Posts by Matthew Hooton
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Hard News: Didn't see that coming, in reply to Russell Brown,
It was news to me. I had never heard the story about him hacking into Helmut Kohl's IT to reduce his personal credit rating. The fact Dotcom may have said it all around the country at Internet-Mana meetings doesn't mean it is not news when he says it at his party's campaign launch in front of TV cameras. By that standard, if Key or Cunliffe said something outlandish at their campaign launches, they'd be able to say "it's not news - I've said that lots of times in small meetings around the provinces with National/Labour audiences".
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Hard News: Mandela, in reply to ,
Yes, should have said "white military establishment". I just recall all these military men - the joint chiefs of staff I suppose - with lots of medals and so forth, saluting their new president. Not a single one (I imagine) would have voted for him and all would have fought against him but there they were. It was a symbol to me of a transfer of power so amazingly smooth compared with what so many had feared.
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Hard News: Mandela, in reply to william blake,
Only Matthew Hooton could use Mandelas’ death to give respect to Regan, Thatcher and de Klerk.
You really have missed the point.
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Hard News: Mandela, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
He was so great a man it was a privilege even to walk on the same planet as him.
Yes, that is how I feel. All a bit weird. One thing I forgot to mention in my rant was watching him, from an open window in the Beehive, arrive at parliament. There were thousands of people on the forecourt. He was driven from the airport in the Rolls Royce normally only used by the Queen. He was so gracious. I saw him with my own eyes. A few years later, at a WTO meeting in Geneva, I was in the same conference hall as Clinton, Blair, Castro and Mandela. For a political junkie, that should be the ultimate. But there was nothing like seeing Mandela that beautiful day in Wellington. (Then there was a fire alarm, while he was meeting Jim Bolger. Everyone had to evacuate the Beehive. Except Mandela and Bolger who continued their talks.)
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Isn't it a strange, melancholy and nostalgic day? Mandela really was the greatest figure of the 20th century. In the way I view the world, being a child of the 1980s, he was alongside Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev in the sense of bringing tyranny to an end - but he stood so much further above them because personally had been persecuted and imprisoned, and yet he forgave.
I grew up in a conservative family and my dad went to the Christchurch and Wellington tests in 1981. He was going to take me, then aged 9, to the Eden Park test but my mother intervened and made us go to Taupo for the weekend. Her main motivation was to keep us safe, but she and her side of our family were anti-tour. Some of my strongest childhood memories are of awful arguments between the pro and anti tour sides of my family. If it means anything as a 9 year old, I suppose I was pro tour but I also remember being very impressed with the bravery of those who stood on the field in Hamilton, and watching all that unfold on television. It seemed like, and it was, an important pivot in what was going on. In 1990, when I was in the Young Nats, I asked John Minto to come to speak to us to “debate” what was happening in South Africa with Warren Kyd, a National MP who supported the regime. John Minto won the “debate”. How bizarre there was even a “debate”.
I remember asking John Minto if he saw a parallel between FW de Klerk and Mikhail Gorbachev in the sense that they were both people who had risen to the top of an evil system and were carefully trying to change it, without civil collapse. He didn’t think there was any parallel, but I still think there was.
Like Russell in his post, the day Mandela was released from prison is one of those days that defines the era in which we live. In accounts I have read since then, there is a great story about Mandela wanting a flash suit in which to leave prison, in order to send an important political message to the financial markets, the military and white South Africans. I can’t remember if I had any pre-release impression of Mandela back then, but I probably assumed he was a Castro or Che Guevara type figure. The Armani suit (or whatever it was) confused me.
Later, as a speechwriter in the Beehive in 1994, I asked the then chief press secretary Richard Griffin if I could write a draft of Jim Bolger’s speech for when he went to South Africa for the inauguration. I think Bolger was even going to speak to the South African Parliament but my memory could be exaggerating what I set out to try to do. Richard agreed and I wrote a draft, which I am sure was awful, along the theme that it was only now that apartheid was gone that everyone, no matter what their political background or what they may have said before, could now see so clearly how evil the regime had been. The speech was a bit too much for Mr Bolger, but I was still proud when a few lines made it in to the final draft.
Then there was the inauguration itself. Mandela I remember gave a very good speech (although I don’t think it was brilliant and can’t remember any of the lines) but what struck me most was when, after the speech, he headed off and was saluted by the heads of all the branches of the South African military and intelligence services. The commentator pointed out that a years earlier their job was to arrest or imprison him. In retrospect, I think the very conservatism of the white population helped with the transition to democracy – these old school lads were taught to respect their state president no matter who he was.
Then there was the Rugby World Cup final in 1995. I remember watching it at a friend’s flat in Orakei Road and – again from memory, so probably wrong – it didn’t finish until about 5am. It was the greatest game of rugby there had ever been. Mandela showing up in the Springbok gear just added to the sense of history. It was incredibly exciting and there was the awful feeling when the All Blacks finally lost. But even then I think everyone interested in politics knew the result was right. I have spent some of this afternoon watching the game again – in particular when Mr Mandela walked onto the field before the national anthems and then when he presented the cup.
A few days later there was the story about “Susie” poisoning the All Blacks. Lest anyone think I am a bleeding heart liberal, I remember thinking that if I had been president of South Africa in 1995, I would have ordered the South African equivalent of the SIS to poison the All Blacks too. Maybe he did! But the little bit of me that thinks he may have is one of the reasons I admire him so much. His wonderful book, Long Walk to Freedom, and other accounts of his life, show he was not some sort of innocent saint but a hard-nosed pol. He was the sort of leader who would think about what suit to wear when leaving prison. He made peace with poor old de Klerk and they won the Nobel Peace Prize together, and then he despatched him utterly ruthlessly in the election campaign, humiliating him in the debates. De Klerk’s autobiography on this is well worth reading: I guess because he didn’t know much about true democracy with all its glorious faults, that he never anticipated Mandela would do whatever it took to win. Mandela was a guy who would do attack ads with the best (or worst!) of them. To me, that is much better than being a mere saint. But whatever it is to be a saint, he was also one of them.
I doubt we will ever see someone so great in our lives again. Sorry for writing so long. I hope Russell doesn’t mind. I am not sure why I have wanted to bash all this out. Or why Public Address seems the right place to post it.
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Speaker: TPP: Nearing Endgame, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Mate, the Tea Party Republicans are totally against this deal. You, Jane Kelsey and they are allies in this matter!
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I don't want to be unkind to the writer, especially being quite new to this blog, but this really is a boring topic. I doubt a TPP can be signed that would be acceptable to free trade countries (NZ, Singapore etc) and if it were acceptable to us, then the US Congress and Japanese Diet would never ratify it. Let's talk about things that are real, like rape, or when we first went up a concert, or John Banks' legal problems, or ....
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Hard News: Friday Music: The First Time, in reply to Che Tibby,
Same. Dire Straits in 1986, aged 13 - although I remember it as being at Mt Smart.
First at Western Springs was Eurythmics in 1987.
First gig would have been the the Psychodaisies in about 1988 at some dodgy Queen St nightclub. The guitarist , Dave Graham, was in some of my classes at school. The contrast between the kid in the Auckland Grammar uniform Monday to Friday and on stage for the Psychodaises on Friday night was bizarre. The sock-drinking was a particular highlight.
Violent Femmes in Auckland Town Hall in late 1989 or 1990 was the best though. -
I have read the post and quite a few of the comments, and have a couple of things to say as someone who:
* was a bit player in all this
* has totally mishandled live radio/TV myself over the years
* works in PR
* considers Matt McCarten a good friend, JT a friend and is on good terms with Willie, and would ultimately like to restore good relations with them despite all this.Based on all that, I think it should have been possible that the scenario Graeme proposes could have played out.
However, that would have involved them accepting that, at best, they had badly mishandled a call from a listener. It would have seen them say so the following day, instead of only apologising for any offence taken and saying they thought they had in fact handled the call sensitively. They could then have decided to take criticism, including from their colleagues and friends, in a constructive manner on air and maybe invited a few experts in the sexual assault field to discuss the whole matter, including from a more conservative perspective.
But that didn’t happen. The reason for that, I think, is that Willie & JT really do think that:
* they handled the call sensibly
* they had nothing to apologise for
* I was a sanctimonious pillock (we have had lads’ drinks every Thursday for four years and not all the conversation was scholarly and pure)
* it really isn’t reasonable to expect West or South Auckland boys to respect “no more thanks” when a girl they are making out with says it at a teenage party when everyone is pissed (although apparently they do think that middle class should be expected to follow that rule), and
* they are victims of a racist and radical feminist mob.It is also true, as Matt McCarten wrote over the weekend, that there really isn’t any management over content at RadioLive, especially since Mitch Harris left. This means I doubt anyone would have tried to talk this through with them, to try to implement a series of events that would have redressed what had happened while protecting Radioworks’ advertising base, and the RadioLive, Willie & JT brands.
As it happened, even I felt, as a regular contributor, that I was being bullied, so – as someone said in an earlier comment – how was a young rape victim meant to feel comfortable calling into their show.
Just one more point in response to Graeme’s call for people to take more care before tweeting or emailing advertisers:
I’m a free-marketeer and that means I think people can do, broadly speaking, what they want, including respond emotionally. I think that someone – in this case Giovanni Tiso – is allowed to respond emotionally to a situation like this and say, fuck it, I am going to try to put some pressure on the advertisers. And I think the marketing managers are allowed to say, wow, this is too hot, let’s pull our ads. And JT is allowed to attack me for going to King’s College (actually I went to Auckland Grammar so some will know how offensive that was) and I am allowed to raise the Clint Rickards angle, and Willie is allowed to say get out of the studio, and Matt is allowed to take a more intellectual approach.
I don’t think people are under any obligation to be as analytical as Graeme has been in his post on this matter, or any other really. It’s a free country and most things unfold roughly as they should without the benefit of 3500-word essays. I don’t see that anyone’s free speech has been violated because even Willie & JT could have survived this situation had they listened to people around them and consequently handled the PR better.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Very very interesting