Today one of the true veterans of NZ radio hangs up the headphones to complete three decades as the morning host at Newstalk ZB. To mark the occasion we asked a number of Leighton Smiths if they had a message for him. 

Leighton Smith on Leighton Smith

Very grateful for this opportunity to provide my assessment of the Australian imported Newstalk ZB morning talkback show host Mr Leighton Smith! Can I point out I AM the genuine, authentic New Zealand made Leighton Smith.

I first met Leighton back in 1990 when I was in the Dunedin Public Hospital rehabilitating from my near-death motorcycle accident on Friday April 27th 1990. One day a lady who was in seeing a relative in Ward 4A opposite me, noticed that my name was LEIGHTON SMITH (written above my hospital bed). She said to me, “I know another Leighton Smith – and he is a radio talkback show host in Auckland.” I replied, “Yes I know – my mother listens to him in Invercargill’.  When she returned to see her relative again she informed me she had contacted Leighton Smith in Auckland and he said that he would get in touch with me via telephone at the Dunedin Artificial Limb Centre. So we organised a date and time and sure enough the next time I was over at the Dunedin Artificial Limb Centre (just across the road from the hospital) getting fitted for my new limb, the telephone rang and Leighton was on the other end. He interviewed me live on his show that morning. It was a phone call I have never forgotten and would change my life for the better forever.

That was 28 years ago. Ever since then I have communicated with via email. Finally in 2013 when I turned 50, my wife and I got the opportunity to meet him and his adorable wife Carolyn in Auckland for the very first time. It was rather emotional for me as he had inadvertently become almost a kind of mentor/friend. We met for the second time this year, when I was in Auckland again, this time however for appointments at the Auckland Artificial Limb Centre. And again, the meeting was emotional for me.

My thoughts on Leighton Smith, the broadcaster? Easily the most astute radio broadcaster New Zealand has ever heard/had on the airwaves. Period. Yep – even better than Sir Paul Holmes. Very few callers have ever cornered Leighton in FACTS. Especially when it comes to politics and matters arising. His knowledge on world politics is astounding, especially American politics. I would be surprised to know of anyone who is a more avid reader of literature than him. Oh – possibly my father – though his genre was mainly novels and fiction. Also Leighton seems to have this innate ability to sift through the wheat of available literature/data both online and physical to cut straight to the chaff – the real stuff from the real source/s. He is not interested in time-wasters, gossip, and uneducated ignoramuses. So doesn’t suffer fools. He can talkback with anyone who has been screened and sifted anyway by Mrs Producer. Any reasonably educated caller will get to talkback with him even if they do not share the same opinion on a matter. He is an excellent listener.

My thoughts on Leighton Smith, the man? One of the most intelligent gentlemen I have ever had the privilege to meet in my life. Of course along with such intelligence comes wisdom. He hasn’t gotten to where he is at without thousands of hours of research. He may be of slight physical build – however do not let the visual interrupt the man’s VOICE! What a VOICE! Deep, throaty, and total testosterone. Plus it has a crack, a BARK to it – the best analogy would be a Mercedes-Benz AMG C63 BiTurbo! It is his greatest asset. His voice simply commands r-e-s-p-e-c-t!

His kindness knows no limits. He can talk with you about anybody and anything without bias nor judgement. But it will be about what IS and what is NOT. In other words – about facts. I don’t believe I have ever met anyone who is so close to the truth. He just isn’t interested in pretentiousness. Either come as you are, or don’t bother coming at all, would be my best description of Leighton Smith, the man. He can literally read people like a book. And I somehow know the man’s reading speed to be greater than the speed of sound! I reckon he could sum anyone up in a matter of a few minimal sentences of speech. And I’ll take a bet he’ll be on the bull’s-eye. Sharp. Like a 1920s barber’s razorblade. Actually sharper. There’s an excellent movie titled A Beautiful Mind – well I would describe Leighton’s mind as “wonderful”. Ladies and gentlemen please allow me to introduce you to the eighth wonder of the world – Newstalk ZB morning talkback show host Leighton Smith’s MIND! No I’m not taking the Michael either.

Now what do I think of Leighton Smith’s ideas? I will say this. I don’t agree with everything he says, that’s for sure. I’d say we agree to disagree about man-made climate change. As I believe in both natural and man-made climate change whereas Leighton refuses to accept man-made climate change. I believe man has definitely contributed to climate change. However I do agree with him that political science has influenced reasoning, for sure. Leighton believes the planet is “just fine, thank you” –  I couldn’t disagree more. And I’m definitely no greenie. But I do agree with Sir David Attenborough’s latest speech at COP24. So called “leaders” of the world are NOT leading in my opinion. They are leading to remain in political power (my opinion).

And I agree with Sir David Attenborough’s challenge to the world’s leaders: “The world is in your hands.” I agree totally with Leighton’s ideas on “LEFTIES”. I do not share Leighton’s ideas of Liberalism. While I agree there needs to be less government in people’s lives – liberalism has and still is completely ruining New Zealand. Lack of discipline in New Zealand – New Zealand was once a nation of hard grafting Kiwis. My grandparents grew up in the 1920s. My parents grew up in the depression. They knew what adversity was. Slowly but surely (my guess is from the early to mid 1990s) Kiwis have become soft in the centre. And that is a direct result of the liberalisation of New Zealand (social engineering from consecutive governments – both Labour and National led coalitions).

As a result of liberalist policies, anarchy is just up around the corner. Children/teenagers/young adults in New Zealand are now behaving in a, “Because I/we can” mentality of “I can do what I like when I like because I/we can” – and that/this is a direct result of a weakening of rules/policies in all New Zealand ie at government level, local body level, community level, and eventually home level. Another weakening in the NZ education system is competition. Now “every child’s a winner”. So essentially with such policies and philosophies children are growing and developing without understanding how to lose. Because in the real world of life ie the working environment or the workforce, there is a thing or a concept called/termed “competition” – in business be it at the highest level corporates, or the smallest level, small business. And believe you me, there are definitely WINNERS AND LOSERS in this real world environment. And there is also something else that exists in this real world environment called the workforce, a  thing called “Doing what you are told to do”. Now all that/this can be a very frightening concept for new work force entrants who have gone through school life believing they are winners and answerable to themselves only … and all of a sudden they have a CONTRACT to sign … they then have a thing called “boundaries” they have to adhere to … and above all else … there are serious CONSEQUENCES that will happen to them if they break them … but “I don’t understand”, they protest … “IT WASN’T LIKE THIS AT SCHOOL! I wanna go back to school!”

I totally agree with Leighton’s take on education in NZ now. It’s groupthink! And I would add it’s actually mindful groupthink! Anything to avoid self-responsibility. Self-accountability. And I would further add that Kiwis who think they can function in the workforce by putting in the least amount of work within their working environment and get paid exactly the same amount as their colleagues who put in the greatest amount of work – those days are coming to an end. New Zealand is not only a low-wage economy, its labour force is relatively inefficient and ineffective. In other words New Zealand is relatively unproductive – in comparisons to other OECD countries. Public debt figures are nothing to be proud about either. While many Kiwis are asset rich … you know the type … life luxuries on parade for the next door neighbour to glance over the fence at – pleasure boat, jet ski, Mercedes-Benz AMG 4×4, Harley-Davidson, go-kart, ride-on lawnmower, Volvo Motorhome etc etc … and yet that very same neighbour owns none of them and is cash/capital poor … We Kiwis are now the world’s greatest pretenders!

Leighton Smith is 55-year-old Invercargill-based exercise consultant

Leighton Smith on Leighton Smith

I’m currently working as a political journalist at the Morning Bulletin newspaper in Rockhampton, Australia,  but I am also a jack of all trades covering a broad range of subject matter. I’m aware of the New Zealand radio Leighton due to his presence on Google searches and Facebook but was unaware about his background and after reading the Wikipedia was surprised to learn he was an Aussie.

I’m a libertarian as well as a supporter of the Aussie battler and bit of a story teller. As a former scientist and aspiring teacher I have a love of understanding the key and complex issues driving the world and explaining it to the audience in a way they can understand. I’m sure radio Leighton shares that passion.

Leighton Smith is a 40-year-old Rockhampton-based journalist

Leighton Smith on Leighton Smith

A hearty congratulations to Leighton on his accomplishments and upcoming retirement!

It’s funny, I’d say that once per month or so I have some kind of encounter based on this shared name.  As a young person people mentioned my name because a Navy Admiral in our country shared my name.  In recent years I’ve had emails about church attendance, holiday parties, credit reports, requests for small favours, and even an expression of unrealised romantic love. Each make me smile to address, though the last was most awkward and humorous.  My grandpa was John Smith and we have a number of unique names in our family designed to help us stand out with a last name like Smith. So I’ve never regretted these kinds of encounters.

I took the opportunity to learn more about Leighton some years ago after googling myself when that was a new concept. Great voice, and I liked his candid tone when I listened to a podcast back then. Fun to have learned that we both attended law school, are business people, fathers and husbands, along with other common interests I’m sure.

Leighton Smith is a 37-year-old executive and adjunct professor in finance based in Iowa City

That one of the world’s biggest companies rides roughshod over a New Zealand court name suppression tells you all you need to know about the giants of Silicon Valley, argues Toby Manhire.

Imagine if a media company told you the name of the man accused of killing Grace Millane. Imagine if, in defiance of a very clear court ruling of interim name suppression, that company told you his name in an email – spelling it out, even, in the subject header.

Unthinkable? That’s exactly what happened in the early hours of Tuesday this week.

The media company wasn’t the Herald or Stuff. It wasn’t TVNZ or Newshub or RNZ. New Zealand media outlets, from the hobbyist bloggers to the biggest broadcasters, respected the proscription on naming the accused. Of course they did: they understand consequences for breaching such an order, and in fact spend significant time and resource policing their social media channels to ensure their audience doesn’t breach suppression either.

Not just because the courts would take action against them for doing so. They understand, too, that it would be morally odious to do so: it could risk damaging the course of justice in an appalling murder that has left a family distraught and sent waves of grief and upset through the country.

The company that paid precisely zero heed to all that is a media and technology corporation from Silicon Valley. A global colossus against which all of New Zealand’s media companies combined amount to a dim pixel. The company is Google. Shortly after midnight on Tuesday this week, it delivered to everyone signed up to its “what’s trending in New Zealand” email the name of the 26-year-old accused of the most headlined crime in this country in 2018.

Yesterday the minister of justice, Andrew Little, castigated offshore media companies that had, outside New Zealand’s jurisdiction, chosen to name the accused. In the main, those outlets have at least geoblocked these stories, meaning they’re not immediately accessible from New Zealand. Little also added his voice to repeated pleas from the Police for social media users not to post the name of the accused. Over recent years we’ve grown used to angry, vengeful or attention-seeking social media users posting suppressed names. The digital titans’ typical response has been to throw their arms in the air. We’re impotent! We’ll do something if you alert us to it! Maybe!

But this is next-level. You didn’t have to go searching to find the name on the internet. Google put it right in your inbox. You didn’t even need to click to open the email. His name was in the subject field.

Shouldn’t Google then be hauled before the courts? What did they have to say for themselves – was this defensible, and what processes did they have in place to stop this sort of thing happening? A spokesperson for Google in New Zealand (based in Australia) responded to those questions by saying, “we wouldn’t comment on specifics”.

That’s a no-comment on the specific fact that they dispatched an email with the name of the accused – information unequivocally suppressed by NZ courts – in the headline. They directed me, however, to Google’s “legal removal requests” page, where users can submit material they believe “may violate the law” so that the company might “consider blocking, removing or restricting access to it”. Quite how they might block or remove an email sent several hours earlier was not clear.

In rationalising such a reactive, wild-west approach on questions like these, companies such as Google and Facebook like to plead that they are not in the business of censorship, that they embrace the “open internet”, and that – hey – they’re tech companies, all of this is automated. What can we do, they protest, issuing a quick shrug before returning to the important task of counting the money. After all you can hardly haul an algorithm before a judge, can you? An algorithm is intangible, untouchable!

And that’s true, you can’t put an algorithm in the stocks, even if that’s a theatrically appealing thought. But you can bring to heel companies that are having a malign impact on your democracy. Google and Facebook may revel in their tech-utopian borderless-world waffle, but they are not beyond regulation. It’s a miracle, really, that they’ve so successfully evaded any meaningful regulation for so long.

Around the world, governments are waking up to this. In examples such as Europe’s “right to be forgetten” rules, it’s dawning on lawmakers that Google and Facebook and the rest are not Gods or weather. Like the rest of us they must adhere to the laws of nation states in which they operate. If you doubt that they operate in New Zealand, consider the millions of public money poured into them – money which once would have fed back into systems which generated local journalism. And we all know how they feel about paying tax.

New Zealand is slowly beginning to scrutinise these digital giants – Facebook sent emissaries from Sydney to Wellington yesterday to speak to government officials about “privacy, content governance and site integrity” – but we’re still well off the pace. There was no New Zealand presence among the representatives of eight parliaments who gathered in London for an “international grand committee on disinformation and fake news”, spurred by the urgent concern about the social media giant’s impact on elections and democracy more generally. Mark Zuckerberg was invited, over and over again. He failed to show, so they empty-chaired him.

In Australia they’re waking up, too. This week its competition regulator called for the creation of a new regulator to check the extraordinary and disproportionate dominance of Facebook and Google, demanding more transparency around the hallowed algorithm and emphasising its impact on the public good that is journalism.

“When you get to a certain stage and you get market power, which both Google and Facebook have, with that comes special responsibilities and that means, also, additional scrutiny,” said the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman. The most extraordinary thing of all is that such a statement of the bleedingly obvious could be extraordinary.

Facebook and Google continue to get away with it in part because they perpetuate a residual image of the original digital iconoclasts, the techbro disruptors, sticking it to The Man. But this is breathtaking bullshit, the finest Jedi mind trick of our day. They are The Man. These companies have a combined value of well over a trillion US dollars. The freewheeling techbros have grown into arrogant, avaricious, suppurating Leviathans.

They preach the open internet on the back of the most opaque machines in big business. They’ve released a wrecking ball into traditional media, and so the public square, and so democracy. They’re brilliant and addictive, and staffed by some of the cleverest people in the world. It’s hard to imagine life without them. And they’ve hoovered up all the revenue and none of the responsibility.

No longer are these anything like the anti-establishment hackers who vow ‘don’t be evil’ – Google ditched that motto years ago. They wield a kind of power that we’ve never before seen. And they wield it with something close to impunity. They know things about you that you don’t even know yourself.

They just sent out an email to an unknown number of New Zealanders that defied a court ruling by naming the man accused of murder in our country’s most infamous crime of 2018. But it’s a small country somewhere down the arse end of the world. How much does it matter to them? They have no comment.

Update, December 13, 3.45pm: Google has sent through a statement. “We respect New Zealand law and understand the concerns around what is clearly a sensitive case. When we receive valid court orders, including suppression orders, we review and respond appropriately. In this case, we didn’t receive an order to take action. We are looking for ways to better ensure courts have the tools to quickly and easily provide these orders to us in the future.”

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