KEY POINTS:
Is it because our politics has become so vicious, so lethal and so bizarre and has left us so confused, bewildered and confounded; is it because of so much accusation and counter-accusation, so much ambush and assassination that last week the nation allowed itself to be fascinated by
a lump of fat on a Wellington beach?
Most bewildering of all was the sight of Winston Peters on Close Up after his parliamentary censure, which Parliament thinks is terribly important but probably means not a jot beyond the beltway.
Watching him was to see a man in full supersonic flight through his own remote and unreachable parallel universe, a universe suspended in an infinite black hole.
In fact, his encounter with Mark Sainsbury was a model for study. I watched fascinated, feeling for Mark, remembering my own baffling encounters with the man. After nearly all of them I lost the will to live.
Here are the lessons those of us who interview Peters eventually learn.
Lesson One. Never allow yourself to be drawn into his brain. It is a foreign domain. Peters is its only master and its only translator. The Peters brain is an eternally mysterious wonder to anyone who is not Winston. It is a dangerous, unnavigable labyrinth which you enter at great peril. Go in there and you will not emerge alive.
Like the Strait of Magellan, it will suck you through to the other side and leave you cut off, abandoned, alone in space, Major Tom to Ground Control. Or, like the Strait of Magellan, it might slam you against the jagged Patagonian rocks.
This is a brain, which when under attack, acknowledges no other force. It functions entirely within itself, of itself in its own entire world with its own fuel and air supply. Just when you think you have gained a safe entrance, just when you think you have got inside it safely and you think you have a foothold from which to strike and a clear escape path behind you should you need it, it will pulsate and flash in front of you and transmogrify.
Suddenly, it is a heroic flying trapeze throwing you spinning and turning in the sky, a merciless flying trapeze jabbering accusingly in a foreign tongue known to no one else on this planet and you will hear powerlessly in a dream until you start to scream, crying out for the cool and beautiful waters of precious lost reality. So we learn to stay with the facts and to be certain of everyone of them we use.
Lesson two: Keep it simple. We must not allow the great smokescreen artist to confuse things. For example, in the Owen Glenn matter, there is but one issue. Why did Peters and his party not declare the $100,000 from Owen Glenn?
The privileges committee has found that Glenn's phone call to Peters, Peters' immediate call to Brian Henry and Henry's immediate email to Glenn add up to Peters knowing about the money.
We allow ourselves to be led nowhere else. We must not be drawn into argument for that will take us inside his head. We track north. We steer three six zero. We allow no deviation and hold our true course. Lesson three: We try to keep our questions short. A long question gives his brain time to morph and then all you will see is the comet trail ahead of you, swirling in a foreign night of dark tunnels, swinging doors, hanging cobwebs and lonely screams of the dead who came before.
When the creature speaks again you will not know from where and you will understand nothing. Let a question drag on and death is certain. You will feel the brief beauty of freefall before becoming a lake of blood and tissue.
W
HEN ALL is said and done at Fonterra, it might come down to two issues. First, why did San Lu not test for melamine when melamine was in such wide use in China? In any trade or any business, no matter what our occupation, we get to know how things are done, who is doing what and what tricks they might be using. People talk, after all.
And second, despite questions from parents dribbling into San Lu since late last year, why did the Fonterra side of the San Lu board know nothing until August 2?
Put the two questions together and you have an unpleasant odour. Someone was done over big time, obviously, but who did it to whom? Did the suppliers do over the management? Did management do over the board? Did the San Lu side of the board do over the Fonterra side of the board? Who was taking the money? And who is going to die?
Andrew Ferrier, Fonterra's chief executive, will wonder for the rest of his life, if he should have come home to mamma and told Wellington on August 2. Certainly mamma thinks so, as she made clear last week.
Fonterra did not think this through thoroughly. Failure to tell the Prime Minister early last month has allowed Helen Clark to distance the Government from the company and let its leaders hang in the winds of fortune. Once the Government informed the Chinese it would have been up to them. Fonterra could always claim to have come clean and to have used the most powerful channel available through which to advise Beijing.
Fonterra has been described as flat-footed in its public relations management over the past fortnight and a horrible clumsiness was seen last week. Wednesday morning, Fonterra advised the news media of a news conference at midday, giving the impression that it would be broadcast on Channel 750 on Sky.
I watched in disbelief. The broadcast was an awful pseudo-
interview of Ferrier and Fonterra chairman Henry Van Der Hayden, in which John Stewart asked the lamest of paid-for questions, even by the standards of lame public relations interviews pretending to be interviews.
"Andrew" this, "Henry" that. "Has it been hard, Henry", "Have you done your best, Andrew", "Are you committed to China, Andrew?" Stuff like that. (Memo to John: I know you despaired of some of my work over the years but for God's sake, man).
I sat in front of the telly, appalled. What absolutely incompetent a piece of communication was this? As I found when I phoned Fonterra's PR person, this was Fonterra's quarterly broadcast to its farmers. The real news conference was about to begin after the patsy interview and indeed, Ferrier and Van Der Hayden withstood questions for well over an hour. But it was not broadcast. It should have been.
Playing that tape was tonally inept. People have died and tens of thousands are sick and we had the bad acting of three people in a bizarre play about an interview pretending to be an interview when we could have had some real communication.
Sometimes you have to seize the moment and throw away the script.
The communication with the farmers and the public, the announcement of the payout, should have been direct and live while the opportunity was there, as Fonterra obviously owned the time on Sky.
The public relations advisers should have scrapped the recording (in which, by the way, the announcement of the payout was as clear as mud) and gone to the country live. That would have been communication to be proud of.
And when it comes to communication, while there is no hope for Van Der Hayden in this department, Ferrier is not a bad communicator. He appears a little wooden but honest all the same, and he will get better if he does more of it.
Fonterra needs to be less secretive. Like it or not, it has a relationship with New Zealand because, after all, to some extent, it is New Zealand. It seems only sensible that we get to know each other. It is quite simple. In any catastrophe, people will take bad news better from people they know and respect. Perhaps I should pitch for the contract. The only challenge is to make them look normal.
My wife has a Chinese colleague at the real estate firm for which she works. She is tough, has a great sense of humour and I like her. She is great fun. The other day she went into the office and handed out biscuits to the people she cannot stand. A man took a biscuit and asked, "Where do these come from?" "China," she said with the sweetest smile.
Deborah's boss is a hard case who finds relief from the savage times in old episodes of The Goon Show. In one episode they try to buy the English Channel and ask how much it will cost. "Eighteen shillings, to be precise," replies Peter Sellers. They buy it, insure it and try to set fire to it to make a big claim. The fire will not start. "It's too damp."
The Goons lived in brains that were worlds of their own, too. But they made us laugh. As does Winston Peters. He really is a special kind of genius.
