Journalists have lifted the lid on such cases as the Crewe murders, the Urewera raids, Louise Nicholas, the Erebus tragedy and Teina Pora, above. Photo / Nick Reed
Journalists have lifted the lid on such cases as (clockwise from top left) the Crewe murders, the Urewera raids, Louise Nicholas, the Erebus tragedy and Teina Pora.
In a world of fake news, never has the need for investigative journalism been more vital. New Zealand has a long and rich tradition of journalism that holds power to account. A new book - A Moral Truth - pulls together a history of this work from 1863 to the present day.
Many stories are familiar to us all, others not so well known. They include the Crewe murders, Louise Nicholas' case against the police, the Erebus disaster and Teina Pora's miscarriage of justice. All have shone a light into dark places and show the craft, compassion, toil and persistence of journalists and editors. Herald reporters Phil Taylor and Kirsty Johnson both feature in the book. Today they reveal their inspirations and a sense of what drives them without fear or favour.
A Moral Truth, 150 years of investigative journalism in New Zealand , edited by James Hollings, published by Massey University Press, is available Monday.
By Phil Taylor
This noseyness, this itch to expose some significant thing that should be known. Where does the impulse come from to right some wrong, to search where the light is poor, to look hard when the powerful mutter "nothing to see here"?
As a teen I accompanied my mother to rescue a lost uncle from a halfway house inhabited by the impaired and the unlucky. Their benefit payments seemed to be controlled by the proprietor. We left with Uncle Albert and, for me, the sting of not being able to help the others.
Passion, or outrage, and righteousness too, has something to do, I believe, with journalism that is labelled investigative.
Having the instinct is one thing, knowing what you are doing is another. Buried facts can be hard to unearth, particularly when they are smoking. For a long time, I had no idea.
David Hellaby's work lit the way. He was a star during the 1980s. His specialty was white-collar crime and his work influenced the setting up of the Serious Fraud Office.
Hellaby seemed to serve that famous quote: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations".
He was a ferret who would rather be held in contempt of court (as he was across the Tasman during his investigation into the collapse of the State Bank of South Australia and its missing A$3 billion) rather than give up a source. Death threats came with the territory.
I remember a photograph with one of his stories in The Dominion. Shot at night through venetian blinds, the subject of the story was caught in silhouette, hard at work at a shredding machine.
After a decade in the trade, I was hired by the same paper. At the interview I was shown Hellaby's desk. Document stacks rose and fell across its expanse like a mountain range. What pieces of some giant jigsaw might those hold, I wondered.
Journalist Richard Langston says it well in his poem for my brother-in-law, Roy Colbert, a mentor to us both. It's called Roy's Typewriter.
He made sentences run out of it,
The roller worn by clack & hammer,
Wit & wordage travelling in its keys.
I wanted to apprentice myself to it.
Once I pulled up a chair
& hovered over its rubbed indented letters
Willing its music to fill me.
I was a cub reporter, a wobbly toddler.
I stared at it and I was rebuffed.
Work, it said to me, work, work.
Through his work, Hellaby showed what was possible and my baby steps were guided by two outstanding chief reporters - the passionate Fred Tulett and the wise Barry Swift.
A murder, written off by authorities as suicide, was my big break but my pick of the best investigative work of my generation is the Louise Nicholas case, Phil Kitchin's exposure ofsexual predators in the police and the cover up that protected them.
Those explosive stories began with a vague anonymous tip. Kitchin spent years pulling threads, corroborating, assembling pieces until the picture came clear. Then he told Nicholas of the furore that would ensue if the story was published and gave her the right of veto.
All that painstaking work, all those kilometres, but Kitchin and his editors were willing to walk away had Nicholas not been up for it. As a result, jail time was served, a Commission of Inquiry was held and the police force is much better for it.
Investigative journalism makes society stronger.
•Phil Taylor's ground-breaking work on the Teina Pora miscarriage of justice case is features in the book.
Other work by Taylor was instrumental in the resignation of a Supreme Court judge over a conflict of interest, the jailing of a corrupt senior police detective for attempting to pervert the course of justice, exposing what appeared to be insider trading by Blue Chip boss Mark Bryers, unmasking a paedophile principal, revealing a stock market darling's involvement in the arms trade, and exposing the Lance Armstrong doping conspiracy.
By Kirsty Johnston
The sounds of men shouting and breaking glass woke me just before dawn. It was Monday, October 15, 2007. I was in the end of my final year at Victoria University in Wellington, living in a freezing flat near the city centre.
Thinking the noise was probably just a party, I put the pillow over my head and tried my best to go back to sleep.
A few hours later, I walked past the dilapidated villa we called the "hippy house" and noticed its busted windows, and a smashed-in door.
Two girls who lived there were sobbing on the pavement.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The cops," they said.
The footage on the news that night was extreme. Police in stab-proof vests storming the house with sniffer dogs. More officers spilling out into the street. Across the country, similar scenes had played out at a dozen different homes. In Whakatane, Tame Iti's partner and daughter were forced from their house in nightgowns. In Ruatoki, armed police searched every car going in and out of the town.
The Urewera Raids, in my backyard.
For the first time, a news item genuinely intrigued me.
I'd walked past the house at 128 Abel Smith St every day for more than two years, with its pamphlet stands out the front and piles of bikes around the back. I'd drunk beers with the bogans next door and watched as the self-declared anarchists hung new signs, my favourite urging people to grow kumara.
Could they truly be terrorists, as the police believed?
I followed every twist and turn. One week, we argued about the media coverage in my 300-level media studies class. Should TV3 - whose studio just happened to be across the road from the Wellington raid - have been allowed to film?
My instinct was yes - it made compelling coverage.
Others argued strongly against, saying it was unfair and intrusive.
By the end of journalism school the following year, the raids were still dominating the news.
The charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act had been dropped.
Some of the accused were no longer part of the case. And the Dominion Post had run the "Terror Files" - the most explosive parts of the police case - on the paper's front page. It was a huge story. So huge, that the Dominion's editor Tim Pankhurst ended up in court himself, accused of prejudicing the upcoming trial.
In class we learned how reporter Phil Kitchin, already renowned for his work on the Louise Nicholas case, had got hold of the police file. He walked in one day and presented it to Pankhurst, little more than a tatty stack of documents held together with string. To me, yet to write anything more than a weather report, Kitchin's abilities seemed like superpowers.
This was top-level police information. How did he know who to talk to? How did he gain his source's trust? I wanted to know everything about how he worked.
Our lecturer promised he would try to get him in.
In the end, Kitchin was too busy to come and talk to us. Instead, we watched a video of Nicholas talking about why she had trusted him.
Despite my disappointment, what she said was enough. He had kind eyes, she said. And he was honest.
I've never forgotten that.
•Kirsty Johnston's story on the treatment of the intellectually disabled in care, and the Government's bid to keep the abuse secret, features in A Moral Trust.
More recently her investigations have included articles on autistic man Ashley Peacock, who was kept largely confined to a single, tiny room in a psychiatric facility for five years; and the use of seclusion against children at primary schools.
She has also exposed ongoing issues with inequality in the education sector, and the extent of government consented water bottling across New Zealand.
The Weekend Herald approached investigative journalists from other organisations to take part in this feature but their publishers declined to give permission.
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