THINKER TAYLOR - TRAITOR?…WHY?
The Admirable Man that Aotearoa’s Loopy Left now can’t Fathom or Stomach
Much of what’s happened in New Zealand in the last few years is as impenetrable and morally ambiguous as a John Le Carré novel.
Sir Ian Taylor was a cherished darling of Left-leaning New Zealanders; a handsome, creative and successful entrepreneur from humble beginnings who exhibits socialist sympathies.
Then COVID-19 came along and Taylor began to do abominable things. He displayed the loathsome audacity to repeatedly criticize the Labour Government’s response to COVID. In lucid, incontrovertible terms, he heretically put down in words the following realities:
The bizarre, inexcusable delay with the New Zealand Government’s roll-out of COVID vaccines. The Government signed a COVID vaccine supply agreement with Pfizer on 22 December 2020 but the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine was not administered in New Zealand until almost two months later (on 19 February 2021). Once everyone who wanted to be vaccinated had received a decent opportunity to be vaccinated, the compelling logic was that New Zealand could return to business-as-usual. Unfortunately, the Government and Ministry of Health bureaucrats took long leisurely summer holidays and the vaccination roll-out remained pedestrian. New Zealanders remained interminably locked down (and out).
Our Government’s steadfast refusal to engage genuine public health expertise: Expert New Zealanders like Emeritus Professor Gorman, who knew how to balance the medical, social and economic considerations and what it would take in order to re-start and re-open New Zealand as quickly as possible, were completely excluded from the official conversation.
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s incompetence: In Taylor’s tailored words: “She had a wonderful vision... but in my opinion just totally lacked the skills to make it happen”/“When you’re in a country at the bottom of the world surrounded by water, the easiest thing to do is lock it, especially if you’re the Government. You just say lock all the doors…That’s not leadership, that’s the power you’ve got.”
The Labour Government’s purloining of rapid antigen tests destined for the private sector: The Government failed to grasp the crucial usefulness of being able to rapidly test for COVID and belatedly pinched tests ordered by, and destined for, private sector businesses. Then Ardern lied from the Podium of Truth about what the Government had done.
In short, Taylor broke the only rule of COVID Club; he talked openly and honestly about the existence and shortcomings of the Club. Taylor was then supremely ungrateful in continuing to criticize the Labour Government after Ardern tried to shut him up by knighting Taylor in 2021.
Taylor’s other heresies include being an ardent supporter of New Zealand’s officially loathed farmers and, in an open letter to MP Chlöe Swarbrick, criticizing her for fomenting damaging societal division in New Zealand by stating bitter, silly things like “wealth in Aotearoa is concentrated in the back pockets of a wealthy few. It’s time we got on and fixed this”.
Nobody’s perfect and everyone’s got their weaknesses and blind spots. Taylor has recently displayed a blind spot when it comes to the true nature of New Zealand On Air’s Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) and the terms and conditions that media organizations had to sign up to in order to receive money from the PIJF. Taylor seems to think there was no ideological bias in those T&Cs. In an article in Stuff’s The Post (2 December) Taylor stated:
At the first Cabinet meeting of this new coalition government, the Deputy Prime Minister asked journalists to “tell the public what you signed up to, to get that money (part of the $55 million PIJF)”.
The answer is simple.
The only way journalists could access those funds was to have their applications approved by the New Zealand on Air board, a completely independent organisation. By making the claim that “you can’t defend $55 million of bribery” our Deputy Prime Minister just accused the full board of being complicit in his bribery claim and they, quite justifiably, should expect an apology for such an unwarranted, and potentially defamatory, claim. He certainly deserved much more than the slap over the wrist he got.
The main flaws in Taylor’s analysis are that there are clear, written, politically partisan strings attached to PIJF funding and clear signs that NZ On Air, which wove the strings and doled out the PIJF funding, is now not remotely (if it ever has been) a “completely independent organisation”.
Take, for instance, the PIJF T&Cs relating to Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi. Prospective recipients of PIJF largesse were required to literally sign up to a particular tenuous interpretation of that Treaty. Under this interpretation, Māori remains a collective unity that has never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown and is therefore, to this day, an extant separate nation within a “bi-cultural” New Zealand land mass, in “partnership” with the Crown (or people within New Zealand who don’t have Māori ancestry, or others – no-one really knows). This radical interpretation of the Treaty would, if adopted holus bolus, have massive constitutional implications, dividing New Zealanders on the basis of race and allocating differential civil rights on that basis. But NZ On Air and its PIJF T&Cs treat the Māori-Nation-As-Equal-Treaty-Partner interpretation of the Treaty ideologically; that is, as factually indisputable and settled.
Taylor used to be on the NZ On Air Board (2015-18) and doubtlessly would’ve served admirably and dispassionately. But if you want examples of the sorts of people who nowadays populate NZ On Air, look no further than former NZ On Air Board Member Andrew Shaw and current NZ On Air “Head of Partnerships”, ex-journalist Raewyn Rasch.
Shaw resigned from NZ On Air on 28 November 2023. His resignation came after he posted this comment on his LinkedIn social media about Winston Peters: "He's not truthful. He's not accurate. He's malicious and he is here on behalf of international tobacco. His return is the worst of this gang of thugs." Main stream media has reported Shaw’s comment as an attack on Peters alone, but the discerning reader will note that Shaw was in fact labelling New Zealand’s entire newly-elected Government as collectively a “gang of thugs”.
And then there’s NZ On Air’s Doublespeak Supremo, Raewyn Rasch. In her former NZ On Air role as “Head of Journalism”, Rasch personally oversaw and administered the PIJF. The problems with this Rasch are more than skin-deep. She’s a Gaslighter Extraordinaire, a member of an emerging tribe who will happily argue, with a straight face when it suits their crusader causes, that black is white. In relation to the PIJF and the Treaty of Waitangi, Rasch repeats a refrain that all media organizations who received PIJF funding are free to report on Treaty matters as they think fit…(but, of course, only in accordance with the PIJF strings). As Rasch told Stuff: “Could you be critical of Te Tiriti? Of course you can. But you’d still need to stick with what the main and core criteria of the PIJF are, which is that you maintain the tenets of journalism which are fairness, balance and accuracy”.
Taylor has now fessed up to having committed a cardinal Woke sin at the last election. He vote voted…shudder…NATIONAL! The Herald’s Simon Wilson, who waded in on Swarbrick’s side in the Taylor/Swarbrick exchange, will probably call for the cancellation, perhaps even extermination, of The Turncoat Taylor. But who in their right mind could care less if Wilson and his shrieking ilk call for that, or anything else for that matter.