KARL DU FRESNE: Mallard in Fantasyland?

I attended two sessions at the Featherston Booktown Festival on Saturday. One, on the state of the news media, was almost totally useless. I walked out before it had finished. The other, however, was not only entertaining but produced one of those “Did he just say what I thought he said?” moments from former Speaker and Labour Party minister Sir Trevor Mallard.

In the panel discussion on the media, Duncan Greive from The Spinoff was the only speaker who brought any insight to bear. The contributions of the other participants – Mike McRoberts from NBR, TVNZ’s Te Aniwa Hurihanganui and moderator Michelle Duff – were shallow, predictable and carefully modulated to elicit murmurs of sympathy and agreement from the full hall.

It would have been a whole lot livelier if Sean Plunket, Michael Laws, Heather du Plessis-Allan, Peter Williams or even Barry Soper had been invited to speak, but that was never going to happen. Book festivals are not noted for their openness to ideas and opinions that challenge prevailing orthodoxies. There are audience sensibilities to be considered.

The preceding session on politics was a lot more rewarding. The subject was the turbulent politics of 2017-2023: the Ardern years. And while there was the same non-threatening quality about the speakers, two of them – Chris Finlayson and Trevor Mallard – at least spoke with the advantage of first-hand, close-up experience. Two journalists, Stuff’s Henry Cooke and the aforementioned Hurihanganui, seemed to be there to make up the numbers and didn’t have a great deal to contribute.

It was a crowd-pleasing session, deftly chaired by Toby Manhire from the Spinoff. Finlayson, nominally the right-wing voice on the panel, was never likely to upset anyone and was presumably invited for exactly that reason. He’s the Left’s favourite conservative: an old-school National Party liberal who quickly earned the crowd’s favour by making it clear he doesn’t have much, if anything, in common with the “Muppet” government (his term) that’s now in power. He remarked that because of the coalition government’s “blowback” on Maori issues, he now feels more like the opposition.

The fact that Finlayson has long been out of politics not only renders him acceptable to left-leaning book festival audiences - since he's no longer in a position of power - but frees him to be frank, all of which makes him ideal for the festival circuit. He’s an engaging raconteur and can be tartly humorous, as when he talked about the many “WTF moments” when National was chaotically in opposition, drolly referring to one former party leader as “Muller the Brief” and to another, Simon Bridges, as a shit.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Finlayson say that if he had won the then Labour-held Rongotai electorate, which he contested for National with no expectation of winning and plainly no desire to do so, he would have demanded a recount. It’s a good self-deprecating joke that bears repeating.

For his part, Mallard, having been Speaker during the anti-vax occupation of Parliament's grounds, was plainly concerned with putting a favourable spin on his involvement in that unprecedented brouhaha. He told the audience that a lot of “marginal people” were involved in the protest camp – people who had “gone down rabbit holes”, including mentally ill individuals he knew from his Hutt South electorate; in other words, nut cases and no-hopers.

I wonder if anyone else in the hall felt, as I did, that this was a less than empathetic way for a Labour MP – one who makes much of the fact that he represented the battlers from working-class Wainuiomata – to brush aside the concerns of people who are social casualties. Henry Cooke pointed out that many of the protesters had lost their jobs because of the vaccination mandate (although I don’t recall Stuff taking the trouble to make that clear at the time) and Te Aniwa Hurihanganui acknowledged that they were a “real mix of people”. Mallard justifiably copped a lot of flak for his arrogance and indifference to the protesters’ grievances during the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and I wondered on Saturday whether he had learned anything from the experience. Perhaps not.

He also criticised the police for taking too long to deal with the protest encampment (oh, so it was their fault, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty) and he defended the use of water sprinklers – which were seen, along with the notorious Mallard-instigated Barry Manilow broadcasts, as an attempt to dislodge the occupants – as being necessary to wash away human waste. That was a new one on me and I wondered whether it was a convenient justification post-event.

But the big surprise – one that even had the stranger next to me turning to me with a look of disbelief – was Mallard’s claim that the protest camp was funded by Russia. Yep, that’s right: Mallard reckoned someone paid for millions of dollars – yes, millions – worth of camping equipment that mysteriously turned up in Parliament’s grounds. Protesters suddenly had money to spend and he had no doubt that money came from offshore – Russia, he said.

Whoa! That came completely out of left field. My astonishment was shared by my fellow  journalist David McLoughlin, who was also at the session and like me, thought Mallard’s claim was bizarre. No explanation was offered as to why Vladimir Putin should spend millions paying for anti-vax protesters to camp in comfort in the most distant capital in the world. Payback for New Zealand supporting sanctions against Russia following the Ukraine invasion, perhaps? Not totally implausible, but it's the sort of far-fetched scenario that only an over-active imagination might come up with. Neither was it clear why the allegation had never emerged before.

Certainly there was feverish talk in 2022, some of it from the excitable, conspiracy-obsessed Sanjana Hattotuwa of the Disinformation Project (remember them?), about alleged Russian-sourced disinformation. Canada too was identified as a source of malevolent anti-vax propaganda, Jacinda Ardern noting the supposedly incriminating evidence that Canadian flags were being flown in the protest camp. But Russia spending millions on tents and sleeping bags? That was a new one.

Surprisingly, despite two political journalists being on stage with Mallard when he made the allegation, nothing has been reported, at least to my knowledge. Here was a former senior government politician – the Speaker of the House of Representatives and subsequently ambassador to Ireland – alleging malign foreign interference in our domestic affairs. I would have thought there was a story in it (“Russia funded Wellington protest camp, says Mallard”), but apparently not. Perhaps Cooke and Hurihanganui decided it was just Mallard running off at the mouth and not worth taking any further. But previous generations of political reporters, their news antennae twitching furiously, would have been pursuing him for elaboration.

What, if anything, should we make of it? For me it had echoes of former Waitakere mayor and Labour grandee Bob Harvey’s startling allegation in 2000 – similarly unsubstantiated – that the CIA was involved in the death of Norman Kirk, which had even his friend Helen Clark looking sideways at him. Mallard’s claim has the same slightly loony, off-the-wall quality. If he has evidence, he should front up with it. Otherwise people will be justified in concluding it was a case of Mallard in Fantasyland.

Karl du Fresne writes at Karl du Fresne