Coming up next, The Crunch with Cam Slater, conversations with a side of controversy. Every Thursday from 4pm, right here on RCR, reality check radio. People are struggling to have conversations and connect with others that they don't completely agree with on every topic and I think that's probably the biggest problem that we need to try and solve is how after all this division and after all this separation do we end up bringing people together again what does unity really look like? New Zealand faces some pretty big issues. First one is COVID in the aftermath. There's no getting away from that. Second is racial division. It's been ginned up and it's dangerous. Another issue that maybe people haven't got their head around yet is digital currency. What form does that take? Is it programmable? Will it be used to manipulate behaviour and patterns of behaviour? Those questions need to be asked and answered. How can you have fair, open, democratic government by people who are appointed? It's a ridiculous idea and if that idea is taken to zenith then this country is in real trouble because democracy, one person, one vote, where every vote is of equal value has to be the foundation of a modern New Zealand. What's true, what's not true, how our kids are to be educated and I have a great fear for the future. I think we know from history where this could end up. This is The Crunch with Cam Slater. Conversations with a side of controversy right here on RCR. Welcome to The Crunch on Reality Check Radio. I'm your host Cam Slater and this is the place we crunch the political issues and cut through the politician's spin. We have a first for the show today. Two brilliant historians on the show this week. First I'll talk with Paul Moon about the history of the Treaty of Waitangi, five myths about the treaty and what he thinks is a pathway forward for the nation. Then I'll catch up with Michael Bassett to revisit his view of the last government and to outline some of the challenges the new government led by Christopher Luxin faces. Of course, we'll have the mailbag to get your feedback. And naturally, we'll close out the show with Cam's buddies and see what they think about the collapse of News Hub and the general state of the media in New Zealand. Don't forget to send comments to inbox at realitycheck.radio or text to 2057. On Monday this week, a dud judge slapped the man who bashed an elderly grandmother at the Posi Park at De Barkle in Auckland with a very well-soaked and extremely wet bus ticket discharging him without conviction.  The woman, the victim here, received a broken eye socket for daring to want to hear a woman speak and on that day a bunch of men were violent and attacked women for wanting to hear a speech. It's as simple as that. And the penalty of a terrible assault was less than nothing. The victim is now victimised again and because it seems the judiciary supports violent misogynists. The Green Party had several MPs in attendance that were there as women were being silenced, which is ironic because the guy who assaulted James Shaw as he walked through the Botanic Gardens in Wellington on his way to work was prosecuted and sentenced to nine months in prisonment for the same offence, except in this case it was a man assaulting a man. In the recent case it was a man assaulting a woman. There's actually a specific law of man assaults woman, but it wasn't used. This is an absolute travesty of a judgement and one that should not and cannot stand. The message this judge has sent is just as appalling as the excuses handed out by the man's equally woke lawyer. The lawyer claims that this man was just caught up in the frenzy of the situation.  If they'd just let Posey Parker speak, then there would have been no attacks, no assaults and no headlines. And that's where the media come in. Just like Waitangi Day this year it was the media egging on people towards violence so they could get their headlines and their videos and their sound bites. The judge however has signalled that assaulting women is okay with him that if you have a handy empathetic excuse like being neurodiverse then the judiciary will allow you to assault women. That's an insult to the victim, to women and to neurodiverse people. I know plenty of people on the autism spectrum and none of them violently assault people and none would use it as an excuse for their poor behaviour either. Thankfully the Free Speech Union is going to appeal the name suppression element of the sentence.  They let the general public down and most importantly the victim of the supporting violence. And then we hear Transport Minister Simeon Brown saying on Tuesday that his plans to build new roads means that fines could double. Sure Simeon, hit the motorist to make more coin but ignore the violent granny basher and the weak sentencing from a dud judge with a history of soft sentencing. Back in 2020 a man who masturbated in front of a 10 year old boy at Auckland's West Wave Pools was discharged with our conviction and a 25 year old was also granted permanent name suppression. The judge was Judge Kevin Glob, the same judge who just let a man who assaulted a woman get off Scott Free. And the excuse by the man who was indecent while watching a child get changed? Well he was let off in part because he claimed he was jet lagged. The problem in our justice system is not the penalties, it is weak judges. Perhaps the new Justice Minister Judith Collins might like to crush a few judges' careers so they get the message that it is unacceptable behaviour from a member of the judiciary. Historian Paul Moon is on the crunch next up. He's forgotten more than most people know about New Zealand history and after the debacle's around Waitangi Day and the attacks on David Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill I thought it might be a good idea to get Paul on to discuss the history of the treaty. Five myths about the treaty and what it is in terms of its standing constitutionally. Paul is on the line now. Welcome to the crunch Paul. Good morning. I was reading an article that you wrote a few this year. It was about Waitangi Day, the five myths and misconceptions that confused the treaty debate. It was published on the Conversation website. And I read through that and I thought I'm still confused. So I was wondering if you can help me. You want me to write another article? No, not a problem, not a problem. Let's talk about this. You've made five points about myths and misconceptions that confuse the treaty debate. The first one is the two versions. There's actually more than two versions, isn't there? Well, there's an English version to start off with which is based on the instructions that Hobson got from London and that was produced by Hobson and Busby and a few others. But mainly by those two. They're translated into Terrell by Henry Williams and that's where we get the second version, the Maori version of the text. And these are taken around the country. Most chiefs signed the Maori version of the text. The argument is that they're separate versions because they mean different things. And it's been about 20 years now that we've known that that's not the case. They mean fundamentally the same thing. But these things, once they get into the bloodstream they're circulating so it takes a long time to extract an idea and implant another one. Well, that's an interesting thought that you raised there because what David Seymour is wanting to do with the Treaty Principles Bill is have a conversation. And it seems there's a vast swathe of people on one particular side who say, no, we don't need to have a conversation at all about this. This has been settled. But there are no principles in the treaty, are there? No, there's not. One of the problems with the treaty is that it was written in 1840. And it didn't foresee circumstances that took place afterwards. It's rather like a marriage. If you look at your wedding day and you say, well, look, this is my understanding of that relationship. On the day I got married, but years or decades later you have a very different type of relationship. It's still a relationship, but it's evolved because a whole lot of stuff has happened in the interim. And most countries deal with constitutional challenges like this in a formal way. But the US Constitution, when things change, should we give women the vote? Yes, they have a formal amendment process to change that document. We don't. We have an informal process which as well, situations have evolved. Let's apply a principle to it. And it's become a bit opaque in some cases. The principles aren't as defined as formal constitutional amendments as I say in the US. And that's one of the challenges with it. And I think, and I'm not sure what Axe's particular bill says, but I think what they're trying to do... I haven't even written yet. Yeah, well, I suspect it has. But I think what they're trying to achieve is to say, look, we need to narrow down what these principles are and define them. And the problem with that will be that if you do define them, a generation later they'll need redefinition. And there doesn't seem to be a process in place for that. So we've had a very casual process since 1975, but arguably it needs to be more formal and more clarity needs to be given to these principles. Whether or not this act bill will allow for ongoing principles to be added is uncertain. It would seem that would be a sensible creation in the law to add that in, to formalise some sort of ratification like they do in the United States. It just gives clarity to everyone. And I suspect in the future there may be more principles that need to be added. Or existing principles need to be clarified, but there needs to be a process for that. And I don't think ex-planned legislation goes that far. This whole argument has really been ongoing since 1975 when the first idea of these principles of the Treaty... I can remember growing up as a kid watching marches and hiccoys and various different things and we were told the Treaty was a fraud. And a whole lot of other specious statements about the Treaty and how it was an appalling document and all of this. And yet somehow, since 1975, we've got to a position now in 2024 that the Treaty is taken as gospel. It's no longer a fraud. And it has a whole lot of things that it means that aren't actually in it, but we've got to honour the Treaty for those imaginary things. Is that a bit simplistic, my viewer? Well, certainly, there was real division even in the 80s as to whether or not the Treaty was a fraud or whether or not it should be honoured. And this is among protest groups.  If you look at the number of books published on the Treaty, say, since 1990, there's dozens of them. Quite a few of yours too. Well, they're the important ones here. But if you go back to the 70s, there's next to nothing. There's very few significant published works in the 1970s dealing with what did this Treaty mean. What's happened since is people have excavated as much evidence as they can, and they've come up with what they think is the definitive meaning of the Treaty as it applied in 1840. And increasingly, I think we'll see over the next few years, there's going to be agreement about that. Problem is, that's what's known as an originalist approach, which is what did the people want at the time of the signing of the agreement? What was in their minds? What were their intentions? And so on. Now, again, going back to the US, there are major problems when you apply originalist interpretations of constitutional documents, because firstly, you can never know what's going on in someone's mind. You can never know their motives. And also, it snap freezes a document. It says, well, this is, in this case, this is what the document said in 1840. We will stick with that. It doesn't allow for evolution. For constitutional documents to function, they need to evolve. They need to apply to the society at a time. Otherwise, they have no relevance. And so the originalist approach, which is one that's being taken by some people now, isn't necessarily helpful in that. Because you could run the risk that you're seeing, as you're seeing in the United States now, we have various different states are applying an originalist view about a particular amendment. I think it's Amendment 14 of the Constitution. Which says that, which was designed to stop actual insurrectionists like Confederate generals and people like that from holding public office in the aftermath of the Civil War. It was punitive for the losers. And so that's now being applied by various democratic states that are saying that Donald Trump shouldn't be on the ballot because he participated in an insurrection. Never mind he hasn't been convicted of any such thing, but they're taking that originalist view to try and stop him being the next president again. Which is precisely the problem. And what it does, and you've basically illustrated that point, is by freezing a document in a certain time and going back to that interpretation, you're denying everything that's happened afterwards historically. You're saying there was no history after that document, so we have to go back to how it applied at the time. And that's always going to be a problem because obviously history keeps rolling on. The key sticking point in today's debate seems to be hinged around this word sovereignty. And reading the English version, and I've got no way of reading that. I don't understand Maori. I haven't learned it. I was born in Fiji. Fijian is more relevant to me than Maori is. But the English version, it doesn't mention the word sovereignty really, but it kind of does, because it's saying that from now on, once you sign this, from now on, the rules and regulations of the British Empire apply. The Queen is the head of the British Empire. And we're going to run the government and we're going to do a whole lot of other things. And we're going to protect all of these rights that you have. Now, interestingly, this was signed in 1840, eight years after emancipation of slaves in the United Kingdom. And the property of the chiefs was retained under the treaty, which also included slaves. So it was kind of weird for the British to agree to that, without actually specifying that out. Am I wrong on this? Well, firstly, it's interesting you mentioned slavery, because the person who wrote the instructions for the treaty, so James Stephen, was also the person who drafted the legislation abolishing slavery in Britain and the Empire. Right, exactly. So it had a very strong abolitionist background to that policy. The instructions, I don't think for a moment they would support slavery quite the opposite. They talk about what they called at the time civilizing Maori. There'd be a government department set up under the treaty called the Office of Protective Aborigines, which would educate and civilize Maori and so on, bring them into the realm of European life. So there certainly wasn't any support for anything like slavery or anything else that the British found unfavorable. What happened, though, is that these instructions then filtered through the minds of people like Hobson and Busby, who weren't particularly well educated. I think Hobson left school at the age of 12, joined the Navy. I think Busby stayed at school at the age of 15 or 16. So in their sort of outlook of the world, they took these instructions and said, we'll apply them this way. Article 1 of the English version says that all sovereignty goes to the crown. And it's really strident. It says the phrase, I think, is absolutely and without reservation. All the rights and powers of sovereignty go to the crown. Now, that's pretty clear cut. You can't misinterpret it. The problem is, it's also almost impossible to imagine happening in reality. You've got to believe that 542 chiefs on mass said, yes, we don't want sovereignty any more over our people. We'll just hand it over to the crown. It seems almost impossible. And these are chiefs who would fight to the death just for minor incursions of their sovereignty. So something's odd there. But if you go back through British policy in 1838, 1839, it's really clear. There's no documents which contradict this. There's a number that confirm it. Britain wanted complete sovereignty over all the territory of New Zealand, but over the, basically, British subjects living in that territory. So there's one document from, I think, May or June 1839 where the colonial office says, we want a treaty to govern Anglo-Saxons who've gone to live in New Zealand. In other words, we want a treaty to give us the right to have jurisdiction over our people. And we'll allow Maori sovereignty to remain intact because not for any altruistic purpose, but just because it's cost-effective. The British government could barely afford an administration to govern the roughly 2,000 settlers in the country. They certainly couldn't govern the indigenous population. And they let those two systems go side-by-side until about 1843. And in fact, even as late as 1843, Lord Stanley says something to the effect of, apart from serious crimes like murder, the two sovereign systems will remain separate in the country. Yeah, it's interesting because on the other hand, they're also saying everybody who's in New Zealand at the time of the treaty is now a British subject. Not quite. Article 3, and that's one of the poorly-worded parts of it, but Article 3, so if you take Article 1, if you believe that Britain has asserted sovereignty over everyone in the country, well, everyone would be a British subject. You wouldn't need Article 3. But then you look at Article 3 and it says, it doesn't say that everyone will become British subjects. It talks about Maori in particular, natives in New Zealand. It says they'll have the same rights and privileges of British subjects. So either they're subject to British rule under Article 1, or they're not. They're the same rights and privileges. And so the argument is that, for example, in 1842, a young teenager, Makatu killed a settler family, he would have the same rights and privileges of British subjects when it came to a trial. And it was the first case, 40 years after the treaty was signed, where British justice applied a major case to someone who's Maori. And so he had the same rights and privileges of British subjects. But apart from cases like murder, Maori weren't subject to British rule after the treaty. And that was a process that changed later on. But it wasn't Britain's intention in 1839, 1840. What about the argument that a large number of the Maori chiefs signed because they wanted, essentially, law and order? I mean, this is only a few short years after Hangi Hika obtained muskets, the ability to war. He had been to the United Kingdom. He had been to the House of Parliament. He had been talking to generals who had just been involved in the battles against Napoleon Bonaparte. He understood and learned the art of warfare with firearms. And then proceeded to go on a marauding expedition down the coast of New Zealand, down into the Coromandel, across into the Bay of Plenty, and reportedly took over 2,000 slaves and marched them all back up north. All of those communities were ravaged by Hangi Hika. Now, the other thing about Hangi Hika, which is very interesting too, is that he helped create the first Maori-English dictionary. So, and his daughter, who married Hangi Hiki, spoke fluent English and, in fact, founded a school in Kirikiri to teach Maori English. And so the argument that Maori didn't understand the English version, especially as the first signatory was Hangi Hiki, kind of doesn't hold water when you understand the relationship between Hangi Hika and Hangi Hiki via his wife. Yeah, well, I think there's probably a spectrum of understanding. There's, I mean, certainly at Waitangi, there's the day of the meeting, which was the 5th of February, the day before the signing. There were four hours of straight discussion. Henry Williams' translator, so he got a group of chiefs sitting there, Hobbson answering questions, and it goes on for four hours. So I think you'd be fairly safe to say those chiefs understood in general terms what the treaty was about. But then you look at what happens around the rest of the country, where you get missionary or an official going somewhere, giving a really scant explanation of what this is, and maybe saying, look, if you sign this, we'll protect you from your neighbouring hapu that keeps attacking you. That sort of inducement. So there's very little understanding of the treaty, and that problem was compounded by the fact that no chiefs were given a copy of the agreement. So even if they could read English or read Te Reo, either way it was read out to them, but read out with other promises as well.  Now, your oral history says, well, no, I was told that, but then the seller says, well, no, there's no documentation for that, so what people were told and what they were actually later given, and I meant later, I mean, decades later, given a copy of the treaty, can be quite different things. So there's a vast spectrum of understanding, and unfortunately, we'll never know what all those are, because they just aren't the records where each signature was accompanied by a detailed explanation of what was explained to that chief. That doesn't exist. So it's just speculation as to who understood what at the time. So that's why we raise the car analogy. It kind of makes it sound like it's a contract, but the treaty is not a contract, is it? No. It's one of those misused terms. Contracts apply, they're provided for under domestic law, so you're in a country and it has a law that specifies what contracts are and how they apply and so on. Contracts are very detailed in terms of performance, so if you have a higher purchase agreement, it'll be pages of very small print covering every eventuality. And if you breach them, it's very simple, straightforward, proscribed process for enforcement. Treaties aren't like that at all. Firstly, they're between sovereign states, not within a sovereign state. Secondly, they don't have provision for enforcement, and thirdly, they're not written like contracts. They don't have precise requirements for performance. There's no penalties or performance indicators or anything like that. And the precision isn't there in the wording either because they really do rely on mutual goodwill. They're kind of motherhood and apple pie statements, aren't they? We're going to be nice to you and protect you, and you're going to do this and we're going to do this thing together and we'll all be happily ever after. That's kind of what it is, isn't it? In a way, I mean the analogy's often being used. It's rather like wedding vows that you don't have, when you get married, you don't have, I promise you, the ironing every Thursday night. In hindsight, maybe you should... Put meals on alternate days or... That's right. You don't have the details of that relationship because they'll be worked out in the course of the relationship. But you do have some general statements of intent that both parties agree to, and the only thing that binds that relationship together is the intent of both parties to be part of it. So it's not both parties though, is it? What it is, is that there was no sovereign nation of Maori. I mean, Maori just means sovereign people. That's not how the British saw it in 1839 and that's a crucial point because treaties are between sovereign states, these sorts of treaties. So in 1839 in August, August 14th the British government said we formally recognised Maori sovereignty as a precursor to getting this treaty signed. They did say though, they qualify that and said it's not a single sovereignty as we have in Britain, it's fractured among many different tribes. Yeah, I mean Britain had got to the point by 1840 there was a single sovereign nation and obviously the history of Britain before that there was many different Saxon kingdoms. There was West Saxon, Sussexon, there was Northumbria and Mercia and all of those Saxon things. Of course they all replaced the Roman rule that was in there and before that the various different British tribes like the Cantai etc. the UK has evolved into a single sovereign nation. Right and in 1840 it saw itself quite rightly as a single sovereign state. It saw Maori sovereignty as fractured but nonetheless sovereign. So they said different tribes, they called them petty tribes governing themselves but they're very clear this is an agreement between two sovereign entities. Or between one sovereign entity and multiple sovereign entities. Yes but they bundled those multiple ones together and that was I think a necessary thing to do because as I say these agreements had to be between sovereign states and if they hadn't done that with whom is the agreement and that would be a problem. There's some thought that honey hecky prompted the treaty because he was doing deals with American interests at the time. What's your view on that? No not at all. There's a very clear sort of paternity when it comes to how that treaty came about. I mean hecky was unknown to the British in the 1830s in terms of officials in London. He obviously rose to prominence in 1844-45 but in the 1830s when the policy was being developed he was largely unknown and look there were American interests in New Zealand, there were French ships occasionally coming here ships from all over the place. Britain was doing its best not to get involved in New Zealand and there's a bit of a myth that Britain had this avaricious appetite to consume as many colonies as possible and to just enlarge its empire for the sake of it. That's not true if you look at what Britain was trying to do from really the 1810s through to 1839 they did everything in their power not to get officially involved in New Zealand because it would involve commitment and cost for much benefit. A very financial mercenary decision why bother? But they were dragged into it because there were problems with lawlessness and humanitarian concerns and Britain had a responsibility for its subjects around the world. Yeah I mean they had their colony in New South Wales with our busily exporting petty criminals too and it was causing no problems over there. They kind of didn't want to get into a similar situation in New Zealand. Yeah and they couldn't even afford I mean look when they appointed Busby as resident in 1833 they couldn't afford to send anyone to support him a secretary or a police constable or anyone. They just didn't have the funds and so the idea that Britain was chomping at the bit to try to get into New Zealand and take it over that couldn't be further from the truth. Well at that time they were still busily paying for a war against France and Holy and Bonaparte which consumed vast sums of money that started in the Peninsula wars obviously and then graduated to the final confrontation at Waterloo and it's only a few years after that we're seeing the Treaty of Waitangi being signed and Britain was probably somewhat impoverished from having that large standing army in operation for such a length of time. It's only a matter of months after the treaties signed the British government is saying to Hobson you've got to become self-supporting financially because we're going to pull the plug on funding. So things were that bad absolutely and Hobson almost drove the country to bankruptcy was government his successor Fitzroy likewise was bordering on bankruptcy. I mean it was really a shortage of funds which then leads to why you'd have a treaty in the first place because you want to stabilise society so that you can have amenable trade situations occurring. Yeah although to be fair to New Zealand there was a lot of trade going on for decades before the treaty and Britain was very happy with that you know if you sat down for a Sunday roast in Sydney in the 1830s the chances are the pork and potatoes were produced in New Zealand and exported there. So great trade before the treaty but Britain did feel it had an obligation when you're getting to 1500-2000 of your subjects in a country and they're lawless and they are causing problems you do have a sort of moral obligation and this was a period in British colonial history where moral concerns were more important. Yeah so the motive is for the British is to limit their expenditure gain some dominion of some sort over the British subjects that were living in New Zealand at the time Maori motives are you know we don't really know other than what was said at the time and what was subsequently said again at Kohi Marama some 20 years later and now it's evolved into the scrap over sovereignty and it seems that there's an argument that we will should have some sort of power sharing arrangement but I find it difficult to discuss that concept and people might say I'm stupid but you know you got Queen Victoria who eventually became the Empress of India but was the head of the British Empire a primary in the world really a military power obviously they had lost the American colonies by this time but they were still forced to be reckoned with they had the Royal Navy Firepower and all of that and the modern interpretation is that that Queen and her representatives signed an agreement on an equal footing with as you said around 500 disparate groupings represented by signatories to the treaty it doesn't kind of make sense either Well it does in the sense that what Britain wanted was to say to regulate its unruly settlers and it needed formal permission to extend its jurisdiction into the country not interesting they didn't do this in Australia in New South Wales they just walked in they had a very different view of the indigenous population there to they just declared that they didn't exist that's it very different situation here and so Britain said look we need some sort of arrangement to allow our jurisdiction to extend to New Zealand and the treaty was a vehicle to achieve that then you can look at the rest of the 19th century and say well it's a history of that sovereignty spreading to encompass everyone in the country by and large through acquiescence sometimes through force but by the end of the 19th century that sovereignty is singular there's no alternative in the country Well that occurred in 1852 with the New Zealand Constitution Act didn't it legally legally that's right and that pushed aside the treaty as far as the British were concerned it makes no mention of the treaty in that act and it created a form of representative government but obviously a lot of Marys still felt well look we're not covered by this and there were a number of tribes who didn't sign the treaty so as far as they were concerned their sovereignty was still absolutely intact they got their handouts for treaty settlements though well that was under the 75 act and the problem is a few whakapapa to different hapu and iwi some of whom signed some didn't the complexities are enormous you can't unravel that so the government decided it would be simpler to consider that all Marys covered by the treaty even if their ancestors didn't sign it just makes it a more straightforward process for dealing with treaty claims What about the myths of a real treaty in the fourth article you know the Littlewood Treaty a little bit of a conspiracy theory there's been a lot of research done on this and it's it's a document it's a copy of one of the texts and there were dozens of copies probably made in that period because you can imagine it they didn't have photocopies did they so you had to hand write them especially if you want to know what's going to happen to the only thing you own in the world which is your plot of land so you'll get a copy of someone's copy and you know the problems that happened with that it's called a treaty and the wording is slightly different from the actual treaty it's not a treaty and you can test this very simply no one signed it, I mean that's the first major hurdle so for a treaty to be a treaty you need some names attached to it but there are other problems with it as well but it's something that people have latched on to that the fourth article is it's another odd emergence this came about I think in the 1990s and the Catholic Church was really responsible for this I think they were trying to gain some foothold in the whole treaty thing so they said that Catholic Bishop arrived here in 1838 he was concerned allegedly that Catholic chiefs those chiefs that converted Catholicism wouldn't be covered by the treaty and he asked Hobson would they be covered and Hobson said look basically Catholic chiefs Protestant chiefs chiefs who retain their original beliefs they'll all be covered by the treaty there's no discrimination against anyone and that's just in a sense common sense because there's nothing in the treaty that excludes you on the basis of religion it wasn't even a consideration and that was it privately of course Pompelli was encouraging chiefs not to sign it he was quite subversive about this but he was French and Catholic so there you go yes but even so it was he was saying to chiefs if you sign this you'll become a slave that's what he was telling them this of course is the most heinous thing that you could be if you're a chief to be then turned into a slave you'd be appalled at such a prospect exactly most of them had the good sense to ignore him so he made, he asked that question the reply came from Hobson what the Catholic Church did in the 90s is say this is a promise made at the time of assigning a treaty and under international law verbal promises made at the time of assigning constitute part of the treaty they constitute as much as a written promise does so if you can't prove a verbal promise any 400 years later there's certainly recording a rough transcript let's call it one of the missionaries recorded what Pompelli has said there are a whole lot of problems with this firstly international law in this area is not retroactive so it doesn't apply to treaties signed in the 19th century that verbal promises were made that's a general international law principle where it stumbles but it stumbles for a whole lot of other reasons secondly at most perhaps 8 or 9% of the signatories of the treaty heard that comment over 90% never did because it was only made at Waitangi it wasn't made at any of the other signings so the vast majority of chiefs never heard that comment thirdly there were all sorts of other comments made there were four hours of commitments and promises and clarifications so we could have dozens or hundreds perhaps of these so called articles added it's just a mischievous claim and it has no substance and what's interesting is in the early 21st century the government the tribunal quietly dropped it so there are still a few... when I read your article that was kind of the first I'd heard about it so it's not a it's a conspiracy theory that's kind of waned isn't it I don't know if it's a conspiracy I think it's just an act of desperation that people are clutching at something and saying well it means this and there's another element to it as well which is taking contemporary values that society has and projecting them back into 1840 so what was pronounced by this so called fourth article is that ah look the treaty guarantees religious freedom freedom of expression and so on what doesn't do that it manifestly doesn't but people are saying these are our values now how do we work them into that 1840 text and we'll do it this way, we'll hijack it we'll smuggle it in through a mythical article and it was a lot of bogus international law arguments used and it was quite embarrassing but as I say it's fallen from view now where to now then there's a lot of anger misconception on both sides but I saw a lot of the speeches at Waitangi, at Ratana this year were saying that David Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill is seeking to rewrite the treaty but it's not is it? Well again it hasn't been released but absolutely not but all the discussion so far is about addressing the principles to narrow them down to give them some sort of slightly clear illegal definition it's not really dealing with the text itself however so many of the settlements are based on treaty principles so in a sense it's challenging the basis on which some of those settlements were made so the treaty is the text plus the principles and then the principles aren't defined so we've got settlements on principles that have been defined by activist judges or the Waitangi Tribunal or whatever which seems to be now expanding its purview to cover anything it feels like well the tribunal is legally charged to determine the meaning of the treaty by applying principles to it there's all sorts of principles that could be added you can imagine just about anything this is a principle based on the treaty so the tribunal lately has had a lack of rigor in that respect historical rigor and I'm not alone in saying this there are a number of historians who have summoned more subtly but said this is a problem the tribunal hasn't got a particularly good grip even on some of the history it produces it and that's unfortunate because the standard isn't what it ought to be well you could argue that the standard of jurisprudence in New Zealand is not the standard it should be either well I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't comment now you wrote an article in August 2023 about our system of governance it was entitled far from perfect but still better than the alternatives and I guess that's kind of prescient given the arguments and discussions that we're having now in that legally and effectively the New Zealand Constitution Act in 1852 superseded the treaty and applied sovereignty over everybody in New Zealand we only had a population of 90,000 at that time but subsequent to that we've had a number of changes the most significant of course being the change from first pass to post to MMP and it could be argued that that also superseded the treaty if you look at what the treaty was intended to do as I say was to allow British jurisdiction to apply the British subjects in the country but implicit in treaties and not very finely tuned but in a very general sense implicit is that circumstances will change and we will evolve with those changes the treaty is fairly loosely written and yes in 1852 the British decided well we've had enough of it, it served its purpose remember the treaty introduced a system of government which was basically a dictatorship where you had a governor appointed by London who was not voted in, there were no elections in the country, no representatives so the governor could make laws as he chose that was the system that the treaty ushered in and Britain replaced that with a democratic system in 52 here's the problem though Britain completely negated the treaty effectively through the Constitution Act but the other party wasn't consulted in this so as far as they were concerned there are reviewers that look we signed the treaty now these people are going around playing with it or saying it doesn't exist it doesn't apply, well no one's asked us as far as we're concerned it still does this is the only agreement we gave our consent to so you've got a gap opening up in 1852-53 onwards and that gap exacerbated a bit by some of the restrictions on voting so obviously only men could vote but you had to own land there was Maori men too though well in 1853 it did if you own land the problem is most Maori land then was still communally owned so almost no Maori could vote in 53 for elections so basically you get only Europeans voting again widens the breach, Maori said there was no consent for this through a treaty now you've introduced a system for governing where we're effectively excluded now that changed later on so there were all these problems wedging the relationship apart from that time and Britain didn't give due consideration to the treaty when it passed the 52 Act I think it just thought well the treaty is something way back in 1840 it doesn't apply anymore the situation in New Zealand has outgrown it I think that was the British 18, Maori view was quite different I mean it's a truism now that there were breaches of the treaty some minor and some rather major you know you just have to look at a map of the roads in the Waikato to understand that and a lot of people might not realise this but in the Waikato when it came to building roads under the law it said that you had to compensate the owners for the land that you took to build the road except if you're married you didn't have to compensate them at all for taking the land and so you'll see long straight roads in the Waikato that all of a sudden start meandering for no apparent reason until you find out that well actually that's where the Maori land was and they made the road as much as possible on the Maori land to minimise the cost to building the road so there's terrible breaches terrible and we've had a treaty and we've had a treaty process treaty reconciliation or treaty settlement process that by and large apart from Ngāpuhi really has settled most of those things but we seem to be opening up this picking the scab of this wound again with the treaty principles bill but should we just not have it have the discussion should we should we just ignore that should we do what a large number of Maori are suggesting in academics and particularly the media suggesting that we don't need to have this debate or should we have the debate if you go back to the marriage analogy how would you deal with a problem counselling you could not talk about it but then it leads to divorce and this is where it gets interesting so we talk about settling claims but there's a difference between settling them and resolving them so if you get divorced for example you can settle that relationship you split it however it's split and that's it you go separate ways it's settled but it's not resolved and most people are divorced do carry around some degree of baggage about the experience and that resolution can for some people burn them up completely and I think we're reasonably good at settling treaty claims in this country we're not good at dealing with the resolution part of it and I don't know if that's even possible because I don't think any countries really dealt with that particularly well that's any sort of conflict so how do you resolve these things how do you actually get to the point where you can put them behind you and you can see in other parts of the Middle East and the Balkans people carry around things for centuries and they just keep flaring up and keep flaring up we're looking at that right now aren't we in Gaza centuries in fact millennial grudges being held and not even being settled much less resolved that's it and the example you gave if Britain was interesting because if you look at the angles and the Saxons and the Picks and all the other groups I don't think there's anyone really in Britain now who gets aggrieved by that no one says look my ancestors were Saxons and I have a real grievance about this I'm really concerned about it what's happened is that the society evolves over time to the point where these things get left in the past but other societies don't and it's part of the transmission mechanism of concern that some cultures have a system where well that's what it is other cultures have a thing this has caused us problems we remember it and that's a very simplistic way of putting it and it's an extreme way but there are cultural differences that affect how these things are dealt with it may be that part of the problem in New Zealand is we actually haven't had a decent war we've set all these things once and for all with conquest right if you look at the UK at the history of that you have multiple tribes disparate tribes the Romans come swanning in and have a regimented system and swamp every single one of those tribes apply Roman rule to the whole country which eventually wanes after three or four hundred years leaving a vacuum for the Germanic tribes are angles the Saxons to come in nobody wanted Scotland not even the Vikings wanted Scotland when they came marauding it's like if barren wasteland let the Picts have it you know you've even got then you've got you know Dane law and all of those sorts of things where communities were conquered displaced ravaged etc over a number of years obviously you've got William the Conqueror coming in that was your Vikings that had settled in Normandy who then came back to the UK to apply Norman law and that's all just absorbed over hundreds of years we're trying to do the same sort of thing but inside 200 years which is a blink of the eye well it is except that it doesn't always and again it's a cultural thing if you look at the Ottoman empires a very good example Turks and the Balkans they were there for 500 years and they imposed their system of rule their system of taxation and so on and 500 years afterwards people still would go back to say the 1300s and say well look you did this then and that became the cause of a whole lot of wars the end of the 20th century for goodness sake so in some cases people have longer memories and cultures keep things alive better than others and maybe that enforced forgetfulness has something to it I don't know but going back to a personal approach to it how do you deal with these things with bad experiences in the past do you allow them to brew inside you do you cast them aside or what well we all know that personally brewing things inside you doesn't lead to anywhere good but can you help it this is the thing I mean that's true but for some people there's no alternative simply that's how they are they're wired that way I mean that's why I think we should have these discussions in a reasonable and considered manner I mean we don't agree 100% on elements of history for whatever reason it might be upbringing could be we've read different books or whatever it doesn't mean that I'm right and you're wrong or that you're right and I'm wrong we have a discussion maybe you learn something from each other and then we come to a shared view of where we can go and you know I don't subscribe to shutting down a debate because it might be uncomfortable I think we need to have uncomfortable discussions and these are very uncomfortable discussions but I think we should have them yeah I don't know if they're necessarily uncomfortable I mean if your goal is to they have to examine why that is because if your goal is to move towards the truth and you're right we'll never agree we'll never get an absolute truth it's the nature of history because you can again go back to the divorce thing you talk to one party in the divorce what's their version of why the relationship broke up and talk to the other party totally different views of exactly the same events using the same evidence so you'll never get full agreement but the idea is to try to approximate the truth to try to inch our way towards what actually is true and I don't know why anyone would find that uncomfortable well it seems there are some people who find it uncomfortable they don't want to have a debate about what the treaty principles are and David Seymour was very brave in putting that up but I don't think he's actually fully elucidated his thinking behind that maybe that's a problem too maybe that vacuum of clarity is something that will agitate people and say well what is at risk here we don't know because nothing's been specified about that and also I think the by and large the vast bulk of the media in New Zealand don't want to have that debate either they've made their mind up that David Seymour was evil for even producing such an idea and therefore we should shut down the debate and have that debate and I'm I'm adamant that we actually should have the debate it might not clear the air but at least gets people talking because right now we seem to have these implacable forces that are butting up against each other and that only leads somewhere terrible as does the creation of an ethno-state and we're running the risk of doing that too and we've seen it never works it's never worked anywhere in the world there needs to be a shared vision and whilst we've got these groups of people that don't want to share a vision then we're going to have conflict over this whether it's argy badgy words or actually worse and I'm worried that it will go worse I think one of the challenges with a debate is obviously you need goodwill but you also need to be clear about are you prepared to be wrong and this is this is something I deal with every day when I research something I always go into it knowing I could be wrong and so I pressure test what I do and in this there's one case for example I got other people to say look I want you to find faults with this I want you to you know and if they do great I mean I really can debate that point and see or just say you know I was wrong you know I stuffed up here I put too much emphasis on this document or I ignored this one and yes I apologize and that's how it should be unfortunately I think in some cases on this treaty debate people are already digging big trenches to say we're not moving we're in here for the long haul this is our view no amount of evidence fired at us is going to shift us from our position and this is probably on all sides of the argument to some extent you'll find people like that so we can have all the debate we want but it won't budge that front line it'll be stuck there because people have decided this is what I think in advance and no amount of evidence will convince me otherwise and particularly people are wrapped up in certain ideologies the ideology trumps the evidence and that's a big concern too because you're not arguing on points of fact you're arguing on well this is my world view yeah it's belief arguing on beliefs not facts yeah and that's that's very difficult so a debate in that environment becomes complex and then you multiply it by thousands of different views and dozens of different ideological standpoints and it becomes a tangle yeah I mean I mean that's the reason what you're on the show is to look at those viewpoints you know David Rankin will have another viewpoint Margaret Mutu has another viewpoint Elizabeth Rata has another viewpoint somewhere in all of that if we just talk we should be able to find some points of agreement although I'm pretty certain that Margaret Mutu is implacable and it's not going to move you know just the feeling that I get but hey maybe I'll get her on the show and I'll have a discussion around that too but you know I think it's important that we do have a debate about this because it all started because somebody wrote a law that said we must honour the principles of the treaty that's it yeah well I mean the actually the law is actually a lot subtler it really said when we're trying to work out how to resolve grievances under this treaty and remember at the time in the 70s the text was very little but how do we do this well we'll establish principles based on the text to help us resolve those claims and that was where the idea of the principles came from because the text was not adequate to cover current situations and remember when the act was passed in 1975 it only applied to grievances for events that took place after the passage of the act so only breaches the treaty after 1975 and it wasn't until 1985 that they amended the law under the long time to apply to grievances going back to 1840 so for the first 10 years of its life the tribunal only considered current breaches of the treaty. Do you agree with Shane Jones's position that the Waitangi Tribunal has become slanted? I think it's fallen victim to some substandard research and the concern with that is that there isn't a mechanism to correct what they do and as I said a lot of historians who come across this when they're doing their research in a report and go oh gosh they've missed out this or they've misinterpreted this and these are quite severe misinterpretations in some cases the treatment of evidence is unusual it's not the sort you would expect there's no mechanism for correction it's the final arbiter though isn't it there's no ability to to the Supreme Court for example to say that the Waitangi Tribunal got this wrong to a point the tribunal can't make decisions apart from one tiny exception the tribunal has the power to make recommendations and it's up to the crown to act on those recommendations but in the absence of any other body or any check and balance beyond the tribunal those recommendations carry quite a bit of weight but again it's inflicted by what politicians of the day think about it and there's a funny relationship there the tribunal may be inclined to moderate its recommendations in order to make them more likely to go through or they might emphasise certain recommendations to say well look this is what we think regard us and put our stake in the ground so is that sort of dynamic that inevitably affects how the final recommendations are shaped I guess the debate is not settled you would agree it's not settled clearly not and it's not resolved either and you made the distinction between settled and resolved we've settled a whole lot of treaty grievances with claims in the process but the resolution hasn't occurred there was a thought and I know Doug Graham pretty well and I remember having long discussions with him back in the 90s and he was saying if we do all of this then all the problems will go away well they haven't because there's a disconnect between settlement and resolution and it's exacerbated by the size of the settlement so let's say you married couple being together 5-6 years you bought a house and divorced you get half each that's settlement there will still be a sense of lack of resolution because he or she has taken away my future and I only got half a house and that's natural so it can be settled but it's not resolved but what happens on this scale what happens if the settlement represents half of 1% of what you're entitled to which is what the average treaty settlement is for historical claims so you walk away from the whole relationship where it terminates you get half of 1% of the value of what you're entitled to so one of the arguments is that the settlements themselves are a source of grievance then you compound that who gets the settlement well it's made in the name say of a tribe and that's what I was thinking what we've been discussing is how we've got the settlement process and it's done by iwi and devolving down to hapu well it's meant to but it kind of doesn't except in Naapui that's where the problems lie but the average Maori New Zealander is not seeing any benefit of the settlement process here's what's happening in a couple of cases at the moment that there are some people who are preparing claims to the tribunal now you can't put any more historical claims in that's well over a decade now that the government said no more historical claims but there are some people preparing claims now one or two saying that the settlements themselves are breaches to the treaty because the Crown settled with iwi but not one iwi signed the treaty it was a hapu no chief said I'm signing this on behalf of the whole iwi they said I'm signing on behalf of my hapu and so the Crown should have settled with a party it made the agreement with but it hasn't it's settled with these big conglomerations because it's convenient and much faster so they're arguing that the settlements themselves breach the treaty and therefore need to be relitigated and there's some substance in that argument that the Crown has taken a shortcut in some cases and gone for a settling whole big areas of land so I think it can turn around and say look we've sorted this out we've sorted that out not taking into account the fact that we've settled with the wrong people now that's an argument there are good arguments to say that they can settle with iwi but it's not quite as clear cut no but if we haven't got settlement and we haven't got resolution then we shouldn't be shutting down debate should we no we need and this really is the whole system is kept alive by that debate flowing through it because if you say this is it you will get no more just be quiet you've got your settlement shut up be grateful well if you don't feel there's a sense of resolution there that doesn't go away it's just going to belch to the surface somewhere else and that isn't being dealt with the sense of a lack of resolution yeah I mean there's a large swathe of New Zealand society that believes that we've had a settlement processes payments been made it's settled exactly why are you complaining even more I mean obviously the system in order to get the first settlement underway which is Tainui included the ability for them to upgrade based on things so it goes on and on and on and that's creating even more every time Tainui gets a top up everyone goes oh my god this never ends well it probably isn't ever going to end is it that's a proportionality thing Tainui accepted that settlement on a basis that was a total pool of X amount of dollars and they got a share of that government then in this was inevitable they said well we're going to increase the pool so you know they settled on the idea that this many dollars there's actually more so they've been worse off so a lot of a lot of claimants have put that proportionality provision into their agreements once all historical claims have been resolved that will be it because there won't be any other ones for the government to add more money to it's all done so it has got a limited tenure it will stop at some point but there are obviously the big one Ngapui and that's quite complicated and I think Ngapui has probably looked south and said well we can see some of the problems that have emerged we can see the scale of what we're entitled to we can see issues of who's entitled to it representation and so on how do we deal with that and they haven't come up with a satisfactory response and the fact is there isn't one and there isn't the right way to do this it's just what's the most expedient or possible way of doing it or affordable well Paul it's been a real pleasure talking to you about this it's certainly given me a few more insights and answered a few questions that I had when I read your article about the myths it's clarified a few things in my mind hopefully the listeners will have clarified a few things in their mind too by listening to you talking about those things and the historicity of it and it's something I've always argued about in politics is you have to look at context and you have to look at historicity I mean I argue about this in church too when people are saying that the Bible says this but you need to understand the politics of the era when that was written and they will look at me and go what but you do you kind of do and so that's why I want to talk to historians and people who have studied this in depth and kind of made it their life to do that because not enough people are well informed and I see it as our role to inform people yes and that's all we can hope for yeah exactly and I appreciate you coming on the show and talking about those things it's fantastic thanks very much no problem thanks Paul we ignore our history at our peril all mean noses stuff and I found that discussion very interesting especially about the relevance of the treaty and our constitutional framework tell me your thoughts on what Paul Moon had to say by emailing inbox at realitycheck.radio or text to 2057 this is The Crunch with Cam Slater conversations with a side of controversy right here on RCR Michael Bassett and I had a wonderful look at history of our parliament before the election and in that discussion he declared that the Ardern-Hipkins regime were the worst government in living history I'll check in with him to see if he still thinks that and then I'll ask him about the challenges that Christopher Luxon government faces he joins me on the line now welcome back to The Crunch Michael Bassett it's good to have you pleasure to be here now before the election we had a discussion and you decided or told me that you thought that the previous government was the worst government in modern history and I pushed you a little bit further and you had to think about it but then you agreed perhaps was the worst government we've ever had do you still agree with that? Yes I do I mean it was just a terrible government they've done no work prior to coming to office they had more than 200 committees trying to devise things for them to do after they got to office they had some baggage and nonsensical ideas about the treaty and a bit of an approach to welfare which if they'd known anything about Labour's tradition they'd have known it was wrong namely that the best way to fix welfare problems is to shower them with money and I mean the evidence has been there for donkeys years that the more money you shower out the more people become dependent upon it and decide that free money is easier than having to work for it and I mean that government was so badly prepared intellectually bereft and had read almost nothing about their Labour Party seeds and therefore they deserve that appellation the worst government in modern history If you look at Grant Robertson he took New Zealand's debt from $5 billion to something like $95 billion with the media cheering him on like he was God's gift to accounting and then we see in recent weeks this huge uproar over you know $13,000 worth of entitlements for the Prime Minister's accommodation and they've written more words about Christopher Luxon's accommodation than they have ever written about Grant Robertson's financial prowess Well that's absolutely right but then what else do you expect from the modern media most of them have so little academic training they don't read much they are sort of born lefties they think that the world owes everybody a living and therefore they're not inclined to believe anything that comes out of Luxon I think to be fair to everybody that Chris Luxon handled that business entitlement for his apartment very stupidly I mean the obvious thing was that he should have just taken the same entitlement that all the other Ministers and MPs took namely I forget what the actual sum is but it's specified there was a little top up if you were Prime Minister and I mean he was entitled to the same sum as anybody else we see this pervasive attitude within the media Duncan Garner wrote last week about the Warner Brothers Discovery decision to let News Hub die and he said did Warner Brothers Discovery HQ make every effort to save News Hub letting it die is not the Kiwi way and it seems that he thinks that the Kiwi way is the state paying the huge salaries he's earned when working for those organisations and if you watch the media all the time and I think you're as good a watcher of it as I am that's the prevailing thinking any problem that anybody has the government should fix I mean get real don't people have a responsibility for their own lives and the same goes for business that's a private outfit TV3 why on earth should the government come rushing in to prop them up when they foul their nest well and I don't think TV3 has ever made a profit in its entire existence probably it's shoveling good money after bad TV1 is not doing much better either by the look of it that's probably why Simon power quit as the chief executive he knew what was coming might well be but the media I guess are a bellweather for the challenges that Christopher Luxon's government faces now you've written an article on your website Bassett Brash and Hyde about the challenges of Christopher Luxon's government apart from doing stupid things like you mentioned about the accommodation I mean he should have just held his ground and it would have died but once he vacillated and turned around his position then the media then knew well we just have to put some pressure on Christopher Luxon and he'll do a runner that is always the danger with that but I mean the real thing is that he hadn't thought it through before it came up and became public of course he was entitled to the same amount that all other ministers and MPs are entitled to when he had to live in his own accommodation in Wellington and pay the upgoings on that but he didn't think that through he decided that the amount of money that was paid to the prime minister which was substantially higher than the others got was all okay and above board and I mean if he'd gone for just the same entitlement everybody else had who could second guess it but instead he backtracked on the whole thing and now he is the only minister living in his own property who isn't getting any I mean it was bad politics all around from Luxon to the media to the opposition prying about it as well and now we've got the ridiculous situation where this Ardern created board and it's supposed to look after this property is telling us all as taxpayers there's 30 million dollars which we know will be 50 million dollars it needs to you know in repairs well if it was a business looking at that proposition we've got a house it's dilapidated it needs significant repairs to be brought up to stand we just make the decision to bowl the stupid thing and build something else for much less than 30 million. Well the trouble is that you're talking to somebody who actually is responsible for a premier house in the first instance and that me. My ministerial house was actually in the grounds of premier house and I used to have to drive past this thing every day and slowly it was sort of crumbling and it was the first prime ministerial house in New Zealand Julius Vogel had it in the 1870s and in fact was inhabited by all the prime ministers through until Mickey Savage who had no family and decided he didn't want to live in it in 1935 whereupon they let it be used as the dental clinic and came the sort of murder house was what it used to be called until the need for dental nurses got so low that they no longer needed the training facility and pulled out whereupon the house started to crumble and here am I going backwards and forwards every day looking at this thing and discovering that Fran Wilde when she became an associate minister of conservation in 1987 had banged a preservation order on it as an historic house so clearly pulling it down wasn't an option and I thought right I'm chairman of the 1990 commission where going to be making grants for various purposes around the country Auckland, Wellington Wanganui in particular and Auckland and so I put up a million dollars from the lottery grants board and said this will be a present to Wellington to have this house restored and we did and it cost a little bit more than a million but the thing was functional and Geoffrey Palmer moved in as prime minister early in 1990 the notion that it's 30 million dollars is frankly just ridiculous to fix it I'll bet my boots that for two or three million dollars you could get that place completely functional again it is an historic house probably I mean you've no idea what we discovered in it I mean there'd been a fire in the place that had all been boarded up I remember going and having a look at all these burnt things dating back to Vogel's time that would be pulled out of the place so anyway don't let spend too much time on Premier House maybe it needs another fire, a good long one no well yes they do but if they can be preserved I don't think they should be they should be allowed to burn down no and if for a relatively small sum of money that fairly significant place it's got very good entertainment facilities in a time and I launched a couple of books at Premier House a couple of my political biographies and I've been to lots of other functions there and it's worthy of preservation so long as it doesn't cost 30 million well you know it's a little known fact that in 1992 I lived for about 8 or 9 months at Vogel House in Lower Hutt oh really yes yes well Doug Graham lived there at the time and I was moving to Wellington and so I needed some accommodation and it was an interesting insight into how ministers live the time of day that they get up and go to work and you know I can remember Doug having his boulder cereal and a cigar at something like 5 in the morning 5 in the morning that sounds awfully early for Doug he didn't nothing moved him very rapidly well no he was always up around 5am having breakfast and that he was gone by 6 yeah so you know you don't get to know these things unless you're actually in the household but that was an interesting experience living there with the ghost apparently yes I went there on a number of occasions when Longie was first but Longie wanted to come back to town to be closer to his lover well he had crown limousines to cater around I don't know why that was a problem oh a drive your own car was better well it's a famously apparently Robert Muldoon used to drive his Triumph 2000 down the Hutt motorway inebriated basically surrounded by police making sure he didn't crash well on the night when he called the snap election in 1984 the chief whip ran down into the basement and let the tyres down on his car to stop him from going home they thought hell with an election coming up it'd be just our luck for him to be caught speeding or doing something crazy yeah and they're totally so anyway let's get on to these challenges that you think that the lux and government faces well they're manifold in my view probably the biggest single one is the bureaucracy yeah I think I mean we've noticed that there are leaks taking place all the time I mean that's a terrible thing to do to leak a cabinet paper before it's even been seen by the minister let alone seen by the cabinet is a high crime and misdemeanor in terms of how civil servants should operate and they have clearly gotten ahead of steam on and I think it's because they had so much to do with the policy of the Labor Party when they were in office that six years they were there that they've come to trick the Labor policies as though they were their own and they don't like the thought that they're going to be unraveled many of them have been unraveled more will be and there's a substantial change of direction but worse than that this nearly 16,000 more of them on the payroll all enjoying quite luxurious by comparable standards in the private sector incomes and they don't want to lose their jobs and so consequently they're determined to make life as difficult as this government as possible and there seems to be as yet I don't think there's a new head of the civil service I think the public service commissioner was going to retire whether he has I don't know he's announced his retirement but he's still there and they haven't got a successor as far as I know and I mean that successor has one tough job he's going to have to convince a very unprepossessing collection of heads of departments several of whom should have offered their resignations when the government changed to actually behave and make sure that their employees follow the rules like supporting the actions not out campaigning for them but doing what the new ministers want a classic case of that is this repeal of the rather stupid smoking legislation that Labour brought in and we culminated in hipkins screeching across the house this policy will kill people there was never any screeching when other policies that he did that would demonstrably kill people but it was just ludicrous because the rates were dropping anyway they were below the targets that were set many years ago for smoking rates and it was an ideological burp to paraphrase I think it was Michael Cullen David Longy it was either one or other of them the only two brains that they had between them you know so it was a ridiculous policy that there was no need for it at all now we've got this claim that Maori are going to be disadvantaged as they smoke more than others and that they ignore the logical conclusion that you come to which is well if Maori are going to be so terribly affected by this well why don't we just legislate to say no Maori can buy cigarettes can you imagine the outcry I can imagine the outcry quite easily I was the first minister of health to introduce tobacco tax to lift it in the budget of 1984 at that time about 28% of the population smoked and as the rate of tax has gone up the number of smokers has fallen substantially and it's down to 6% now we have to say that that policy is working I mean you don't see many people smoking these days it's rather rare and if they are smoking then they've had to pay a fortune for it so the policy that the Labour Party introduced a huge sort of a sledgehammer to crack a nut and besides it haven't come into force yet anyway exactly and it was ridiculous and so the new government kicked it and the problems I mean there's even a of a cartoon in The Herald this morning that has somebody holding a fag very sad and unnecessary nonsense but that's the media you see there is much agitators as these embedded civil servants who think that the policy ideas are theirs and they're sacrosanct but what we saw with the Labour government over the last six years or proceeding six years was this locking in of spending with no accountability for A. where the money is going to come from in the future and B. no accountability for is this you know effective ways to spend taxpayers' dollars and in the moment the new government comes in and says right we're going to remove that spending or we're going to remove that it's calamitous the world's ending you know the spending means that kids are going to starve you know before we had free lunches at schools how did the kids get to school and what did they eat then strange enough the appearance actually accepted some responsibility for appearance I mean and even if you're a beneficiary the benefit is actually paid for the kid and for looking after the child not for lying in bed and bonking or whatever it is you're choosing to do making your kids lunch and sending it to school making sure it goes to school I should say but I mean the money that is paid on behalf of the child is treated as though it is a parental entitlement by far too many people and I am of the opinion that until such time as you follow the money you're not going to get parents doing their job properly it is possible to marry up attendance rates at school with benefit payments and as soon as you started to deduct money from benefits because the kids weren't sent to school they all of a sudden turned up at school didn't they I think you they certainly will and I think the parents will have suddenly realized that they have a vested interest in getting the kid to school but life has just been made too easy and I blame Carmel Sepuloni we were talking earlier about the worst government she is unbelievably the worst minister of social welfare this country has ever had she doesn't even begin to understand what the welfare state was about well I mean it was always designed as a safety and this last government turned it into a trampoline that's right I mean it was what do they say a hand up rather than a hand out you made the comment earlier that we're creating a society where people expect the government to solve all of their problems and that comes back to welfareism in a large in the way that it's been extended and extended and working for families is a classic example and John Key railed against it said it was communism by stealth and then when he was elected not only did he keep it he expanded it and that's the thing is that people then once they're getting something from the state they expect that to come every week and it becomes a death cycle for the taxpayer because there's less and less people inclined to become taxpayers and more and more people who become tax takers yep absolutely I mean that was some of the reforms that you and Roger Douglas oversaw was to recalibrate this so that working people were rewarded for their hard work and effort their now their intellect and all of those sorts of things rather than continuing under the Muldoon regime where you had some people paying 66 cents in the dollar in taxation absolutely well the trouble was it didn't last long moreover we need to acknowledge that it wasn't just ordinary folk who had their fists into the till and were taking taxpayers money farmers especially and business people I mean remember all the import protections and things that existed there was a license to print money especially in motor vehicles if you could get the import license for something that was waved across the desk of Robert Muldoon you ended up having a license to print vast sums of money well that was true right from the word go and the awarding of import licenses was something of a scandal I was told once by somebody who was present when Walter Nash was Prime Minister for God's sake was still deciding on import licenses and there was a meeting and all these things that had put in applications for licenses and Walter would say no no no and then there came tinned Canadian salmon and Walter said no hang on a minute Minister says one of the officials lots of working folk rather treat tinned Canadian salmon as a special treat at the weekend oh said Walter oh well okay we'll allow a certain amount to come in so indeed they did and I mean that was the scientific nature of import controls they were chaotic moreover some of it was one of the few examples of corruption I had a relative who made elements for water heaters and so on he used to have to get import licenses tracked down to Wellington regularly to see the industries and commerce department to make applications and my uncle made inquiries of a friend how did you go about things oh well if you see Burt somebody or other if Burt's the official you see this is the technique you'll make your case to him he'll then say excuse me back to the toilet you'll discover that his top drawer of his desk is slightly open if you drop a 10 pound note you'll get your license and my uncle said indeed he discovered that Burt had his draw open a little bit and he thought well why is everybody else getting licenses and I'm not so he dropped his 10 pound note you wouldn't call it corruption on a grand scale except that that official clearly was doing quite well out of a government regulation yeah I mean people have long said that there's no corruption in New Zealand and I've always said every time the transparency international report comes out these guys running around with blown folds on there's so much corruption particularly at local government level I mean there was a famous case where a lot of the footpath contracts and things like that were going to this little flea outfit that suddenly became a multi-million dollar turnover company all of the basis of fixing footpaths in Auckland well the only case I ever saw when I was actually a city councillor which I was in the early 70s involved corruption involved contracts and we formed the impression the works committee that the particular engineer that had signed off the awards of contracts was a bit corrupt and he didn't stick around much longer his position was made too hot to handle and he cleared off but I wonder sometimes as to whether the works area is an area where corruption still exists I know some good examples first only having been involved in tendering for some contracts particularly in defence and that is absolutely rife with the only word you can use is to call it corruption but nobody ever seems to do anything about it but there's these cosy contracts that keep getting lit to guys who were never any great shake as an officer in the military and now have resigned their commissions gone out on their own have obtained exclusive rights to a particular product or something like that and all of a sudden that's what gets selected all the time it's like this cosy little arrangement it's alright you can go out into the private sector but we'll look after you by ordering all of your products well maybe remember New Zealand is a tiny society when it comes to finding people who will contract to do things it's quite difficult sometimes I mean councillors I remember the councillors when I was on the works committee saying well who are you going to get to do this job that we had that we wanted done and the truth was the contractors went running around barefoot and sometimes a little bit of corruption crept in in order to get a job done but when I say New Zealand is a little society I think everything is little you've cited some examples I've cited some examples but it's small scale stuff compared with overseas corruption it's not endemic and it's isolated but it's particularly lucrative for those involved but you're right about New Zealand being a small society and New Zealand is even though they travel overseas it's like they travel overseas with blinkers on and they don't see that New Zealand is a total population of around 5 million people even if you add those who are New Zealanders but live overseas it's thought to be another 1.5 million people even at 6.5 million people that's the size of an Australian city Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane I think Brisbane is approaching 5 million as well so we are tiny but we like to think we're bigger than we are and we're trying to live a first world lifestyle with really a second world income and in some respects a third world income and a fourth world income approach to working I mean if ever there's an opportunity not to work you can count on Kiwis putting their hands forward Yeah I mean we look at some of these roading projects so they're a glaring example and also the rail projects they're eye watering sums of money that cannot be sustained by the population of New Zealand in total and much less just Auckland city but they seem to be these guilt edged projects that are mega billions of dollars and no prospect of ever returning anything to the rate payers or the tax payers who have to fund these massive boondoggles Just on that count the number of jobs that have been finished within the contracted amount could be counted on the fingers of one hand take Auckland the city rail link which is now almost ruined a sizeable chunk of the city just slightly west of Queen Street and when it was first mooted as a Len Brown project it was 2.8 billion by the time they got round to signing the contract it was 4.4 billion and last sign of accounts it was 5.6 billion and it'll be well over 6 billion by the time it's finished now what on earth has gone wrong I mean how can a country like New Zealand operate successfully if it can't calculate its infrastructure costings properly there's any number of projects that you can look at that again a Len Brown one the whitewater rafting and canoe centre at Manukau, build it and they'll come you know they didn't nobody's come you can drive past there on any day of the week and you won't see anybody there you could fire a shotgun across the water and not hit a single thing it's insane we had Michael Wood the Labour Transport Minister proposing a cycle bridge that was going to cost as much as a replacement for the Harbour Bridge they were going to build it beside it was insane they spent something like 25 million dollars scoping it like how on earth do you get to those sorts of money you take the northern busway extension from Constellation to Otiha Valley it's a distance of 1.5km it took 7 years to build it it's 5 lanes on either side but what's ridiculous at either end of that 5 lanes on either side it's 2 lanes on either side so all they succeeded in doing is moving the traffic jam from Otiha to Constellation 3.5km closer to the city quite right I drove it just the other day it's bizarre you come sweeping down the new piece and then you get near to Constellation Drive and it all falls up because cars are fluffing in from the left off Constellation Drive and everything is blocked then until Milford yeah it is totally an appalling design they go from 5 lanes to 2 lanes and it's the same the other way around for they're always heading home to Whangapura each night they go straight to Constellation they spread out across 5 lanes and then they're back into 2 at Otiha and crawling all the way to Silverdale just ridiculous but it cost Moonbeams to do it it's a good idea I mean the busway is a brilliant idea I'll support busways all day long over and above trains because as soon as you get something happen with the train line that's it the whole system is closed down they can't move at least with buses they can drive on a side road it's much more manoeuvrable yes I mean that's the problem with trains and yet Michael Wood that same sainted Michael Wood was going to give us a 30 billion dollar centre of the city to the airport light rail but it wasn't going to go to the this is the big lie that he told it was never going to go to the airport it was only going to go to Mangaree town centre bus from there to the airport that's how insane it was I hadn't picked up on that but of course its origin was so suspicious I mean by the time Len Brown had done the CRL and Phil Goff had narrowed Queen Street to nothing so there's a whole lot of shops on either side of Queen Street with four lease signs in them and there was nothing really substantial left in the centre of the city Michael Wood was going to funnel this rail link in I mean just bizarre no thinking no sort of lateral thinking the best idea for rail to the airport I mean it's a silly idea at the best of times but the best idea was you know ironically from a left leaning councillor who said that they should put a spur off Puanui and head to the airport that way it's very short it was rural land all the way through apart from a little bit at Manukau and that would solve the problem for a fraction of the cost and of course he was howled down and told he was stupid and didn't know what he was talking about but you know Mike Lee actually had a very good idea and it's a shame it's never been picked up you know it would have been more a lot of good ideas in the course of his life some I don't agree with sure but you know that's the thing about Mike Lee is that this is the problem with the polarization in politics just because somebody from another team has a good idea doesn't mean you should howl it down sometimes they should be investigated and Mike Lee's one of those people who actually thinks logically about these things and says well this is ridiculous spending this amount of billions of dollars wrecking the communities between the city and only hunger and then from then on he's saying no let's go out we've already got a rail line that goes through Puanui put a spear off that there's only about 200 houses that we need to bowl to make that happen and then the rest of it's all rural land in a straight line directly to the airport you know I've always thought that a couple hundred more of those little vans with a trailer hooked on behind that goes to your house and picks you up and trundles you off to the airport and he would have solved the problem anyway and sure as hell wouldn't have cost 29 billion even if you wanted to have a dedicated method of transport to those areas then allow those vans to go on a busway that you've built to go to the airport yes certainly well so they should go on a busway just as I think Ubers ought to be allowed to go on busways if taxis can let's just get back to Luxon you've said that it appears that he's short of solutions as well I've picked that up as well and it seems that nationals been caught flat footed on some policy areas particularly in transport with the announcements on Monday of this week where they're going to hike particular rates and you know road user charges and things but they're going to wait until the second term to do that because of the promise that was missed in effect that we won't do this in the first term and they didn't qualify it that way but of course when it comes to the second term you deal with that when that election time comes around that's why they've done that I'm sure but the essential point though which again they can't explain properly but which is understandable the user should pay there's no reason why my aged aunt who doesn't go anywhere much except in her little fliver should have to pay huge sums for bus transport if she never uses a bus or vice versa the bus user should pay the petrol tax when they never drive a car I mean a user pays is how it should be and I think that's what the government is reaching towards I don't think they're going far enough though we've got all these cycle ways and the user doesn't pay for the cycle ways I agree I mean I've stunned that they've only cut that in half I mean the cycle way stuff for a kickoff most cyclists don't adhere to the cycle way policy they'll drive on the road go along Ponsonby Road and how many times do you have to just about bounce a bicycle because they're not on the well interestingly I was driving down Ponsonby Road yesterday I didn't see a cyclist at all and that's the thing with these cycle ways you never see any cyclists on them I go every Monday I go out to Manicow for lunch with my mates drive down Kevin Distrive which has got a cycle way built into the side of it never seen a cyclist on it not once we'll take the waterfront drive where they've done an elaborate cycle lane thing and I've several times recently encountered a cyclist on the main drag on the main tarmac the thing is with cyclists they've got their little helpers in the media people like Russell Brown and Simon Wilson and they screen blue murder if a single millimetre of cycle way is removed they're almost more entitled than MPs are for entitlements yes and yet they don't pay a bin except through their rates of course everybody pays rates because they pay them even through their rents if they're renting so what do you think Luxon needs to do I've often said when taking office in the first 100 days literally like perhaps in the first week they need to line up all the heads of departments on the front steps of parliament and metaphorically shoot one of them in the back of their head and then say to the others now let that be a listen to you well they certainly need to be told Kirk did that in 1972 when I was first elected Kirk was sworn into office as prime minister and he summoned all the heads of the departments around and showed them the Labour Party's manifesto this red glossy thing and tested it and said this is what we're going to do and this is what you're going to be asked to do and follow the bureaucratic rules and do it so that was as good as what you've just suggested it didn't involve shooting anybody but you know what I mean is pick a senior civil servant someone who's a bit mouthy and has commented on things and get rid of them and then say to the rest if you don't follow our instructions that's going to happen to you several should have been pushed out the head of social welfare the head of education police health of course has been subjected to so much chaotic stuff rather hard to find out who it would be that you'd be getting rid of but there should have been substantial offers of resignations but ministers they're not a particularly strong set I have to say I don't think the minister of education is great I think the minister of health is good showing some real class because he knows he knows a few things about he does but coming back to the prime minister the first thing is you need excellent people in your office and judging by the quality of the press statements and the speeches that have been given so far they haven't yet found the best person if a prime minister even a new chun has a good speech writer he or she can be a hell of a lot better than otherwise they might seem I don't know if you've ever watched the original office TV program with Ricky Gervais in it and he portrays a character called David Brent who sits there and intones his knowledge of management and human resources and he's singularly hopeless at everything I get the distinct impression that Christopher Luxon has studied at the right hand of David Brent interpreting a lot of Brent characteristics and it doesn't fill me with any confidence I haven't seen that program and I don't know it but he certainly needs better office staff than he's got and I think it's very important that he has some people around who are old hands and who can point to the dangers of things even as it gets caught on the hop it's in the nature of the job something suddenly blows out and left field you haven't been schooled up on it and you need somebody who's an old hand and who can say oh well I wouldn't say too much about that just yet there are two sides to that story and so instead of waiting in and making a statement that you'll do this or do that or you hold off until you've gotten yourself properly briefed yeah I mean there's been a huge hiring friends swapping out staff since the change of government but I've noticed a lot of familiar names turning up and you know they're less than average journalists who are now sitting there in ministers offices tuning out press releases and I'm thinking what were you thinking hiring that person did you not read all of the things that they wrote about you when you were in opposition most certainly not yeah it's nuts and there's no sort of like there's no Heather Simpson type person in the government that all of the staff and the ministers quiver in fear at seeing that number pop up on their phone and you're getting a summons to that office no good is ever going to come of that summons and so you quiver in fear there doesn't seem to be anybody like that in the in the lux and lead government well too many of the ministers are quite new to Parliament I mean the Minister of Maori Affairs has only been there for five seconds in Parliament won a by-election in 2022 I think didn't they and the Minister of Education not been there very long Paul Goldsmiths one of the longest serving Ministers he done a little bit between 2014 and 2017 enough to sort of have a bit of a handle on some of the people but too many of the other Ministers just a quite new chums yeah Mark Mitchell's had a bit of experience and I understand not from Mark Mitchell himself but from people that are close to what's going on there that there's been a bit of a Donnybrook between him and the police commissioner over all of these sort of ESG type woke jobs that the police have created and the Minister has said we'll get rid of them we don't need that we need people on the street and there's been quite a Donnybrook around that but I'm not sure how Costa thinks he's going to win against the Minister well his cost is a term these five year term is up next year I think doesn't it and I'll be very surprised if he's reappointed yeah I think the Government is missing a Heather Simpson type person or from the TV show the thick of it a Malcolm Tucker type character I don't know if you've ever seen that it's a British comedy show and Peter Capaldi with his broad Scottish accent plays Malcolm Tucker who's the enforcer of the Government there's some just brilliant lines from there but there doesn't seem to be anybody in the Government that's doing that no no toughies well you know we voted for a change of Government anything's better than the Ardern-Hipkins regime but you and I are perfectionists and we like to see even people that ostensibly are our team to do better than they're currently doing and that's I get the tone of your article was about that that you were disappointed that they haven't done better I mean I don't remember I don't come from a National Party better or I made no secret of having voted for ACT this last time but I just don't think this Government looks to be any better than most of the other National Governments that promised the Earth and did the precious little and I mean John Key's Government was terrible disappointment if they were going to get us an economy the equivalent of Australia and when they get a template put in front of them about how they might go about this they backed off immediately and it was the same with Sid Holland's Government the same with Keith Holyoaks The National Party is always the Government that's why I've been saying that for years and years and years it's why I'm no longer a member of the National Party apart from the fact they didn't want me because I kept pointing at them and saying you're just the Government of the status quo all you do is manage Labour's reforms well that's absolutely right and that's more or less the thrust of my book on the state in New Zealand that's a terrible state and we're not going to get ahead until politicians get brave but even P doesn't reward them very sadly No, in fact it rewards people that want to slide off and do their own thing and that makes life more difficult piecing a coalition together MMP forces mediocrity and indolence on parliamentarians Yes, I agree You and I should start a campaign against MMP I didn't support it at the time I thought it was nuts and it's proved to be nuts But we can't get rid of it because every time we try and get rid of it the incumbent Prime Minister screws the scrum and loads it up with lots of other choices and everyone gets around arguing about the merits of this or that and that and all these other things and they don't actually vote to get rid of it and it wins by being the status quo Don Quay did exactly that I agree he was a disappointment as a Prime Minister someone with so much ability and his Government existed so that he could get a knighthood and that's about the size of it Well not as successful as it could have been which is a great pity All right my friend Well I think we've covered quite a lot of ground there Michael Pleasure is always having you on the crunch and we'll get you back again whenever something historic or momentous arises and we need your sage wisdom Well happy to chat and good luck with your life the next in the foreseeable future Thank you very much Appreciate it I think Michael Bassett is a national treasure He still thinks the Ardenne-Hipkins regime was the worst Government in living memory but he also singled out Carmel Sepoloni for a special mention and he didn't hold back Let me know your thoughts about my chat with Michael Bassett by emailing inbox at realitycheck.radio or text to 2057 And now it's time for Cams Buddies This week we'll find out what they think about the collapse of News Hub and the media in general I'm expecting this buddy session to be as brutal as it will be honest My producer has them all lined up ready to go Let's go now to Cams Buddies Welcome back to Cams Buddies Good to have you again Oh hi Cam, how are you doing? Yeah great Fantastic I've got an interesting topic for you tonight There's been a lot of wailing in the media about the collapse of News Hub and I wanted to ask your opinion on that and the general state of the media in general I'm sure you've got some very wise words to say to those wailing journalists Well, I can't understand the wailing but I've got two words for this we can sum it up in two words contrived and gone And that absolutely sums it up because mainstream media is contrived false and many people are sick of it and they've got new online choices now that they never had before Yep, they've got reality check radio for a start Indeed, and we can listen to very very extensive interviews that are straight from the coal face no interrupts from the interviewers Absolutely brilliant Yeah So what do you reckon they can learn I mean will they learn they're just slow learners I don't think they can learn I mean think of this cave walls clay tablets smoke signals morse code with time things change don't they How come they never saw this coming Well, I've been saying for years it's going to happen this way at Lineal TV where we've all got a watch according to the schedule they decide for us has been long dead we consume our media in many many different ways often through iPads or through their computer you know they've persisted in this outdated method of delivery of information and it's often four or five days late anyway Well you're absolutely right TV's dead in the water and like you say it has been for years I mean you could see the dying spiral you know I can't understand how they never saw it because if they class themselves as journalists and some investigative journalists they couldn't even investigate their own demise and yet it was right in front of their eyes and they've completely failed to adapt if they had realised it they could have thought of something innovative you know to take its place and take their viewers or listeners onto that but they've failed that didn't they and now they're shocked that's what I can't get over I think do you know what I think is the most shocking thing of all is the fact that they are shocked it's just unbelievable and I mean honestly I can't believe that their overflated egos actually think that they have an amazing product it's an awful product and I used to watch it years ago and I can no longer watch it I turn it off so I'm just an ordinary person you know that represents the average Joe blogs really other people turn it off too and you know the absolute and main hilarity and kindergarten style of delivery is beyond belief do they think that's viewable it's like story time for children does it just me that thinks that no I don't think it's just you that thinks that and I think in increasing numbers people have been turned off both TV and ZN news hub for receiving their news I mean often stories that they run a four or five days old then they put a particular slant on it and you think well hang on a second I read that you know somewhere else around the world four or five days ago and that's not the impression I got from that story and they've been pushing these various minor groups of people in New Zealand as though it's normal you know and it's not I know and I've got a beauty on that one that this is this was actually the point that turned me around on the media and they won't like to know that it involved Donald Trump they won't like that but I happen to be watching Fox and Trump came on and as he often did he whistled up to the journalist and had a chat straight off the cuff and this is what he said to some people COVID is just a cold to others it is life threatening now the very next day all over our news in fact all over the world news that Trump says COVID is just a cold yeah now that is not what he said it is totally misrepresenting what he said and it was accompanied with a photo of Trump looking as ridiculous as is possible and this is how they shape our minds so just from that one item they persuade people to think Trump's an idiot COVID is very serious all fear and we must watch the next episode because it's like a soap opera well they're just liars they're just liars through and through and they have a format which I'm sure you're aware of so we sort of have the news readers headline which captures our attention and then we have a journalist lead in don't we which sets our emotion for what's to follow and then we have a video which shows the evidence and that's often staged and then the journalist closes usually in a fairly fatalistic tone and we suck up the whole item as fat well the bad news for them is a lot of people have woken up to that now and they don't want to watch it they don't want people telling lies to them no people have had enough and they've been saying it for a very long time and these journalists and media people all turn around and say trust is falling in the media we need the government to do something about it they never once stopped to think that perhaps the trust in media falling is as a result of their dishonesty and their lack of integrity in the way they deal with things they always say things like this journalist is a fantastic storyteller well I don't know about you but when I was a little kid and I was telling fibs to my father he'd say to me you're telling stories again aren't you these journalists all running around telling us that they tell great stories well in my head I just hear they tell great lies yes well you and thousands of others but you know how I love these little one-liners don't you I've got one for that thou shalt not bear false witness yes a very good very good one liner but they've just ignored their audience they've carried on doing their activism because you can't call it journalism and and then they're all surprised when there aren't enough viewers to support their lavish lifestyles and all of a sudden they've gone from hero to zero or rooster to feather duster no incredible thing is not surprised they're shocked quote they're shocked I mean I saw that man on he was crying I think he's the head of the whole shebang he was crying and he said he was shocked shocked shocked he was shocked and he was crying you know well I mean I do feel sorry for the people that have lost their jobs but hey they never felt sorry for certain people that lost their jobs three or four years ago no they never did they have reported on misery and human suffering with gay abandon and then they're shocked as you say shocked that the audience has disappeared on them you know we're all sitting here snickering and laughing at them I just think it's just incredible and I mean one of the most amazing things in recent times was Winston Peters who they bag you know at every opportunity and when he called them out on the government funding thing they disgracefully lied and I've seen a copy of the funding document and it states that they must promote colonisation and it's a negative effect on Maori's they must promote climate change and if they don't their funding will be called back in a game and they stood up there they stood up there in response to Winston Peters calling them out and they said there was no government influence he was a liar but people are waking up to this well they're going to be waking up to not having these fools gaslighting us and that's really what news hub were they were an organisation that gaslit us especially during the Covid years they were Ardern's happy little minstrels that were gleefully singing along we had little Tover they always got the first questions and if it wasn't Tover it was Jessica it was so blatant you know so blatant and then they sit there and go what happened? Yeah well like I said really the one word for them is contrived right the way they do even for that and I'll tell you why if people are listening at the moment if they don't believe us I challenge anyone to get on any MSM in New Zealand at the moment and to openly express their concerns about say the Covid Vax and the possible side effects of my carditis etc I'll never get on because the result will be edited or they'll be cut off you know you've got other radio hosts who call anybody with the views that we have cookers and abuse us and things like that you know he's just they are viciously one-eyed they are and I just can't watch it like if there's sort of an event maybe there's a forest fire heading towards my house or something I might switch it on to have an update but even then I have found a Christchurch source of news and people have taken to watching that because it's just news it's just authentic it's not grooming our minds for political agenda Well the other thing if you look at reality check radio we interview all sorts of people we don't necessarily agree with their point of view I certainly don't agree with the majority of the guests that I have on my show but we let them speak and we let them talk and we let them answer questions and we don't shut them off and machine gun them with a hidden agenda of trying to make the politician or indeed any guest just to destroy them we're there to listen to what they've got to say and it's the job of the host to ask sensible pertinent questions that will get more information to the listeners Well that's exactly what it is and that's why people enjoy it and I do I mean I've got past children's stories and I actually want to hear something fairly extensive and highly detailed and that's what I get out of it and they seem to always have people right from the coal face there's no person in between we're talking to the actual person concerned with the event or whatever it is and that's what I really appreciate and then I can sit back and make up my own mine you know what I think of them and form my own opinion I'm not having my opinion formed for me Exactly People don't understand the dishonesty that occurs in the mainstream media I'll give you a good example it was an article 2 weeks ago about me it was published at 12.28pm just after lunch and 10 minutes later I got an email from the journalist asking me for comment on the story they're about to publish which was already published and in the bottom line of the article they say we've approached Mr Slater for comment deceiving their readers that these people have contacted me before they published this article and they didn't and I can prove it and they've done it time and time and time again they're just dishonest do you think that they're capable of learning that that's not wise would appear not and that's the problem is they don't learn so they it's like if you've got a naughty kid back in the day you used to give them a pat on the back low enough and hard enough and it's straightened them out there's no consequences for anything now there's no consequences for bad behaviour and so people don't learn those lessons and they keep on perpetuating the issues that the things that the mistakes that they keep making because they've never been punished for them or never had a consequence for them that's correct and of course the other consequence they don't get in this case is the budget you know if you were running I don't know a podcast or something and you started to run out of money how you can improve your act you don't run out and fill up 10 credit cards and keep going they just keep going I mean if you look at the losses that they have chalked up it's absolutely massive but they've kept on going so somebody has been financially supporting them even though their product is not wanted exactly well that's no consequences no no consequence at all well I better go to Paul he's waiting on the lines but thank you very much for your contribution there Linley and I'll talk to you again next week welcome to Cam's Buddies Paul how are you? very good thank you, how yourself? box of fluffies actually it's you know Thursday afternoon and I'm enjoying the radio show and we've got a good topic to talk about and I've just had Linley on and she was scathing about the media and the topic was what do you think of the failure of the news hub and the media in general I think that's a great question and I'm really disappointed at the failure of the news hub because it's representative of 300 families who are I guess stressed and concerned and worried about what's going to happen and that means there's a flood of such people on the market so if there happens to be any other jobs that arise from this they'll know that they have their friends and colleagues as applicants and so you'll be competing against each other for what little crumbs there are left and I'm thinking that must be a terrible situation to be in having said that go woke go broke we're not in any doubt as to what happened and why people are less interested in watching what they're watching and people don't necessarily get their news from television anymore because they seem to be in my view during the pandemic mouthpieces for propaganda and they were happy any time I listened if something came on about Donald Trump they had a scathing way that they talked to him and they never talked such of Joe Biden who is in my view and then whenever they're talking to someone about something that I think is is is it a boy, is it a girl, who knows they report in the manner that they believe you're supposed to report rather than saying well he's having a baby she's having a baby all this unusual behaviour so that we don't know if we're Arthur or Martha leads people into trusting them less for some reason they think we all believe this most people I speak to don't believe such things now I might live in a very circle of people who think like me but I don't believe so I go to a number of places where I'm the only white face and we're having discussions about different things they all seem to be on the same pages as me regarding many of the subjects that we talk about but another thing that I think is very interesting is to make that news show go and news hub go and all that they do 300 staff if you want to look at what will kill any business it's an over how many hours of production did they produce per day for 300 staff I watch Avi Yimini and he can actually produce good content every day with himself a security guard and a cameraman and so I'm thinking well that's three people so they'd have to do 100 times more work than Avi to be earning what they're earning and I don't believe they do but I think Avi's probably not too dissimilar in output to them in total I'm looking I'm thinking many of the things that they do look like they were going to perhaps struggle now what would I know about business although I've had a few and I know that in any what is it the Pareto principle that 80-20 rule 20% of the people do 80% of the work or if you can I think it's down to the square root of the staff to 90% of the work so any time you look at a business and Elon Musk must be a great believer in it because he sacks everybody that's there they say it's never going to work and suddenly it's going as good as ever with a tenth of staff so he must have something right yeah I mean that's the thing the media have sat there moribund not changing blaming the audience blaming everything else as trust has been evaporating before their eyes and they've been continued to gaslight us on almost anything like you say about you know whether a man can have a baby or a man can chest feed or any of this sort of nonsense they gaslight us on that they gaslight us about vaccines they gaslight us about safe and effective and they wonder why we don't trust them it's not a surprise it's a surprise to them I know but that's probably because they have to head up their own fundament for most of the time well I found it most interesting any interaction I've had with the media they have completely misrepresented me and I mean you couldn't get more of a misrepresentation they said that I was a leader of a particular organization I'm not even a member of the organization they said at different times that I'm helping this person for the good of myself and trust me they were a drain on me in my resources I was helping them for the good of them because I saw a need and when things make the paper that are just absolutely challenging of a good deed and I know no good deed will go unpunished I know that but I look and I think when media are seeing someone who's got a mental health issue and what they do is make it so anybody trying to help them becomes a villain then I'm thinking well maybe they aren't such nice people and I talked to another friend who said oh as soon as you've got this or this or this reporter on your case they're ruthless they lie they edit what you say so you almost need to take a video of it yourself and I see different people who when I think it was the BBC were trying to attack Tommy Robinson and they were trying to get people to talk against him and he videoed them being deceptive and completely lying and I'm thinking this is wow stuff and the public want to believe that the news media are telling you what happened I'm not as interested in the opinion pieces I'm more interested in what happened rather than what you think what happened means so if you tell me what happened I can draw my own conclusions I have a reasonable intellect and you tell me what happened and I can draw my own conclusions if you tell me what your slant is then I'm thinking well this is crap I'm not interested in your slant what actually happened sometimes sorry go ahead sometimes these folk they become the master of their own undoing and if they've all been to the same university and got their media training so that this is how it is now then it's not even necessarily their fault but they've been manipulated as like the useful idiots that they are often because they've been doing the bidding of whoever trained the university people to train them in such nonsense so I just look and I think there's 300 families and if any of them the patriarch of their family sometimes you have other families hanging on your success so it could be even a thousand families that have actually going to suffer after June because of what has happened and I'm sad about that but also the people that are in the industry that are doing this are going to lose their jobs I see a number of them think that they might put a thing to discovery or Disney or whoever it is and say what about we take it over ourselves well I'd suggest to you they're not business people otherwise they wouldn't have been reporting opinion pieces business sometimes is much harsher in the reality then most people think there's a lot of people that the grass roots people think well if you do this and this and this it will work well trust me other people with greater minds than these have thought of it and it's not working so at the end of the day you look at them and you think if you want to chuck whatever your asset base is away then take it on yourself and see if you can have a go and to my mind a media organization's greatest asset is trust and it is something that should be guarded it's something that should be cherished but when it's gone it's gone and you can't get it back and organizations like Newshub or the New Zealand Herald or Stuff have shown us that they can't be trusted and Stuff has an editorial policy of not running any information that's contrary to the climate change narrative that's all agreed to by the WEF and everybody else that's the editorial policy and they'll be the next organization that tips over because they've just got an inherent bias and an inherent dishonesty in everything they do and the same goes for the New Zealand Herald you know I've got a real beef with a couple of journalists if you can call them that at the New Zealand Herald it's because of their dishonesty well I think that it ends up playing out over and over again like when people have lost their trust nothing that like I was talking to someone recently who was saying that there's likely to be a measles epidemic in the western world because of the lies that were told about the vaccine that was the Covid vaccine now people are thinking well I'm not taking any vaccine and we all know that vaccines are great and good and I know in my family we took these measles and rubella and mumps and all that sort of thing I know there was a lot of people against it at the time and many of the diseases of the past have kind of gone away but this is likely to bring them back because of the lack of trust and I think the media are complicit in this and as for companies that are saying that they can't discuss the other side of an agreement because that's their policy and the other science is settled that is so not scientific it's laughable if it wasn't actually so sad but the danger of not allowing free speech when you don't allow free speech people die and the reason I say that is we all have someone saying I've got an idea in our minds let's run down the motorway 160km now and then the sensible guy in your mind says don't do that you'll kill yourself and eventually you work through all decisions that you make with these pros and cons of someone chatting in your mind and you kill the one with the bad idea and you do the good idea and that person that thought that was in your mind is gone well if you can't criticize ideas and have the ideas getting challenged then instead of killing the idea off people will lose their lives because of it because of the lack of free speech and my belief is more people die of the cold than of the heat in the world and no one's saying that and no one's talking whilst they're talking about the climate change narrative and stuff I know that they've said they won't even publish an editorial to the other side of the equation but whilst I'm talking about that nonsense they're not bringing in human flourishing so they're not bringing in if you take away the greenhouse gases in this or the fossil fuels in this then no one can eat their homes and they die they're not challenging that and they're not challenging the fact that even now in the UK people are of an opinion that the heating is so expensive that they're not turning on and people are dying because of it it's actually gaslighting and it's dishonest the whole statement about the science is settled is not how science works there is no science that's settled you have theories and you test those theories until you either prove that the theory holds or you just prove it by something else happening there's almost nothing that's actually proved in science but they did that and they did that with the vaccine to be safe and effective you know it was a lie and they just pushed that lie constantly and you wouldn't hear anybody say anything different because they wouldn't allow it well it's like the laws laws of gravity exist because and they call them a law because it's happened a million times plus but everything else like the theory of Pythagoras or the theorem of Pythagoras now that works every time as well but it's not as graphic as a law so we know science doesn't say the science is settled otherwise everything would be a law instead of a theory and when the theory no longer holds there's not a theory anymore that's right once it's not a theory it's a law but it's a law because it's been proven there's not a single law about climate change not one and all of the thousands of predictions of calamity that they've said were going to happen I think Al Gore said that the North Pole would be ice free by 2012 and here we are in 2024 and there's still a whole pile of ice up there you know so when does somebody say Al Gore is a liar? Well on YouTube there's a number of things and on YouTube there's a number of things you can look up all the predictions that haven't come true around climate change and there's a vast number of them where people have predicted this will happen by then and the science sees it turns out not true Exactly I've got somebody else waiting in the queue Paul so I'm going to have to call short now and we'll talk again next week OK take care bye for now Thank you Welcome to Cam's Buddies Jack Sorry I was late I was waiting for Paul I had to push him off so I could get to your call because it's far more important Whatever The topic for discussion tonight is the failure of news hub is it bad, is it good, is it indifferent and what do you think the media should be doing or what do you think the prospects are? Well firstly the minute I heard the news I started watching TV3 I should have been doing it ages ago I feel really guilty but the reason why and I'm sure unlike a lot of other people we stayed on TV1 even though it's nowhere near as good purely because of the chase I'm a chase fanatic and then we sit there in our lazy boy listening to the chase immediately that finishes the news starts you go oh well that's it I'll just keep listening for watching it's a inertia that people of your advanced ages don't change the channel and that's why TV3 is folded I can't say that's the total reason but it's the reason why I never changed and I can only make an assumption that others may have felt the same but as I said before the minute I knew go ahead Well it's like that in radio news talk ZB has a massive audience and that's a legacy from when the state owned those audiences or those stations they had one ZB, two ZB all of those well they all got amalgamated into news talk ZB it became a private organisation but nobody changed the dial and so when media works started up radio live and then today FM and magic or whatever all of the three that they've started that ultimately failed they failed because of inertia and some respect but also because they were a poor facsimile of what everyone was used to and as a consequence there was no movement of viewership now I can remember sitting in the lounge of Mum and Dad's place when TV3 started we were all there to watch TV3 start with you know little logo and everything coming up on the screen I remember that those days but they haven't really progressed I mean I don't think they've ever made a profit now I don't know about you but there's not many businesses if you don't make a profit you can continue on for 30 odd years tell me about it I think there's so many options now a lot of people young people in particular to watch everything on their phone, pad or whatever and best people are actually watching TV I think it's authorities that are here Yeah well I tend not to watch what's called Lineal TV you know you start at the news at six o'clock and then something else at seven and then something else after that and something else after that I can assume my television in bite sized chunks I usually watch two or three episodes of a series that I'm enjoying and I turn the television off for the rest unless I'm watching Cricket or some sort of sport or something like that but I don't consume the news because frankly it's not news it's propaganda as Paul said and it's often you know four or five days after the fact when I actually read the news somewhere else and they don't cater to to the audience sometimes I wonder whether I'm going there I go I've heard that where do I hear that and then the next item comes on oh man I know about that and I'm thinking where do I hear that you're right it's regurgitated over and over again I mean you think how bad this is for TV3 what about newspapers would you like to go in the Herald newspaper chain right now No not particularly it's a literally a sunset industry and the sun setting and these media types are all sitting there like this is a new revelation when we've actually known that this is the demise of this is going to happen for years I mean you know you used to get videos out from a video shop and then DVDs and then they're all gone well why are they all gone because it was a sunset industry that failed to adapt and so you know Netflix and other streaming options came along so we've got TV and Z sitting there producing things in a linear form we've got News Hub producing things in a linear form and TV3 and then suddenly they're going oh but everybody gets their information elsewhere well why didn't you change you know why didn't it's 10 years since I actually sat down with Mark Jennings in a meeting room and said you know unless you change things are going to this is what's going to happen in it and that was you know that was 2014 so it's 10 years ago that I sat down and warned him of that and in the meantime they've done lit