Robin Maconie: Murdoch Stuffed

On page 133 of Bill Oliver’s complacent and self-serving memoir Looking for the Phoenix – a book without an index – the veteran historian describes with typically arch insouciance how the London launch in 1981 of his Oxford History of New Zealand happened to coincide with a citizens’ protest, in the Haymarket opposite New Zealand House, against the presence of Prime Minister Muldoon and our national capitulation to institutional racism in sport.

“It was a hot day; John Thomson, once the editor of [VUW poetry magazine] Hilltop and now of Early Music, the composer Robin Maconie and I drank a bottle of cool white wine in John’s Ely House office and strolled a few blocks to the demonstration wearing our NZERS AGAINST RACIST TOURS badges”.

To a visiting eminent historian on salaried leave the event is remembered as little more than a pastoral frivolity. What Oliver failed to notice – not only as a historian but as a human being – was that to fellow New Zealanders and cultural exiles Thomson and myself, the sinister and shameful capitulation of New Zealand political morals to financial and sporting interests was taking place against the backdrop of a systematic and bloody takeover by Australian Rupert Murdoch of British newspaper interests, including flagship broadsheet The Times which I had joined in 1974 under William Rees-Mogg’s editorship as occasional music correspondent and feature writer.

The radioactive cloud that descended on Britain’s liberal press following Murdoch’s arrival set the tone for the ruthless and destructive politics of Lady Thatcher in the UK, to be replicated by Rogernomics in New Zealand. Murdoch’s likely downfall thirty years on, and the recent sudden and dramatic clearing of the air, has exposed a sinister, longstanding and nefarious intimacy between British national news media interests, political power, and the law. It coincides in New Zealand with a time of heightened economic and social distress for the general public, along with revelations of scandalous and longterm mismanagement of the public interest in New Zealand, affecting the deregulation and sale of higher education, disposal of cultural assets, integrity of house building standards, loss of hospital and other care services, the mischievous appointment of senior security and policy officials by incompetent private headhunting organizations, and dereliction of safety standards in the mining industry, to name only a few. All of which has taken place under the watch of a compliant and debilitated news media arm of a civil service whose notion of public duty is summed up in wave upon wave of pompous and patronising television advertisements telling viewers how to fix a light bulb, how to gamble, how to vote, and that what to do in case of an earthquake is look in the yellow pages of the telephone directory.

Tom Mockridge, the New Zealand editor who oversaw the fatal merger of The Dominion and Evening Post, a political manoeuvre cynically designed to impede and control political investigative reporting in the capital, has now been summoned to London to rescue the credibility of the Murdoch brand of news communication. The irony is not lost on the Wellington reader for whom the local merger has long since reduced a previously thriving and competitive news partnership to a palpably anorexic and ineffectual medium shielding a culture of waste and inefficiency within the civil services.

Of his own rose-tinted Oxford version of New Zealand history Oliver reminisced: “In some measure thanks to its exclusions [women’s history and Maori history], the book has a unity, one difficult to describe except with words like mood, tone, and spirit. This was an outcome, first, of editorial design, and second, of editorial control”. A bleak, apt, and damning summary of the cosy and incestuous relationship of academic, political, and media interests that has ruled over Wellington for far too long and at far too great a cost.

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