There’s general agreement that Lockwood Smith has been an excellent Speaker. His quiet, natural authority has allowed him to control the House without getting to his feet every few seconds to call for order. He has refused to allow Ministers to get away with non-answers to questions. If any party is unhappy with him, it is considerably more likely to be the National Party than anyone in opposition, perhaps the ultimate tribute to his impartiality.

But yesterday the Speaker seemed to lose the plot when he warned the media that their coverage of MPs’ expenses bordered on lobbying and that, if it continued, he would treat them as lobbyists. The media, he said, should ‘stop parroting a view’.

He then issues this threat:

‘If the newspapers do want to have a view and want to lobby on it, I’m very happy to issue them with a lobbyist card and relieve them of their [Press Gallery] offices here, and if they want to be lobbyists – fine.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Taking a break in Queensland can make you dissatisfied with home. It’s the weather mainly – warm, sunny, reliable. And Queenslanders drive at the speed limit with the result that, paradoxically,  you get there faster and with your nerves intact.

And then there are the papers. Or one paper at least. We arrived at our Brisbane hotel on Friday evening and woke the next morning to find the Weekend Australian outside our door.

There is really only one word to describe the Weekend Australian and its weekday siblings – quality. We have no quality newspapers in New Zealand. Our metropolitans are broadsheet in format, but tabloid in content. The experience of reading them is rarely enjoyable, often not even informative. Read the rest of this entry »

Journalists like to talk of the ‘public’s right to know’, but in most circumstances no such ‘right to know’ exists. In fact you are the one with a right – to conduct your personal and business affairs in privacy.

You forfeit that right if you break the law, if your behaviour invites public scandal or derision or if you have chosen celebrity.

The lawbreaker cannot expect to remain anonymous. Name suppression in criminal cases is anathema to the media and rightly so.

But you don’t have to break the law to forfeit your right to privacy. People who achieve public prominence, whether they seek it or not, are subject to greater media scrutiny than the average person. If, for example, you are the chief executive of a large company, or the executive director of a major organisation, or a prominent member of the clergy or the spokesperson for an influential lobby group, your words and deeds are likely to be of considerable interest to the media. This is particularly true if your words are at odds with  your deeds. Read the rest of this entry »

A young woman is in critical condition in Auckland City Hospital after being hit by a bus in Mount Wellington yesterday. This is a dreadful situation for the girl, her family and the driver of the bus. If the girl dies or is left disabled it will indeed be a tragedy, as this morning’s front page Herald story rightly suggests.

But the Herald has a sidebar to the story headed “SAD TOLL”. It reports that between May 2000 and February 2009 four people have died in bus accidents in Auckland. Four people in nine years. While each of those events will have been a tragedy for everyone involved, the sidebar and the use of the word “toll” seem to me to suggest a much blacker history of fatal accidents involving buses than the statistics would imply. Read the rest of this entry »