Hard News by Russell Brown

The email record shows that I worked pretty keenly to get an interview with Anthony Bourdain in 2005. I had been wholly captured one summer holiday by Kitchen Confidential, then loved A Cook's Tour, the book and the TV series. Now, he was coming here to promote the Les Halles Cookbook and I really wanted to talk to him.

He was as you'd expect on the day: cool, lanky, extremely dedicated to cigarette breaks. I did sense there might be a limit to his patience, and I now know that at the  time he was at the sharp end of a divorce from his wife of two decades (their split was reported in the New York Times three or four weeks later). But he was a generous and thoughtful interview subject and the transcript below is only minimally edited. I gave him a copy of the then-new D4 album and he perked up noticeably when I explained that they were big in Japan.

I was shocked and saddened to wake up to the news today that he had died; apparently succumbing to a long-term depressive illness. I admired the snap of his writing, his attitude to food, his cutural habits (music and comics!) and, to be honest, his way of being a man. His globetrotting came rather late in life, and I've always loved the respect he showed to the people he met on his travels, and the way he increasingly began to use food as a way into the culture and politics of the places he visited.

This past week, I watched three episodes of his final CNN series, Parts Unknown (you can find them pirated on YouTube, with a bit of patience) and felt I was getting a perspective on those places, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Uruguay (where he toked up large and legally), that I wasn't going to find anywhere else.

I'm not sure I ever actually cooked a dish from the Les Halles Cookbook, but one section left a lasting impression one me: the one dealing with stock. Why, I asked myself, was I not making stock like Bourdain did? It's something I love doing now; I find it meditative and satisfying. And therapeutic. I take stock while I make stock. Last weekend, I was tired and anxious, but I was vastly the better by the time I'd finished the chicken stock now crowding the freezer.

I'm very sad that Anthony Bourdain is no longer in the world. I'm glad I got to do the following interview.

So you got to taste some whitebait?

Yes. Some people bootlegged it into Australia for me. It was some of the sexiest food I've had in a while. Any resistance I might have to to putting in the extra flight time to come here evaporated at that moment.

The news is that Fox has picked up Kitchen Confidential for TV ...

They've ordered up a pilot with Darren Starr – I know they were talking to Robert Downey Jnr to play me.

How do you feel about that?

Well, we share such a similar CV that I think it's entirely appropriate. That would be great, but one learns very quickly that when it comes to Hollywood or television it's foolish to hope for anything. I've seen the script and it's pretty good. In the first episode there's hardcore drug use, oral sex and a dismemberment. So it's looking pretty good.

Is is strange to think of your life becoming the basis of a sitcom?

Is it any weirder than anything else that's happened to me over the last few years? I'm okay with it. You sell your baby to Hollywood and you don't end up as a Hasselhoff vehicle, you're way ahead of the game.

The Les Halles Cookbook – the thing that struck me was how easy to relate to it was, especially the introduction. Is there a sense in which none of this should seem forbidding?

I certainly was looking to take the intimidation factor out, and I wanted you to sense that there's actually someone standing next to you talking to you while you're trying to cook this stuff, rather than this disembodied, removed, authoritarian voice telling you "this is the recipe, you're on your own – waddaya mean it didn't work?"

People should know that you're probably going to screw up some of these things the first time out – and it's not big deal. I thought of the cover first: brown butcher paper. I want you to smear food on it and, and for it to be rude and utilitarian and useful. And not food porn. I just didn't want it to be bullshit.

Do you dislike food porn?

No, believe me: The French Laundry Cookbook, I take that to bed with a flashlight - it's beautiful. I'm not actually cooking from those books, but I like looking longingly at them.

Do you see cooking in some sense as something that you can either do or you can't?

I think it's a character issue. It's trial and error. All my cooks are Mexicans who've never cooked before. But they have good character. They come from a culture where they're predisposed to enjoy food, where food is an intimate and important event. They have good character and a sense of humour and a good work ethic. I think that's really all that's required. There are a few geniuses in cooking, a few artists – but not many. Chefs are generally the second or third smartest kid in the family – we're misfits and losers.

You talk a lot about Mexicans in the first two books …

God's people.

And then there's Jose from Les Halles. All these people are Catholics. Do Catholics make better cooks?

The greatest cooks I've ever met are Confucian, so no. But a history of poverty, oppression and struggle is always useful when you talk about good cooks. I think it's no accident that the best cooks on earth are the Basque and the Vietnamese. Where people are proud, food tends to be an expression of cultural identity, or even of a personality. That's when it's good.

Did doing A Cook's Tour make that clear to you? Because there's quite a respectful tone in both the book and the TV series.

I'm humbled by travel. And I was devastated by Vietnam. You realise how little you know and how great and how big the world is. I like being in a country where I don't speak the language, I don't know anybody, I don't even know how to order breakfast. Every little thing you learn to do is a triumph.

Cooking professionally is a dominant act - it's about control. Eating well is about total submission.

Is that the key to the difference in tone between Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour? That first book was so full of bravado …

Right. Chef mode. I'm talking to you as if you were in my kitchen. You are mine, I control things. It's about not just me controlling you and telling you to do things, but you controlling and dominating your area of responsibility. It's the same in a home kitchen: getting your shit together, organising your time, your space, your expectations, your plan. But eating is a whole different thing. It's time to let it all go, sit down and put your faith in a stranger.

How much do you miss cooking professionally?

I miss sitting at the bar after work, getting drunk with the cooks and feeling on top of the world. I miss the sense of elation, the sheer adrenalin rush of having pumped out 300 meals. On the other hand, my life now, everywhere I go in the world, I end up getting drunk with chefs at two in the morning.

Is there any comparison for you between cooking and writing?

Yeah. Show up on time and do the best job you can.

Can we talk about the first chapter in A Cook's Tour where you – the meat-eating guy, the anti-vegetarian – confess to being squeamish and disturbed at the sight of a pig being slaughtered?

I'm a city boy! I would pass out if I saw a cow being milked. Proximity to livestock is not something that really comes up. I've been a cook and a chef my whole qworking life, but meat was meat, it wasn't an animal. I'd never seen a 300-pound pig stabbed in the heart and spraying blood and struggling and wheezing for two solid minutes. That was pretty goddamn disturbing. I still don't like it – I'm a product of my environment."

And then there were the vegans you met …

I don't think much of them. They seem contemptuous of the world - and not curious. And that's just the enemy to me. Certainty and the lack of curiousity seem absolutely sinful to me. To be certain of anything.

Is there anything you won't eat on moral grounds?

I'm not going to eat a live monkey brain out of a screaming monkey's head. Because I don't think it's food. When I've been in Asia, people have offered it to me but it was clearly something where people were going to go out of their way for me. For shock value, I'm not going to torment the little monkey. Under any circumstances."

Would you eat the pulsing cobra heart again?

I wouldn't go looking. But if I was surprised by it at a party in Vietnam and people had spent a lot of money getting for me specially, I'm not going to offend my hosts.

I often got the impression that you were trying not be the Ugly American in those places.

I tried very, very hard. I'm blessed, I'm utterly humbled by how kind people were to me, and how generous. I will do almost anything to avoid being rude - but you can't help but rude anyway. American, I'm six foot four. My very gestures, the way I speak, is probably offensive in ways I don't even know. Eating a traditional Japanese meal: my god, I don't mind being clumsy and looking like an idiot and being the tall, ugly, hairy foreign devil. You're this big freak in their house anyway! But I'd like my offences to be forgiveable.

How different is it when you come somewhere like this? Because you are the celebrity chef here …

It's not something I'd like listed on my passport as an occupation. I think I'd rather have "arsonist" or "serial masturbator" written down. Those two words together - "celebrity" and "chef" – it's a such a working-class profession, it just seems like a bad fit. Like "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence".

I thought you were bit harsh on Jamie Oliver …

No, no. He was very nice actually. Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson, both of whom I like and respect, like him. I don't think he's bad for the world, but on television he looks like a twat.

And yet on the other hand he's got young men thinking about cooking good food for their friends …

Yeah, he's good for the world. It's sheer mean-spiritedness on my part, I understand that and other people should too. I come from a culture of working chefs where's nobody's just that fucking adorable. I just hate all that mockney shite.

Did you ever go somewhere where the food was just awful? I thought you were pretty kind to Scotland.

Oh, I like Scotland. I love that. I could be in the chippy eating deep-fried crap all day. I love Glasgow over Edinburgh - it's one of the world's bullshit-free zones. If you're not enjoying a deep-fried Mars Bar, you're just not drunk enough.

The Hospitality Association here has recently proposed compulsory drug-testing for waiters and kitchen staff. What do you think of that?

It's a bad idea. This business attracts people who have drug problems, who have alcohol problems, who are dysfunctional who are misfits. And hopefully it corrects and weeds out on its own – it inspires people to reach their own personal crossroads and say "do I want to be good at this? Do I want to be the sort of person my colleagues can depend on?". It's the last meritocracy, where you are judged solely for your job performance. So to start imposing political correctness, meaning you can't say certain things, where the druggies are weeded out beforehand – where do they go? You're marginalising.

It's one of the last environments where people from completely different backgrounds who would never otherwise be able to work together do. My sauté man Manuel, who comes from the mountains of Mexico, not a sophisticated guy, not used to taking orders from women – yet he is forced into a situation where he has to rely on women cooking next to him and because she is as good as him, or even better, they will develop a respect and a relationship and a degree of intimacy that would be impossible in another workspace, where he'd probably get fired for speaking to her inappropriately.

It's so intimate that if you're talking shit about anything, you will be found out and exposed, so there is no pretence. And because at the end of the day you will be judged entirely for your performance. That's such a beautiful thing.

So when you start making it safe, clean, politically correct, inoffensive and drug-free – where's the fun? Where's the good? It's the last refuge for the underclass and the misfit, and to take that away is a really, really bad thing.

I presume you've had people working under you who were on a similar trajectory to yours when you were headed for rock bottom. How do you deal with that?

Once I became a chef, after I kicked heroin and crack, I became notoriously draconian on the subject. I'd say listen, I love the job you're doing, but if you're still doing heroin or crack, I don't care what you do after work – but the fact is I'm looking at you hard, and the first day you disappoint me, you show up late or steal from me or lie to be, I'm waiting and you're fired. You're through. You get zero strikes.

Were you treated that harshly?

Yes. When I worked for Bigfoot, it was you show up late, you get sent home. You show up late the second time, you're fired. I find that completely appropriate. There are two types of people in the world: the people who do what they say they're gonna do, and everybody else. That's all I care about. Unless you're my sous-chef – you always need one bad apple, there's always one guy you give allowances to. It's not fair, but it's the way it is.

Your job means you go to a lot of restaurants. Are they getting better or worse?

There's a terrible sameness to modern cooking right now. All the restaurants start emulating each other. You see the same dish. If I see another tuna tartar or something with truffle oil I'm going to kill myself. I'm not a fan of foamed sauces. So there are a lot of overrated restaurants, but particularly in the English-speaking world, it's a new and exploding scene, bubbling with possibility and enthusiasm. It's good to make mistakes and over-reach and fail and to make bad food for a while. There's a process where chefs eventually find out what they do well. When I tried to be a creative genius, people got hurt.

What's next for you?

More travel. I've got a crime novel I'm writing now, I have a collection kicking around somewhere. And I'm moving to Vietnam and I'm just going to write about living and eating in Vietnam for a while. I'm going to live there for a least a year.

What is it about Vietnam?

I don't know. I've described it as like meeting the woman of your dreams. It's a pheremonic x-factor. I don't believe in metaphysicals, but it is almost metaphysical. It smells right.

Amazon Studios' first venture into the New Zealand market, All or Nothing: New Zealand All Blacks, keeps being described in New Zealand media as a documentary series about the All Blacks' 2017 season. It isn't. It's not even described that way on the page, where the genre line, lifted from IMDB, reads "Unscripted". That's a common industry term for a strain of reality television.

The three credited executive producers are Australian-born Eden Gaha, who worked with Mark Burnett on Survivor, The Apprentice, Masterchef and others; Greg Heathcote, EP on New Zealand versions of The Block, The Bachelor and Survivor and others; and Pango Productions co-founder Bailey Mackey. Remarkably, the guy who made The GC is the least reality TV-ish of the three.

The background of its principals is evident throughout the six episodes, most notably in the tightly-framed contemporaneous confessionals from key characters, as they rate their chances, rue their mistakes and contemplate their challenges. They're the same formulaic shots you'll see in Masterchef or The Bachelor.

But after binge-watching all six episodes on Monday – because yes, I really liked it – I'm wondering if the key contribution came from Bailey Mackey and his company. There's a warmth and yes, a Māoriness, that seems quite different to other series in the NFL-owned All or Nothing franchise – and it's more than getting Taika Waititi in as narrator. The All or Nothing series following the Dallas Cowboys' 2017 season (thus, made at the same time as the All Blacks one) is more documentarian, but positively frosty by comparison.

Perhaps that had something to do with Tom Pullar Strecker's report in January that New Zealand Rugby was unhappy with early work on the $20 million project. Perhaps they weren't getting the documentary they expected. But, having traded access for approval, did they really want a documentary anyway? At any rate, the series was cut from the usual eight episodes to six.

Certanly, All or Nothing won't tell international viewers much about the game of rugby. The producers opted, perhaps wisely, not to try and explain the rules of the game – or even, in the case of Sonny Bill Williams, the difference between union and league.

Moreover, almost all the gameplay is shot in tight, from ground level. This has the effect of focusing on the collisions and emphasising the gladitorial nature of test rugby. The gleefully OTT sound design characterises every clash and kick (and in one case, a hug) as a huge detonation. Every haka is sheer thunder. It's fun to watch, but it's impossible to see any tactical dimension – and it actually drains the genius out of many of the tries.

What saves the series is the people. Unscripted TV almost always relies on creating conflict, and doing it in the edit suite if it doesn't happen in real time. There's remarkably little of that here.

Instead, Steve Hansen emerges less as Head Coach than Empath in Chief, talking about the job being to know which players "need a cuddle and which ones need a boot up the bum". He swears quite readily, but his team-talks are more firm than ferocious – and yet his players look at him wide-eyed, like anxious schoolkids. There's a particularly good scene where he shuts up a cluster of established players urgently advising newbie Ngani Laumape at training.

The series follows a handful of players' stories closely: Sonny Bill owning up to that red-card tackle in the second Lions test; Ben Smith and his family worrying about another concussion (which turns out to be something else altogether); Ryan Crotty fighting his way back into the starting lineup, only to fall cruelly to a hamstring injury. These are all, necessarily, interrupted narratives and the characters fall in and out of the overall story a little awkwardly in places.

But the loveliest part of the series is the ascent of Reiko Ioane. The possibly-contrived conversation at training in which Wayne Smith is flabbergasted by Hansen's order at training for Julian Savea to switch wings to give Reiko a run on the left, with an eye to starting him there, is gold. But oh man, Reiko's proud family: I was pretty much crying with them.

(By contrast, the first real drama in the Cowboys series is the management team trying to make a domestic violence allegation against their top draft pick go away. It's a little hard to empathise.)

The players basically emerge as humble and genuine, and devoted to Hansen's vision of helping them to achieve things "they believed they couldn't achieve". If the actual rugby part isn't all that well conveyed, I think the producers, possibly a bit by accident, got to the heart of what makes the modern All Black team culture special.

Sky Television has bought All or Nothing for screening, or you can take advantage of a seven-day free trial and stream it on Prime Video. (If you have a smart TV, it probably has the Prime Video app – you just need to log in to Amazon and enable Prime Video.)

UPDATE: Henry Cooke has been on it (and, unlike me, got a response from ADHB) and both ADHB and Waitemata DHB (which is the one that actually handles detox services) insist they didn't tell Housing NZ. In which case, what the hell went on here?

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In June 2015, Jesse B became one of the hundreds of Housing New Zealand tenants to have an order made against them at the Tenancy Tribunal over alleged methamphetamine contamination. Like most such tenants, he did not attend the hearing and the process ground on without him.

As was the case in many cases at the time, the flat B was living in had not been subject to a baseline test for meth "contamination" – that is, tested before he lived there. There is no testing information noted in the decision beyond a note that "the evidence presented today shows that the premises were indeed contaminated". Nonetheless, the tribunal decided that "the contamination more than likely occurred during Mr [B]'s tenancy and that he ought therefore to pay for the cost of testing."

What's notable – and on the face of it, shocking – is the means by which the tribunal arrived at that decision:

On this day five years ago, Audioculture, the "noisy library of New Zealand music", launched to the public. It really doesn't seem that long.

At the time, I was on the board of the NZ On Screen Trust, which was renamed the Digital Media Trust in recognition of its expanded responsibilities. The original vision for an archive came from Simon Grigg, who had nurtured it for least three years before that, and the idea evolved and took shape as we secured funding and moved towards making it a real thing.

But one thing never changed: the belief that our popular music is culture and that all the things around that culture are part of it too.

There were some early battles around the nature and style of articles on the site. Some of my board colleagues felt that a crisp, systematic encylopaedia was in order. After all, no one was going to read a 2000-word epic about a band that broke up 20 years ago, were they? Yeah, they totally were. And (I know, because I now see the numbers in an advisory capacity) they still are. Audioculture's time-spent-on-page in Google Analytics continues to be off the freakin' hook.

We learned a few things. One is that photographs are really important. Great pics – and so many of the early ones came from Murray Cammick –    weren't just loved by people who used the site, they told stories that couldn't be told any other way. And they were our best marketing tool.

Over the five years Audioculture has surfaced important image collections that would not otherwise have come to light. Sara Leigh Lewis's wonderful images of the emerging Auckland punk scene tell a story not just of some weird kids in bands, but of the changing city itself (there's a second lot here, added in 2015).

Sara went on to a professional photographic career. My old mate Gordon Bartram didn't, but his images of the Christchurch music scene in the early 80s – just a kid who brought his snappy camera to gigs – are precious too. More recently, I was able to pass on an extraordinary trove of photographs from late 80s Auckland that Brian Murphy had taken.

In many cases, Simon just went to people's places with a scanner under his arm and stayed there while they opened trunks and boxes that hadn't been disturbed for years. The vast majority of the images he found and published would not otherwise have seen the light of day. His guess is that about 90% of the photographs on Audioculture had not been available on the internet before.

The other thing we learned was that what what we called "Scenes" – that is, articles that weren't artist profiles or label backgrounders – were generally the most popular reading on the site. The most-viewed article in five years (and it still turns up in the stats, month after month) is Michael Hollywood's journey through the Wellington nightclubs of the 1980s. I think people like those venue histories because they were there and part of the story. It's an illustration of the stake we all have in this culture that grew around us as we grew up.

Simon, having put his heart and soul into the project, stepped back in September last year, although he remains officially (and keenly) involved as Founding Editor. His place as content director has been taken by Chris Bourke, who brings both a depth of knowledge and the skills of a musical historian. He's aided in his work by Steven Shaw, Audioculture's site editor and secret weapon. I can't emphasise enough how important it's been having someone there with both editing skills and an affinity for the content that flows from being a musician himself.

Audioculture's relationship with the culture it covers has always been different to that of its marvellous sibling. The heritage film and TV material NZ On Screen presents overwhelmingly is the content on that site. By contrast, music is available everywhere these days and the heart of Audioculture is the pictures, the stories, the memories around it all. The most important thing now might have been shared by only a few hundred people back in the day. It was always going to be a little more, well ... noisy.

I'm proud of my little part in all this and grateful to everyone else who has helped – not least Brendan Smyth at NZ On Air, who found a way to fund the idea in the first place. If you're a longtime reader, you might have noticed that Chris is steering an effort to update all the stub articles written early on just so many artists were at least mentioned. I recently did the update on the Androidss, and I have similar updates on Bird Nest Roys and Diatribe coming up. You'll also note the effort to involve more women, Māori and Pasifika contributors.

So, just take some time, dive in, browse and search. And spend as long on the page as you like.

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Here are the the Top 10 most-viewed pages on Audioculture, 2013 to 2018:

1. Wellington nightclubs in the 1980s

2. Darcy Clay

3. New Zealand-made guitar amps

4. The Number One hits, 1990-1999

5. The Number One hits, 2000-2009

6. Trawling through the crates – the lost record stores of inner Auckland

7. Ten guitars - NZ-made guitars

8. Where did all those cool guys go? Kevin Hill's photos of Christchurch rock bands 1968-1980

9. Top 10 songs about the sea

10. Truth and legend – The HMV and EMI recording studios and pressing plant

 And a couple of great new ones:

Alan Perrott on the amazing story of Mark Williams, the boy from Dargaville. That's an upgrade, and there's a second part on his years in Australia coming soon.

And the late Alan Brunton's previously unpublished ‘Hey Bird’ – an essay on rock’n’roll Christchurch in the late 1950s that was brought to Audioculture's attention by one of his literary executors, Martin Edmond, who worked with Brunton in the Red Mole troupe.

The first thing I noticed about Marlon Williams' show at Auckland Town Hall on Saturday night was that about half the audience looked old enough to be his grandparents.

I don't, I hasten to add, mean that in a bad way. But it was striking that a 27 year-old artist can fill the Town Hall twice with people who were three or four decades into the journey when he was born.

Sure, he has that choir-schooled voice and he could make a career out of crooning through church tours. But what struck me about the show is the extent to which he didn't do that.

One moment his band the Yarra Benders were sounding like the Bad Seeds and the next he was offering some stage banter about not understanding trap music ("I don't know how to behave!") that soared majestically over the heads of most of those present. It was surprising, funny, and at times pleasingly weird.

There were quirky cover versions – Yoko Ono's 'Nobody Sees Me Like You Do' and Barry Gibb's 'Carried Away', which, Williams explained with a nerdy delight, had been rejected by Barbara Streisand for her chart-topping album with Gibb, Guilty – and towards the end of the show, there was this.

Amazing. And not long after, he and his band were embracing onstage to celebrate the final concert of a 67-date international tour.

It wasn't the only good music of the night. Julia Deans has been playing support on the New Zealand tour and for the two Auckland dates she supplemented her live band with her friends and fellow singers Celia Church and Anna Coddington, who stood alongside her at the front of the stage for about half the set. It was a band put together to play songs from her new album We Light Fire, but it also found fresh ways through her debut, Modern Fables: 'A New Dialogue' seemed to take flight with those three voices aboard.

She finished solo with the title track from We Light Fire and got a big and richly-deserved ovation. I gather that at other dates on this tour, she's had to suffer people talking through her set. Those people are not only rude but massive musical ignoramuses and I am extremely grateful that their ilk didn't seem much in evidence on Saturday night.

I spent the hours afterwards contemplating what I'd seen and heard and wondering whether this will come to be regarded as a golden era for our music. There are so many of these talented, resourceful singers and songwriters now. They seem able to call on musicians who can do justice to their work, and managers who can get them where they need to be. And yes, in the streaming age they won't always trouble the charts, or get much traction on global-generic commercial radio – but that doesn't really matter. It's basically irrelevant. People are making art here.

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Today is, of course, the final day of New Zealand Music Month 2018. It wasn't always the thing it is now, and last Saturday on Music 101, Alex Behan did a really great job of explaining the story. You can catch up with the text and audio here. It's really worth your time.

Congratulations to Graeme Downes, whose Verlaines songs 'Lucky In My Dreams' from the album Way Out Where and 'Angela' from the album Juvenilia have been picked up for use in Big Dogs, a new US crime thriller series set in New York City, based on the book Rivers of Gold by Adam Dunn.

This is also a real win for Songbroker, the Jan Hellriegel-founded site where Graeme's catalogue is available for licensing. Songbroker recently opened an office in Los Angeles, where it is being represented by Greg Johnson.

And congrats of a different nature to She's So Rad's Jeremy Toy for getting up and coming back from a horrible accident in which he was taken out by a drunk motorcyclist as he was unloading his gear after a gig. That guy contributes so much and it's not the first shitty thing to happen to him. You can read more in Hussein Moses's story on The Spinoff (which also includes an exclusve embed of a new She's So Rad song, 'You and I').

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Videos:

Firstly, Boycrush's twinkling new tune:

And a meeting of giants: Iggy Pop joins Underworld to make an outright fuckin' banger.

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Tunes!

I mentioned Jeremy Toy: here he is with a new track as his soulful alter-ego Leonard Charles:

And because the guy clearly doesn't know how to rest up, an EP of lovely, chunky, fuzzy grooves, all free to download.

Anna Coddington and Dick Johnson are back as Clicks, with a dancefloor single that manager to be both sharp and so very smooth. On the streams or for sale here on Bandcamp.

A tender, spooky sad new single from James Blake that seems to have come out of nowhere:

A great 90-minute afro-disco mix that's a free download:

Brazilian techno master Gui Boratto is back. Interview here.

And, finally, something awesome from the Unofficial Flying Nun Vault: Toy Love playing 'Death Rehearsal' at the Hillsborough in Christchurch in 1980. Yeah, that's what all the fuss was about ...

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"Testing for low levels of methamphetamine in residential properties in New Zealand has come at a very high cost," reads the report of the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman into the national panic over the alleged meth contamination of thousands of properties, which was published today.

"Although promoted as being protective of human health, the actions taken in pursuit of zero risk (which is not achievable in any case) have been disproportionate to the actual health risks," the report finds.

The report validates, in some detail, the scientific critique laid out in a cover story I wrote for Matters of Substance nearly two years ago. It seems to offer a way out of a disastrous situation I had feared was intractable.

Gluckman says that New Zealand's approach seems "unique in the world" in its focus not only on sites where methamphetamine was manufactured but where it might simply have been consumed. He says that "the methamphetamine testing and decontamination industry has promoted the idea that all properties are potentially in danger from methamphetamine contamination."

As a consequence, "there have been huge costs to homeowners, landlords, and the state – not only of testing and remediation itself, but the unnecessary stigma of ‘contamination’ (for example on a LIM report), often based on little or no actual risk."

New Zealand's years of testing fever have come at a cost not only in dollars, but human well-being. Gluckman observes that in a social housing context, "the risk of being in an unstable housing situation is likely to be far greater than the risk of exposure to low levels of methamphetamine residues."

And yet, Housing New Zealand threw people out of their homes and sometimes issued triumphant press releases when the Tenancy Tribunal ordered former tenants to pay tens of thousands of dollars in costs for generally unnecessary remediation. The tribunal itself repeatedly ignored warnings that its apprehension of the science was faulty, often forbidding entry to dwellings that posed no risk to anyone.

This chaos developed gradually from the Ministry of Health's publication of cleanup guidelines for former meth labs in 2010, but really broke the surface in March 2016 with a flurry of stories about the way a new state housing development in Christchurch had been "contaminated". Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett lamented the "serious health effects" on "wee babies" and endorsed Housing NZ's get-tough approach. There was little doubt who the villains were.

It should be noted that Housing NZ did have a genuine problem with a more limited number of properties that had been used for manufacture (it's one that has been steadily diminishing as meth is increasingly trafficked into the country fully made). And no, no one wants a P house for a neighbour. But the women who were evicted, along with their children, in Christchurch may not even have been themselves consuming.

If the story turned when the minister weighed in, it turned back 21 months later when her successor, Phil Twyford, gave an extraordinary interview to RNZ Checkpoint, in which he offered an apology to Auckland man Robert Erueti, who had been evicted from the home where he had lived for 15 years and spent more than a year in emergency housing. Millions of dollars had been wasted, said the new minister, who followed up by commissioning the Gluckman report released today.

Change has been evident in the interim. In the March issue of Matters of Substance Housing NZ CEO Andrew McKenzie contributed a column outlining a fresh philosophy that he said was the result of  "a long, hard look at the way we work with our tenants, particularly how we keep them in housing."

McKenzie began his role in September 2016 and is thus accountable for the continuation of the agency's ill-advised policies for some time after that. But you can't read this paragraph without seeing Housing NZ reconnecting with a role it had long seemed deserate to shirk: its role as a social housing provider and not just a property manager.

Tenants will be provided with support that will ensure they have all the tools they need to sustain a successful tenancy for the time they need it. Achieving life skills and housing independence are key planks of this approach. That includes tenants who need a stable home to have the best chance of working through any addiction issues. While our tenants need us, we’ll be there for them.

Armed with Gluckman's report, Twyford will now apply its recommendation that the cleanup standard established last year (1.5 micrograms per 100cm) should only be applied to properties where meth manufacture or what Gluckman describes as "excessive smoking" are suspected. The standard will be treated as what it actually is – a sentinel value for the remediation of contamination by more harmful chemicals – and where there is no reason to suspect actual harm, we shouldn't be testing. It will be harder for the testing industry to distort the science.

Helpfully, the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill (No 2) – originally designed to give landlords greater power to enter properties and test at will for supposed meth contamination, terminate tenancies on the basis of those tests and claim compensation from tenants – is yet to receive its second reading. The bill has already been somewhat reined in after select committee scrutiny (among other things, it no longer specifically refers to methamphetamine) and Twyford will incorporate the new recommendations in regulations to be attached to the act itself.

So much for the politics. But we also need to contemplate another reason the country got into this mess – the news media.

For years, reporters and interviewers simply nodded while self-proclaimed "experts" with a direct commercial interest in a meth panic made outlandish claims about health risks that did not exist. It was, we were repeatedly told, the new leaky homes crisis.

The influence of the testing industry was evident in more subtle ways too. This text appeared at the bottom of that Stuff story quoting Paula Bennett:

The problem with P

* It can cause breathing problems, respiratory irritation, skin and eye irritation, headaches, nausea and dizziness.

* High exposures even for a short time can cause death or severe lung damage and skin or throat burns

* People can be exposed by breathing the air that may contain suspended contaminant particles as dust, by touching surfaces that are contaminated, by eating or drinking from contaminated dishes, or from eating or smoking after contact with contaminated areas.

It's presented as fact, but none of these things are true of methamphetamine itself. So where did this wording come from? You can find it in various versions on state government websites in the US like this one. But that US site refers solely to contaminants from meth manufacture. The same words appear on the websites of New Zealand testing and cleaning companies, but on those, the harms are attributed to the mere consumption of meth in a property. The information was altered for commercial gain – and the papers printed it.

There is a happier story too. The Science Media Centre demonstrated exactly why its role is so important by releasing this commentary from Dr Nick Kim at Massey University and Leo Schep at the National Poisons Centre, casting expert doubt on the claims that were all over the news. Schep said almost nothing thereafter, but Dr Kim (perhaps because he did not rely on Ministry of Health funding), was happy to explain it to anyone who would listen.

The first to listen – and I do love pointing this out to my journalistic peers – was The Panel on RNZ. Meanwhile, the daily news clamoured with absurd and irresponsible stories pushed by the testing industry.

As the story unfolded, a handful of journalists – RNZ's Benedict Collins deserves special mention here – did very good work. A strikingly uneven Fair Go report on the issue seemed to embody the wider  battle between hand-wringing sentiment and scientific scrutiny – the latter coming via Garth Bray, who worked with Dr Kim to demonstrate that the  level of meth "contamination" that had the Tenancy Tribunal ordering hazmat suits was in fact present in most of our banknotes.

And I think the  Matters of Substance story is one of the most important things I've done. Among other things, I was able to show that Housing NZ's "meth team" had openly countenanced forcing prospective tenants to undergo drug tests as a condition of shelter. (The idea was rejected as impractical, and not on account of its human rights implications.)

Again, there's credit due here – not least to former MBIE staffer Joanne Kearney, who became concerned about what she was seeing as far back as 2014 and started making OIA requests and looking up Tenancy Tribunal decisions. Her willingness to share that information with me made a difference. The same goes for the Housing NZ employees who talked to me. As one of them put it, "we're not monsters".

So good journalism practice won over bad, in the end – but the final cost of the moral panic the media helped foster was significant, in both dollars and wrecked lives. The easy stigmatisation of people with drug problems hurt them, hurt the communities they lived in, and hurt the economy. I truly hope some lessons have been learned in the course of this debacle.