Secrets of the Gallery unrevealed! National MP not outed! Why JT hates the media, as well as the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover, the book. All this, and not much more, in this week's Poll Dancer.
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Qantas Media Award finalist Hamish McKenzie has recently informed me of a groundbreaking new book by internationally acclaimed* author Richard Meros that will irreversibly and permanently alter New Zealand's political scene, like, forever. The book, which McKenzie describes as "Appalling! Scandalous! Fantastic!", is boldly titled: On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover.
Discussing such intricacies as the "erotic Zen of Ken Shirley", societal power relations, and "the potentialities of clipped muff", the book promises to take off from the boundaries of good taste, flush its passport down the toilet, apply for refugee status and get outed by Winston Peters before it hits the ground.
"Never before has an author so audaciously propositioned the Prime Minister through print!"
(* Hamish is in Canada. He acclaimed the book.)
The timing of Richard's advice is terribly appropriate, since I just got Helen Clark's cellphone number.
It happened at the Great Blend in Auckland last week. Pissed off at John Campbell's comments that most of the Press Gallery had Helen's phone number and that the relationship was too close, Judith Tizard said: "John has Helen's number. EVERYONE has Helen's number."
"Uh... *I* don't."
So she whipped out her cellphone and proved her point.
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So, *is* the relationship between politicians and the press too cosy?
Well, Rod Donald almost brought me a beer (someone else ended up paying for it); Bill English was really nice to me after I broke that student allowance story; and once, Stephen Franks call me "Kenneth Wang". So... does that mean they're my friends now?
Some rather sound advice from the object of my affection, Jane Clifton:
"I never thought I'd have to write a column propounding such basic, 'duh!'-grade information as this, but apparently there are things about political journalists that are still not widely understood, even by politicians. Such as, that political journalists are not politicians' friends and make truly unreliable confidants. That political journalists do not invite politicians to lunch because they like them and are genuinely personally interested in assisting them to unload. And that political journalists do not make tapes of conversations with politicians in order to treasure them as keepsakes."
Call me a cynic, but I'd have to say that the reverse is true, too. If I'm moving flats, I don't expect Bill and Rod and Stephen to turn up to help me shift the grand piano. And even though I have Helen Clark's cellphone number (Richard Meros' advice notwithstanding), we're unlikely to go out for coffee anytime soon.
It's not hard to imagine: all the handshakes, smiles and pats-on-backs are just part of the job for both sides. Like Clifton says: Duh!
In this day and age, and in this particular forum, I don't really need to convince you that it's all a big system of mutual manipulation and convenient alliances.
There are occasions when these alliances come under scrutiny. John Tamihere accused Duncan Garner of an unholy alliance with Rodney Hide. Well - it's not as if Hide had to pay Garner to break the story, and it's not as if Garner had to blackmail Hide to get him to cooperate. Once their interests met, as they say, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
As Gordon Copeland might say, this is the relationship between politicians and journalists God had intended.
What's more interesting, though, is the *other* Tamihere story. What Tamihere said in the Wishart interview wasn't new, but, to put it in a nutshell, other gallery journalists could have done the same story, but to do so would have burnt all their bridges with the government and ensured a very difficult and short career. What it took, instead, was an outsider - a nutter in a rowboat who had no bridges anyway - to let it rip.
This is a curious conundrum - to report, you need information; to get information, you need trust; to build trust, you need to refrain from reporting.
There are other, less cynical reasons, too, why certain pieces of information are left permanently in the bottom drawer. A politicians' personal affairs, for instance, are left alone unless they are politically relevant. Like the Geneva Convention, this sort of stuff is supposed to take the edge off a vicious game, and to stop Parliament from becoming a living hell for all those in it.
In one fascinating instance, it's been an open secret for a long time that a certain National MP is gay. Well, actually, numerous National MPs are gay, but this one was married, and doing it with his male secretary. [Apologies - I mistakenly said that he left his wife in the first version, this is untrue. He has not left his wife - Keith.] It was his business and his business alone; everyone knew, but nobody printed a word. But then the Civil Union Bill came along and this MP spoke against it. I know, being gay and not supporting the CUB isn't necessarily hypocritical, but the arguments that he used certainly were. There were rumblings, and a few wondered aloud whether to out him.
If he had been outed, he certainly could not have said the same things and be taken seriously. On the other hand, do we really want to risk re-opening the door to a politicians' personal life being used as debate fodder?
Some secrets are kept for good reasons. And while it's true that journalists are not politicians' best friends, they are actually strangely good at keeping secrets (uh... open secrets, anyway). Some are better at it than others. Go Sunday Star-Times.
It makes you wonder what other secrets are tucked away, but at the end of the day, one has little choice but to trust journalists' judgement in deciding what *not* to report, too.
Ironically, Sunday Star-Times Political Editor Helen Bain use to be John Tamihere's press secretary, before she switched sides and blasted the crap out of him. (JT hat-trick for me!)
The story goes that soon after Bain left, she sent an OIA request to Ministerial Services asking for all the traffic tickets that ministers clocked up in their taxpayer-funded, self-drive cars. Turns out that 13 ministers got pinged, with Tamihere himself getting 6 tickets.
Was Bain working off information she was privileged to as press secretary? The 9th floor apparently thought so - they gave copies of the OIA response to everyone else in the Gallery, who all got to it before Bain. Yup, sucks to be a weekly.
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It's a strange, strange environment to work in. I talked to Tom Scott earlier this year, after reading a book on his time inside the gallery, Ten Years Inside. He left Parliament around the time I entered kindergarten.
"When you work here for a long time, and you've fretted late at night, it's curious - the same thing happened when I worked at a freezing work, and at a psychiatric hospital for long hours - you start to think that the building you're in, the institution you're in is actually totally real, and everything outside it is false. [It's] like you're in some sort of starship, and you've landed on an alien planet - you don't really want to leave, it just becomes your total world."
I think, really, that's the sort of context that the relationship between the Gallery and politicians have to be seen through - part interdependency, part institutionalism, part cabin fever, but all so very human.