NewstalkZB's Barry Soper with Nelson Mandela in 1994, the day after he had been inaugurated as South African President, signing his inauguration address.
NewstalkZB's Barry Soper with Nelson Mandela in 1994, the day after he had been inaugurated as South African President, signing his inauguration address.
Barry Soper is a name and certainly a voice that’s recognisable across New Zealand.
After decades in the Beehive, Soper put pen to paper outlining his time covering 12 Prime Ministers, from Muldoon to Luxon.
He blends personal stories, policy critiques, and behind-the-scenes tales ... like Muldoon’s drunken Schnapps electioncall, Lange’s antics in Africa, and Bolger’s mimicry habits.
As former PM John Key wrote in one of the book’s forewords, “Barry knew, and still knows, where the bones are buried”. The other foreword is penned by Helen Clark.
Barry Soper told The Front Page that journalism has changed a lot since he started.
“There is more pressure on journalists these days to meet an unknown deadline because it’s always there.
“When I began, we had all sorts of things that we had to do before we filed copy. In my case, you had to have a screw mouthpiece phone, put it onto crocodile clips, and feed it into a mutter box. Plug your tape recorder into it, and you could feed audio.
“Of course, now you do it by computer. So, while there’s more pressure on journalists, you can file copy with great ease, and the quality of the audio would be perfect.
“I’ve filed from India before with old technology, and it’s bloody awful because the phones took several hours to get a connection through to New Zealand, and when you got the connection, you only lived in hope that it would be a good connection.
“One point I make in the book, I remember it vividly, standing on the west lawn of the White House with a brick phone, being interviewed back home, and thinking, this is unbelievable. Here I am, no wires, no mutter boxes, and I’m talking, and the people of New Zealand are hearing it,” he said.
Barry Soper through the years at Parliament's press gallery. Photos / supplied; montage / Phil Welch
Soper also makes the observation that there has been a certain decline in the “art” of politics.
“[In Muldoon/Lange’s time] ... Parliament was full of the type of characters you just don’t get now,” he wrote, and “Unlike today, there were a number of fantastic debaters.”
" There used to be an unwritten rule in Parliament that if you took part in the Wednesday debate, you were not allowed to speak with notes. You had to stand up, you had to be a good orator.
“People were pulled up in my early days and told, ‘You are speaking from notes, you’re not allowed to do that!
" It was harder, but the oratory was so much more superior than what you get today. Lange, in particular, though, his voice would rise to a crescendo, and then he would drop it down to almost a whisper, and the whole audience would be silent and taken with him.
“It was like being in an opera. Whether he said anything that was particularly newsworthy is another matter.”
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
