Connie Lawn is First to Talk to
NZ Washington Ambassador Tim Groser

Greatest farm surplus ever is the
prime problem for the career trade negotiator

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 14 March 2016 - After a lifetime massaging trade deals as an official and then as a Minister of the Crown, Tim Groser finds himself negotiating his trickiest mercantilist tightrope to date. As his country’s freshly installed ambassador to Washington the urbane yet wily bureaucrat must bed down his country’s role in the TPPA which he last year described as “New Zealand’s biggest ever free trade deal.”

His problem? How to get value from the Trans Pacific arrangement for an agrarian nation at a time when parties to the arrangement, along with the rest of the developed world, enter the era of hyper farm surplus?

Nothing unusual in this, even though the surplus is of greater magnitude than anything that has gone before.

In the past, trans Pacific parties such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have shared a simple solution. This was to ship the surplus to the always hungry Soviet Union, or Russia as we would describe it now.

This is no longer possible due to the US invoked and vigorously policed embargo on sending anything to this old disposal market.

Neither does the vast North American market offer much hope. Nobody is more conscious than Mr Groser of the surgical delicacy required in persuading Canada to sign up to the TPPA in the face of the opposition from its French-speaking dairy farmers, the most protected anywhere on the globe.

Should Mr Groser turn his attention to Europe he can only contemplate still greater surpluses as more farm categories come off the restricted production quota list. Next off the rank, the EU sugar beet production limits.

And yet...and yet....markets are never static. Mr Groser would never utter it, and may even have disciplined himself never to think it. But daily the odds are increasing in favour of Britain’s exit from the EU.

From his Washington command-post, it is hard to imagine that Mr Groser does not see just one more trade deal, on top of all the other ones to which he has been a party?

As he suavely goes about his official rounds, might not Mr Groser be forgiven if his thoughts are pulled away from a Pacific contemplation to considering now the nearby Atlantic Ocean?

As someone as close to the epicentre of world trade as it is possible for anyone to reach, might he not just be contemplating from time to time, oooh, something like a new Commonwealth Preference regime?

One in which Euro-soured Britons return to the supplier that rescued them until quite recent times from what Mr Groser and his diplomatic colleagues would delicately describe as “food insecurity.”

When the dean of the White House Press Corps and holder of the National Press Club, Lifetime Achievement Award Connie Lawn (pictured with Mr Groser) was first through the embassy doors to discuss events with the the new ambassador, these and other elements of realpolitik became the background tapestry to the official politesse.

The lesson of very recent years, and to which the Russian embargo bears witness, is that not only is the United States run from Washington. But in large measure, so is Europe.

Photo: Dr Charles Sneiderman

Empire Loyalist Winston Peters MP
is Echoed in Fleet Street

New Zealand First Leader Calls for
Resumption of London-Led Trading Bloc.

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 28 February 2016 - London’s Daily Express has given full coverage to the call by Winston Peters MP (pictured) to restore the once dominant Commonwealth trading bloc.

Reported the newspaper: “Winston Peters, who leads a group of MPs in the New Zealand parliament, has urged the UK to view the possibility of exiting the EU later this year as a chance to strengthen ties with those 53 countries that were previously part of the British Empire.”

The Daily Express along with the other middle class British mass-circulation newspaper the Daily Mail is implacably against Britain’s continuing membership of the EU. Both the newspapers have long campaigned for the British exit.

Under its signature proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, the Daily Express maintained a crusade against Britain abandoning the Empire in favour of a European trading bloc alliance.

Reported the Daily Express: “New Zealand’s ex-deputy prime minister told British politicians to use ‘Brexit’ as a way of making amends for ditching Commonwealth countries in favour of joining the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.

The newspaper quoted Mr Peters as saying that Brexit " is an opportunity for not just New Zealand businesses, products and people.

“It is an excellent opportunity to heal a rift dating back to 1973."

EU Will End This Year

Declares German Head of Oceania Think Tank

Bungling of immigrant emergency

punctures German mystique

and leaves EU rudderless

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 18 February 2016 - The European Union during 2016 will cease to exist “as we know it” predicts Oliver Hartwich, the head of the New Zealand Initiative policy group.

The immigrant crisis was one too many emergencies for the EU which he portrays as staggering from one crisis to the next. Among these were member countries with covenant-breaking debt to GDP ratios, the Brexit, and the rise of radical politics in the form of populism and nationalism.

Germany meanwhile was reeling from its handling of the immigrant crisis, which now saw the once EU powerhouse “isolated.”

In addition, the officially-driven cover-up of the Cologne refugee assimilation consequences episode had even raised questions internationally about the nature of German society’s commitment to open government and a free press.

Dr Hartwich speaking at a seminar at the headquarters in Wellington of the New Zealand Initiative sheeted the pending demise of the EU “project” to the decision by its leadership after the fall of the Berlin Wall to embark upon an expansionist phase.

This took two perilous forms, he noted, the currency union and the quest for new members. History proved that instead there should have followed a period of “consolidation.”

The revolving door subsequent crises Dr Hartwich identified as “weakening the structure,” of the EU to the point at which it could only focus on its “own survival.”

The New Zealand Initiative sprang from a number of independent enterprise policy groups, notably the Business Roundtable.

Dr Hartwich,a German-trained lawyer and economist was appointed executive director at its inception, following a tour with Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies, and as chief economist at London’s Policy Exchange.

He noted that the focus by the EU on member financial bail-outs, was obscuring the rise of radical politics in members such as Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.

The realpolitik exposition on the EU and its future conducted by Dr Hartwich was consistent with the enterprise group’s focus on cutting through doctrines and ideologies in order to outline events at home and abroad.

The event was attended by a number of National Press Club representatives including Life Member Sir Christopher Harris, pictured (at right) with Dr Hartwich.

In response to a question from a National Press Club representative about the involvement and culpability of the United States in the current series pf EU alarms, Dr Hartwich commented that the US simply saw the EU from its start as a bulwark against Russia, and its policies were centred exclusively around this view.

Ageing and Entitled Hub Workers Paved Way

for Pagemasters to Return to New Zealand

Axing gives Fairfax Accountants tighter grip on revenue/costs

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 17 February 2016 - New Zealand’s on-off-on relationship with Pagemasters is now full circle with Fairfax taking up the slack at the Australian makeup outfit left by the departure of NZME. The old Wilson & Horton chain fired the Australian makeup outfit bringing its production subbing in house again.

A year later Fairfax is filling the gap left by NZME and in doing so brings to an end the era of the Fairfax Hub, a centralised subbing depot here which did the page work for the chain’s papers in New Zealand and Australia.

Fairfax’s decision to fill the vacuum left by NZME was no surprise. In recent times veteran subs had suspected that in addition to their page layout software, that their bosses had fitted time and motion monitor apps on their terminals in order to assess the productivity of their often ageing staffers.

Fairfax was worried too about its eventual and accumulating retirement commitments to hub staff compared to its liabilities attendant upon its much younger general editorial staff.

Employment liabilities are an endless worry for all newspaper chains as they contemplate their digital first futures, as they describe the strategy.

Demonstrating this concern is the strong indication that Fairfax will pay Pagemasters on a piecework or productivity basis. This gives Fairfax accountants a much tighter grip on costs in relation to revenue. The outsourcing eliminates the unknowns attendant upon things such as sick leave, holiday pay, and service entitlements.

UK High Commissioner

Jonathan Sinclair

Spearheads HMG Trade Restoration Drive

EU Legation and

British New Zealand Business Association also in harness

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 14 February 2016 - Britain’s diplomatic and commercial apparatus has gone onto the front foot in re-aligning New Zealand and its trade to resuming a UK focus. In this campaign it has enlisted the support of its historic auxiliary the Auckland-based British New Zealand Business Association founded 99 years ago. Also on-side is the EU legation in Wellington.

British High Commissioner Jonathan Sinclair states that the UK remains New Zealand's largest trading partner in the EU.

The UK he insists is the biggest booster of the mooted NZ/EU Free Trade Agreement.

The active engagement now of the High Commission in the trade re-positioning drive indicates a direct and high level involvement in Whitehall in re-developing and reinforcing UK/NZ mercantile threads.

It is a welcome development for a New Zealand government ardently pushing for the EU free trade agreement, reflected by a corresponding enthusiasm radiating from the EU legation to New Zealand.After Australia, Mr Sinclair reminds audiences, the UK has the largest stock of investment in New Zealand at $55bn– “far in excess of the United States” which is third with $33bn.

Adds Mr Sinclair (pictured above, at right, with BNZBA patron John Collinge.) “Our domestic policy exchange between our governments is unrivalled.”

Mr Sinclair meanwhile is to carry the trade restoration campaign to Auckland, the nation's merchant city, with speaking engagements under the auspices of the British New Zealand Business Association.

In trade, especially in the longer global cycles, what goes around comes around.

New York State Power to Allocate

US Dollar Licences

Was Unseen, Unspoken Dominant Presence at TPPA Signing.
Dollar Control of Trade Underpins Pacific Pact

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 9 February 2016 - Like a skillful ringmaster the United States kept its whip carefully hidden under the robes and other theatrical panoply of the Auckland TPPA signing. Nobody was talking, or for the most part even knew of the real hard power behind the agreement.

This is the 80 percent of world trade conducted in the USD, and the United States’ ability to decree who can and who cannot trade in it.

Dollar allocation rights stem not so much from Washington, which is why United States Presidents can claim that the USD licenses are out of their hands. They are centred in the State of New York.

This was the elephant in the room during the TPPA signing, writes the Chartered Accountants Journal long time banking columnist Peter Isaac who was on hand in Auckland.

While activists hollered in the streets outside about loss of sovereignty and those inside proclaimed their devotion to trade liberalisation only a very few understood what had brought them there.

It was the whip in the form of the United States control of the currency conduit of world trade, and the allocation of the rights to use it.

A contemplation of the plight of France, in the view of most of the French, a world power, tends to dispel any doubts about this reality of global business.

The USD9 billion fine levied on BNP Paribas for doing business with several countries which were then the subject of a United States trade embargo was one such factor.

Another was the threat on the French bank of a ban from processing US dollar payments through New York.

If there were still any more remaining reservations, well, look at France now. Awash in unsold milk and other farm products, France must slavishly adhere to the US-imposed embargo preventing the sale of the surplus to the one country that wants it – Russia.

The Atlantic lesson, if not the mechanics of it, served as the unseen writing on the Auckland wall for the Pacific pact delegations, even if was obscured in the mists of time.

The American founding fathers in seeking at one and the same time a federalist and localised balance in America’s banking structure had allocated the power to grant or revoke USD dollar licences to officials in New York State. Where it remains.

Flawed and Cringing New Zealand Foreign Policy Closes World’s Biggest Nation Russia to Vital NZ Exports Claims Napier Engineering Chief
Craven fawning United States orientated policy conflicts with frivolous and irresponsible populist stance to wreck trade

MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service: New Zealand manufacturers in the food and food processing equipment sector in shutting the door on exports to Russia will find themselves also shutting themselves out of an immense and reliable growth market counsels the managing director of Napier Engineering & Contracting.

The company turnkey constructed a string of freezing works in Russia with all the expertise and processing equipment hardware shipped out of the Port of Napier.

The experience was both profitable for Napier Engineering and salutary. “Our staff who lived in Russia for months a time were superbly treated. In most contracts of the scope and size of this one there are major problems. But in the Russian project no problem arose that could not be solved on the spot,” recalled Ken Evans (pictured).

Mr Evans warned exporters that the US – invoked embargo that prevented EU members from selling to the Russians meant in practice that the Russians were jump-starting their own food and food processing machinery resources.

Mr Evans said that the Russians were not unaware of the inconsistency inherent in New Zealand banning US Navy vessels warships on the one hand.

Then “grovelling in meek obeisance” on the other in falling into line with a US embargo on Russia to which it was not even party to.

An export economy such as New Zealand’s simply could not eliminate the world’s biggest country, which also happened to be a growth one and an emerging one, insisted Mr Evans.

The falling into line of the EU with the United States embargo on Russia was substantially responsible for the world milk surplus.
Milk and other agri products that would have been sent to Russia continue to back up into an unmanageable world surplus, noted Mr Evans.

The severity of the problem locally was being demonstrated by farmers in regions such as Taranaki being urged to “diversify,” he said, and do so regardless of their investment in processing and handling equipment.

Mr Evans urged the government to propound a sensible and statesmanlike trade policy with the United States “at least midway between the cringing and damaging humiliation of participating unofficially in their boycott of Russia and that of the equally silly and dangerous embargo on their warships here.”

According to Mr Evans the conflicting policies in regard to the United States , the “craven” one on the export ban to Russia, and the “frivolously damaging” one of the warships ban here had the effect of “putting New Zealand and its exporters into a dim light” around the world.

" The severity of the problem locally was being demonstrated by farmers in regions such as Taranaki being urged to “diversify,” he said, and do so regardless of their investment in processing and handling equipment.

Green Parrot Discovered
in Club Memorabilia
Now Linked to The
Green Parrot Restaurant

The Green Parrot founded 90 years ago is renowned as the most enduring and famous restaurant in the South Seas. In a bizarre twist of events the National Press Club appears to be holding the original green parrot jug from which the Wellington institution derived its name.

The jug (pictured) was given in the early 1970s to a group of journalists in order that it might adorn the premises of a press club that was then under consideration. In the event the jug disappeared from sight. It has only just recently re-surfaced during the cataloguing of National Press Club memorabilia.

The circumstances of how the jug came into the possession of the club are noteworthy.

It was donated by Tony Poynton. He was a prominent commodities trader during the 1950s. This was sometime before the Green Parrot restaurant was taken up by society patrons such as those nowadays in the sphere of arts, entertainment and politics. In this 1950s era it was the eating place for those in hard edge sectors especially those in metals and vehicle trading. Mr Poynton was involved in both.

A commanding presence, Mr Poynton had seemingly intervened to calm down a threatened disturbance involving diners from two rival and competing camps of scrap metal exporters.
Grateful for such timely and effective intervention the proprietor of that era spontaneously swept the green parrot jug off its shelf and presented it to Mr Poynton (pictured below.)

Of a restless and inquiring nature Mr Poynton with the advent of the 1970s took up a new profession. It was that of newspaperman. First in the advertising department of Truth and then he went on to pioneer Contact, the Wellington region mass-distribution weekly.

Rubbing shoulders now with journalists, Mr Poynton with his managerial experience and skills saw the need for a unifying organisation with its own premises. Here, he reasoned, the considerable expenditure on conviviality in those more gregarious days could be re-invested back into the vocation instead of into the brewery balance sheets.

Mr Poynton’s death was to coincide with the founding of the National Press Club and thus he was never able to follow through on this objective. At the same time, and also from cancer, there occurred the death of his close friend the broadcasting journalist David Inglis which further diminished recollections from this time.

The jug though remained. It is stamped on its base as Made in Japan. Green parrot pitchers, as they were known, were a staple of the Japanese ceramics industry during the 1920s.

The Green Parrot restaurant was begun and named by an America sailor paid off in Wellington and who went on in 1926 to found the restaurant. The conjecture is that the pitcher was acquired by the seafaring founder in Japan and went on to have pride of place in the eponymous restaurant.

Kim Beazley Keynotes at Washington Un-Mooring

Australia’s ambassador to Washington Kim Beazley keynoted at the last farewell to New Zealand’s departing ambassador Mike Moore, reports MSCNewswire’s Connie Lawn, the only journalist admitted to the occasion.

The two former Australasian Labour Party leaders also have in common that Mr Beazley will also shortly be returning to the South Seas, having handed over to the incoming Joe Hockey.

The two larger-than-life populists share quite different backgrounds. Mr Beazley is from a dynastic political family and from an early career in academia. Mr Moore in contrast started his working life as a boy-labourer.

But this has not stopped them from sharing an infectious sense of humour characterised at one joint session by Mr Moore suggesting that Australia become a state of New Zealand.

It was Mr Beazley who bestowed upon Mr Moore the Order of Australia.

Mr Moore’s being confined by a recent stroke to a wheelchair has not curtailed his ambassadorial activities and the prognostication is that it will not be long after his return to New Zealand that he will recover full mobility.

In the photograph by Dr Charles Sneiderman Mr Beazley is shown with Mike and Yvonne Moore.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk

Modern Marco Polo

MSC Newswire –Napier. International financier and two-time National Press Club guest speaker Marc Holtzman has become the Chairman of Bank of Kigali, the largest Bank in Rwanda.

Mr Holtzman (pictured) spoke to the National Press Club at two joint gatherings, both of them with the British New Zealand Trade Council,( now Business Association.) One in Christchurch and the other meeting held in Parliament.

At the time Mr. Holtzman was President of the University of Denver. Previously, Mr. Holtzman served in the Cabinet of Governor Bill Owens as Colorado’s first Secretary of Technology.

As technology tsar Mr. Holtzman helped guide Colorado’s economic transformation into a fully diversified technology hub. During his tenure, Colorado was consistently ranked first among the fifty states in having the highest percentage of technology workers per thousand in the nation.

In recent times, and seeking to further apply his experience in fostering hard-edge vocationally orientated education Mr Holtzman has put his shoulder to the wheel of the New Zealand charter school movement.

He has maintained for many years in New Zealand’s Gibbston Valley, near Arrowtown, a substantial home in the form of a retro French chateau amidst its own substantial vineyard.

It was here several years ago that Mr Holtzman celebrated his 50th birthday. Celebrants included a roll call of statesmen hailing from his preferred spheres of business notably from Eastern Europe and sub-Sahelian Africa. New Zealand minister of finance Bill English was also there.

From Kazakhstan to Kigali few over the past quarter century have trod the emergent-nation beat quite so assiduously as Marc Holtzman. Even fewer have had the same operational fiscal-to-factory floor level of economic participation.

A modern Marco Polo, nobody brings to contemporary education policy formulation and implementation quite the same applied knowledge of the connection between funding, schools, and jobs as Marc Holtzman.

More...

Where are they now? Sir Anand Satyanand & Dame Margaret Clark

Where are they now?

Sir Anand Satyanand & Dame Margaret Clark

Rt. Hon. Sir Anand Satyanand and Dame Margaret Clark were for many years stalwarts of the National Press Club. Sir Anand relinquished his membership of the club when he was appointed in 2006 New Zealand’s 19th Governor General.

Dame Margaret was an active participant in club operations during the 1990s when it took up public positions on ethical and career issues, most notably those in connection with the tertiary education and training of would-be journalists.

Sir Anand’s vice regal appointment capped a career following his graduation from the University of Auckland as a legal practitioner, district court judge, and Ombudsman in which newsmaker capacity he joined the National Press Club.

Dame Margaret was a pioneer in the then new field of political science and lectured in the subject in the Americas and in Asia prior to returning as professor to Victoria University, Wellington.

In 2010 Victoria University conferred on Dame Margaret the status and title of Emeritus Professor in the School of History Philosophy and International Relations in recognition of her career of valued and distinguished service to the university.

Since the completion of his five year vice-regal term in 2011, Sir Anand has remained active in community affairs notably as chairman of the Commonwealth Foundation, and more recently as patron of the Superdiversity Leadership Council.

Safety & Security

in Contrived News*

How serious are no-go areas in relation to their coverage by mainstream media?
They are all the more pervasive just because they have become an accepted as part of the scene. Therefore they do not stand out. They are not viewed as being unusual, or out of place.

Some examples?
The most worrying aspect of these no-go areas is that there are so many of them. Here’s one to start with. When it was officially disclosed that in New Zealand there were 40 people under surveillance by the security services, there should have been instigated by the media at the very least a debate on the nature and provenance of the individuals being watched.

You could say that the admission that in a sparsely populated nation that there were 40 people under surveillance was disturbing in itself?
It was a very candid admission and pretty much corresponds to a non-disclosed number of quite a few more. We have to assume these fall into the lesser security category of persons of interest.

This hardly constitutes a pattern of no-go areas?
If you want a very large-scale and set-piece no go area then you have to consider the Paris climate conference. It was treated with the type of hushed reverence that was once accorded royal events such as coronations. There was no disclosure of the immense and embarrassing tensions at the conference. Instead there was the old rote style of reporting in which the word “historic” was such a recurring feature. I would have liked to have known details, for example, of who was there from this country, and who was paying for them to be there?

Let’s have more examples to make still more visible this pattern?
This no-go syndrome is far too easily ascribed to the delicacies of political correctness and this is certainly an element in the toadying, conformist, correct and polite coverage of something like the Paris event. Timing is also a big part of this. For example earlier in 2015 the round of pay increases to politicians triggered immense and justified media ire. At the end of the year, when the mainstreamers were not watching, were distracted, the pay boosts went through and without a murmur.

What are these distractions?
The distractions are made up of pre-programmed and large scale events. Sport hardly surprisingly is the central one here. It is so much part of the mainstream wallpaper that news practitioners fail to notice it. For example you are watching the news on television which is mainly about sport. At the conclusion, the newsreader says “and now we have the sport” when all you have been watching has been about sport.
This is hardly something new in the news?
It has become intensified because of the mainstreamers turning themselves inside out as they seek to hug popular culture in all its manifestations and this really is the heart of the matter. Its most obvious manifestation is the embracing of entertainment and sport.

You are always going on about market-forces and such like and isn’t this what we are talking about here?
Let me narrow this down. We are talking about news which is in fact contrived in that it is a pre-programmed event such as a ball game. One side must win. The other must lose. So the outcome also is 50 percent pre- programmed. It is very much pre-packaged and it is the news equivalent of bubble-wrapped pour-on instant convenience foods.

Some might say that you will soon recommend the return of classified advertising on the front page?
In this fingering of the dominance of pre-packaged and pre-programmed news I am in good company. Paul Henry for one (pictured speaking to the National Press Club in 2011). In his autobiography he relates how when he was working for the government television news, there was this intense focus on having the news crystallised as long as possible before it was presented.. When there was spontaneous news, actual news, it threw this pre-programmed contrived format into inconvenient disarray.

*Interview with National Press Club president Peter Isaac

Moore on the move

Mike Moore, the National Press Club's most frequent guest-speaker, is on the move again. In the history of work nobody traveled quite so far as the retiring New Zealand ambassador to the United States.. His working life began as a Northland boy labourer and it reached its pinnacle when he was the titular head of the Planet's business. As head of the World Trade Organisation.. In his typically tell-it-as-it-is style Mike Moore sent this letter, to a wide circle of friends and associates in the United States . . .

20 November 2015

To All Staff and Agencies Washington DC; US Posts and Hon Cons

Yvonne and I are giving notice to MFAT that we will be leaving the Post just before
Christmas on the 16th December.

Minister Murray McCully and MFAT have been very generous and kind to us.

We have lost a couple of weeks because of tests and surgery that I have had and we will not be able to have the kind of thank you’s that are normal so we will combine the Staff Christmas Party with our farewell to you.

Yvonne and I have made a lot of very special and lasting good friends here and their support and compassion has been wonderful.

I am now the longest serving continuous Ambassador to the US. I didn’t seek this job but felt I should do it because great issues were at stake. The time was ripe for it.

On a security level things have moved up several notches. You are aware of the many exercises we do together and the important contribution we are making in the struggle against ISIS. TPP was the second part of the job and we have worked to getting acceptance for this by Congress. I believe it will be forthcoming. It will be a question of time.

I hope to get around most of you in the next 2 weeks to thank you personally. In my political life I have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time but the mission I was given here was correct and the timing was right.

I want to thank you and your families for your commitment and to apologise for walking past you in the building full of ideas and full of hope.
If I forgot to say hello or thank you that was my mistake.

We will go home content that we did our best. Pity the old body gave up.

With love and affection always

Mike and Yvonne

Vocation Plunges into

Low Paid Avocation

Warns White House

Press Corps Dean

White House Press Corps dean and National Press Club of New Zealand Lifetime Achievement laureate radio reporter Connie Lawn cautioned would-be journalistic practitioners about the accelerating free model in an interview with Irv Chapman (pictured below), late of ABC, CNN, and Bloomberg.

Her lawyer father, recalled Miss Lawn, at the outset of her career a half century ago, had advised her that journalism was more of an “avocation” than a “vocation.” Even then, she noted, the portents were there about the now so-evident hobby nature and impermanence of the calling.

The free model increasingly involving unpaid chores such as blogs and other such commentaries combined with falling remuneration for practitioners served to emphasise the increasing reality of the paternal prediction.

Bloggers

Bloggers and others in comment and opinion if they were required to making a living out of it had to find their own advertiser-sponsors, thus restricting what they could in fact say.

An Honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her work in assisting the New Zealand cause in the United States Miss Lawn is exclusively pictured above with the man who presented it to her, the New Zealand Ambassador to the United States Mike Moore. He is pictured with Miss Lawn and Mrs Yvonne Moore (at right.) Mr Moore like Miss Lawn has addressed the National Press a number of times.

Press-friendly Presidents

On one occasion the former parliamentarian and head of the World Trade Organisation used the club as a forum to conduct soundings on constitutional issues.

Meanwhile, Miss Lawn recalled to interviewer Irv Chapman that the most press-friendly White House incumbents in her experience had been Jerry Ford, Ronald Regan, and Bill Clinton. In spite of the rough time he had received at the hands of the press corps, President Clinton never lost his amiability around them.

Miss Lawn was speaking to Irv Chapman in a narrow cast arranged by the National Press Club of Washington in order to commemorate the final iteration of her autobiography which in part chronicles her many years as correspondent for Radio New Zealand.

The final chapter

The new edition is entitled I Wake You Each Morning: The Final Chapter. In it she talks about the time she met Nelson Mandela and he told her he listened to her radio reports while in prison.

Returning to contemporary times Miss Lawn noted that since the presidency of the “second George Bush,” the White House had become a “passive beat” with its press conferences becoming stage managed.

The National Press Club of Washington of which Miss Lawn and Irv Chapman are stalwarts is affiliated to the Wellington club.

Page 5 of 7

Adrienne Stewart

Society Hostess

“Never Met a Stranger”

The death at 75 of Adrienne Stewart brings to an end the era of society hostesses when Wellington was a notable cultural focus of the South Pacific. Her determination to foster a keener appreciation of this sphere was made manifest in two organisations. One was the National Press Club and the other was the Newcomers Club.

She was a stalwart of the National Press Cub during the high noon of conventional journalism in the final decades of the last millennium insisting that the club’s guest speakers were confronted by the quantity and quality of audience that she believes that they deserved.

Simultaneously she was a prime mover in the capital’s Newcomers Club. This had its origins in the discovery that movers and shakers in the diplomatic and commercial world seconded to Wellington were existing in a parallel universe and needed to mingle with locals.

This coincided with the heyday of the dinner party era before the advent of electronic media interrupted traditional social transactions.

Adrienne was a patron of the visual arts encouraging practitioners to stage their own showings at the numerous art galleries of the Wellington’s fin de siecle era.

Seeing an opportunity for some applied social interaction she would from time to time venture out with an exhibition of her own works.

As a social mixer she liked to see people that she considered had ability take advantage of Wellington’s role as a merchant capital. In her role as a hostess she sought to bring together those she believed had shared commercial purposes.

Adrienne was a redoubtable collector of all sorts of artistic objects of the three dimensional variety and curiosity shops benefited greatly from her patronage.

Beguiled by journalism she tried her hand at it herself with a selection of columns cataloguing the comings and goings of the cosmopolitan and the colourful in the once-thriving suburban print weeklies.

She was recalled at her memorial service as someone who “never met a stranger.”

She is survived by her husband Ian and their two children.
Sir Christopher Harris Foresaw Culture Wars

Sir Christopher Harris who has died was for many years a stalwart of the National Press Club. He will be remembered for his constant cautioning of practitioners in their political coverage on emphasising what sounded good instead of what actually worked.

Christopher John Ashford Harris third baronet of the Harris Baronetcy of Bethnal Green, County of London foresaw the way in which journalists were increasingly being drawn to the ideological in place of the practical.

A member of the club under the newsmaker category Sir Christopher for many years ran the family importing and merchandising business Bing, Harris & Co and was also a main board director of the Todd Corporation.

He was to the fore when New Zealand abruptly sought new markets in Asia and he constantly iterated Singapore as a nation with valuable pointers for New Zealand. He was a man of action and put his various skills at the disposal of the political parties that echoed his point of view especially in the Wellington electorates.

He was worried about the effect on Wellington of the evaporation of its manufacturing and productive sector and a pet project was to restore to Wellington its floating dry dock in order to boost heavy engineering.

His platform skills were applied to the National Press Club notably in the vote-of-thanks summing up of guest speakers.

He was a lay expert on Captain Cook. He delighted in publicly presenting the explorer as the personification of kindly yet determined informed endeavour that became reflected as Sir Christopher saw it in New Zealand’s own pioneering history of method and order.

An orderly approach that he increasingly saw as being eroded by doctrinal rather than disciplined priorities and in many ways he foresaw the onset of today’s culture wars.

Always affable he successfully disguised any irritation he might have felt at any of the more extreme doctrinal points of view put forward by guest speakers or indeed by any of the club members themselves.

In many ways Sir Christopher was redolent of a distant age, and of an elite class. One that paradoxically installed in the Westminster realm the foundations of the extreme political liberalism that he found himself so severely at odds with.

The baronetcy had been established by his grandfather Sir Percy Harris a British House of Commons Liberal MP who did much to introduce the welfare reforms of Britain’s immediate post war era.

His father Sir Jack Harris and his mother Lady Patricia Harris became in New Zealand public intellectuals of an ultra-liberal persuasion.

Sir Jack was at the helm of the Save Manapouri campaign which paved the way for the Green Party. Lady Harris was a constant figure in the early days of New Zealand television. She was the author of Dining In and Dining Out in New Zealand, a book which remains a minor classic.

The family’s globe-girdling influence stemmed from the Bing, Harris & Co business fortuitously begun in Dunedin just in time to catch the Otago gold fields discoveries.

The family returned to Britain and then repatriated itself back to New Zealand to take control of a business which because of its diversification into so many mercantile sectors continued to prosper in 1934, the year of Christopher’s birth.

He was a pupil of Wanganui Collegiate and it was here that he notched up national school records in the 22O and 44O yards. In later years he was to establish a sporting reputation as a deep sea yachtsman based at Wellington’s Royal Port Nicholson club.

It was indeed as a collegiate figure and club man that Sir Christopher will be recalled. He tended to discard small talk and pleasantries in favour of discussing hard edge topical issues.

He was as genially at home with the grandees of the Wellington Club as with the more diversified and more sceptical devotees of the National Press Club.
Greatest Living Adventurer Dies

Bernard Diederich who has died in Haiti was New Zealand’s greatest living adventurer. The National Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award holder sailed before the mast on the Pamir during World War 2, graduated to tankers, and then took up ocean sailing as a hobby which is how he arrived in Haiti.

It was here that he started a newspaper, jousted with Papa Doc Duvalier, and then became during its heyday Time magazine’s Central America correspondent, a position which made him the global expert on all the region’s various dictatorships, and in this he was much assisted by his personal friendship with Fidel Castro.

Another friend was Graham Greene and he and Greene toured the region together giving Diederich the material for his last book Seeds of Fiction.

Bernard Diederich’s career coincided with the high point of print journalism before electronic media eroded the status of practitioners and their freedom to follow a story wherever it led them.

He returned quite regularly to New Zealand to visit his family roots in Martinborough and also to speak to the National Press Club, notably about his coverage of the US incursion into Grenada in which he interposed himself on a dinghy.
Krystyna Tomaszyk’s Last Journey

The death of Krystyna Tomaszyk QSM concludes the most storied of all New Zealand’s immigration epics of living memory. The National Press Club stalwart and her mother were part of a near thousand-strong contingent that fled Europe in 1944 via Siberia, Isfahan, and Bombay, eventually settling in a refugee camp home in Pahiatua.

Most of them stayed in New Zealand and Krystyna became a prominent civil servant while authoring several books on this experience known as the Polish Children.

Always superbly turned out and talking in perfect English, Krystyna over many years brought an aura of cosmopolitan class to the club’s proceedings. She was active in many other organisation, notably the National Library Association. She travelled widely, often on charitable work, notably those connected with Mother Theresa.
Mike Moore Had Built-In Shock Absorbers

In the modern history of careers there are few who can match the trajectory of Mike Moore who has died at the age of 71. Starting as an unskilled manual labourer he became for two years the head of the World Trade Organisation.

A regular guest at the National Press Club Mike Moore possessed built-in shock absorbers that allowed him to circumvent university education, and indeed, any real formal education at all, and yet attain the highest offices such as the WTO one, and the prime ministership of New Zealand, however briefly.

Mike Moore, pictured here being introduced by National Press Club president Peter Isaac on the occasion of Moore’s launching a campaign for a formal Constitution, was a constant communicator with the happy knack of an equally consistent ability to engage his audience, be they individuals or groups. His trademark was a candour blended with a humorous analysis of the driest of situations.

He was among the last of the authentic working class Labour Party potentates and a winning aspect of his persona was that he never sought to explain or promote his humble origins in order to draw attention to his spectacular rise in the world.

As ambassador to Washington his vernacular style accurately mirrored his country, as did his obvious enthusiasm to help out personally when the opportunity arose.

A curiosity about Moore was that one could never imagine him alone and thus without the constant human interaction, hostile or friendly, that appeared to fire his brimming energy in spite of much of his career being beset by his own anything but robust physical constitution.

In the event Moore turned any solitude to advantage by causing to be published boisterous political tracts in the form of books with titles such as Beyond Today, A Pacific Parliament, and Fighting for New Zealand.

His last communication with the National Press Club was two years ago in response to an invitation to participate in an event and in its way typical of his simple yet evocative delivery. It read:-

Dear Peter,

I must be quiet for another 6 months.

Sorry’

MIKE
Mick Bienowski: Out of Siberia

Mick Bienowski’s trademark convivial magnanimity of spirit belied the horrific nature of his arrival in New Zealand which was via a labour camp in Siberia which is where he found himself in the aftermath of the Russo-German invasion of Poland at the outbreak of World War 2.

He had the incredible good fortune, as he saw it, to be among the now-famous contingent of Polish children who eventually found refuge in Pahiatua, New Zealand.

Mick Bienowski (pictured at a National Press Club event in 2014) who has died at the age of 87 after a long illness was a long-standing member under the newsmaker category which in his case was due to his work as staging constructor at Wellington’s John Street show buildings which with its cavernous interior was the main large capacity venue of its era.

Mick had earlier discovered the show buildings and their value when he used them to display his quick-build homes, a now much publicised genre of which he remains an unacknowledged pioneer.

Here, at the show buildings, he was responsible for configuring touring pop shows as well as sporting events, notably WWF fixtures which as a wrestling enthusiast himself were a particular interest.

Mick Bienowski as soon as he could in New Zealand took up a building apprenticeship, became a master builder, and in Wellington established MB Construction after his own initials which in turn corresponded by chance with the branding of the Master Builders industry group, as he would gleefully point out.

A keen outdoorsman, he revelled in the New Zealand ethic, yet he was always conscious that his manual dexterity had allowed him to survive the war, and he was keen to take his ability out into the community and did so by instructing Maori groups in woodworking, and also in the practical side of prisoner rehabilitation through employment in the construction sector.

He is survived by his son and daughter.
Rex Benson was NZ Herald X-Word Compiler Kropotkin

The death at 75 after a long illness of National Press Club events organiser Rex Benson brought to an end the life and times of one of Wellington’s most diversified talents. It was typical of Rex that while he handled club events he also doubled as secretary- treasurer.

He was a big picture man and a detail devotee. He was best known however as Kropotkin the cryptic crossword compiler of the New Zealand Herald. To this task Rex brought a formidable computer-based firepower. This allowed full flight to his imagination while forestalling any repetition and doubling up of ingredients.

His personal interests were quite literally multicultural encompassing bridge, opera, wine and literature.

In counterpoint to these he was an ardent rugby fan who dedicated infinite air miles in pursuit of the touring All Blacks.

Wanganui-born Rex came to Wellington as a student and gained an early interest in journalism via the Victoria University student newspaper Salient.

His career was taken up in market research where he specialised in data analysis and in doing so became something of an information technology pioneer.

He never lost his university-era interest in radical politics and this was reflected in his own self-branding as Kropotkin a Russian philosopher and anarchist.

He is survived by his wife Judith and their children.
MSC Newswire Founder Max Farndale Reached Million-Plus Audience

Max Farndale founder of MSC Newswire, the National Press Club’s associate site, has died suddenly at his home in Napier.

The National Press Club’s association with the site began four years ago and it reached a peak of activity this year when monthly visits reached 1.2 million.

Mr Farndale configured the site around an international audience, reasoning that New Zealand media had become over-localised.

Burly and affable and well known in Auckland athletic circles, notably in cycling and running, Mr Farndale had worked in production engineering and travel before arriving in the publishing sector.

MSC Newswire became renowned for its predictions including the ascendancy of Donald Trump, and the fall of the National Party in the New Zealand general election.
Broadcasting Career Took Steve Whitehouse into UN inner circles

Witness to global peace keeping
operations for 30 years

Stephen Whitehouse’s career began in broadcasting in Wellington and took him to the inner circles of United Nations headquarters in New York where secretary general Kofi Annan described the New Zealander’s technique as the “Whitehouse Way.”

He led the United Nations radio and television unit and his 30 year career there took him throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, and the Balkans during which time he witnessed and recorded many commotions.

Stephen Alexander Whitehouse who has died in the United Kingdom suddenly at the age of 73 emigrated to New Zealand with his family in 1952.

He grew up in Wellington in an artistic and bohemian household, his mother, actress Davina Whitehouse, being a central figure in the young country’s burgeoning cultural scene. Visitors to the home included a young Sam Neil, Richard Campion (father of Jane), and Peter Jackson. The opening frames of Jackson’s film ‘Brain Dead’ were shot on the beach outside his mother’s house.

After graduating from Victoria University, Wellington, where he had excelled as a revue writer and performer, he worked for the Broadcasting Corporation before moving to Hong Kong for a stint on the South China Morning Post. A keen jazz enthusiast (he played tenor saxophone) he leapt at the chance to work at the UN and lived in the Park Slope, Brooklyn (the ‘real New York’ as he put it) from the early 70’s.

Retiring to Sandwich, Kent, he worked on the Festival Committee, took up the banjo, joined the local Liberal Democrats, avidly watched cricket and rugby and listened to his beloved Radio New Zealand, returning to Wellington every year for the NZ summer.

An enthusiastic amateur historian, he was also a volunteer at Sandwich Museum. A keen sailor during his earlier years, he recently became a trustee for the P22 gunboat.

Steve is survived by his wife Lynne O’Donoghue, sons Sasha and Sam from his first marriage, a stepdaughter Alexandra and stepson Daniel.
Denis Adam, Insurance Tycoon, Philanthropist, RAF Pilot

The death in his 95th year after a long illness of Denis Adam brings to an end the era in which astute and cultivated Europeans did so much to set the tone of post-World War 2 New Zealand. He was the last of the independent philanthropists and his endowments in creative arts in terms of awards and buildings remain a constant and visible reminder of his generosity.

His range of interests extended into many nooks and crannies of capital life. He was for example for many years an active member of the National Press Club. He is pictured receiving his Life Membership plaque from the club’s vice president Peter Bush.

His career was testimony to a singular application of his diverse skills and especially so in regard to what made sense commercially.

Early in his days in New Zealand he became the proprietor of a petrol station in Petone and it was here that he anticipated the growth in motor vehicle insurance.

This now became the foundation of his insurance broking business, a sector which he would come to dominate.

He rarely referred to his life prior to his arrival in New Zealand, other than to make an occasional wistful or ironic reference to his earlier days in relation to his subsequent career in the Antipodes.

His background was in fact extraordinary.

He was for example one of the handful of Germans in World War 2 flying with the RAF

Denis Frederick Adam was born in Germany in 1924 to a family of secular Jews.

At an early age he was sent to boarding school in Britain and he was to retain subsequently vestiges of a clipped British private school accent.

His parents followed him to Britain upon the ascendancy of Hitler,

As soon as he was able he joined the RAF. If anyone were to bring up the topic, he would be careful to point that his experience had been predominantly in Typhoons rather than in Spitfires.

Upon demobilisation he contemplated a career as a journalist, an idea he tested on his commanding officer.

“Don’t do that,” he was told. “At the end of your career you will have nothing to show for it.”

Having met a number of New Zealanders while serving in the RAF, it was now that he decided upon a mercantilist career and also to embark upon it in New Zealand.

He was the younger brother of Sir Ken Adam who was responsible for the film sets for the James Bond films and for those of Stanley Kubrick, among many others. .

Sir Ken Adam, also an RAF pilot, predeceased him by two years.

Denis Adam was a signature figure of the Wellington business district for many years operating out of his modest Adam Foundation office in the old DIC building.

Always immaculately attired in a three-piece business suit and a tan overcoat he drove himself to and fro in a classic era Rolls Royce.

In his office he made himself available to a wide selection of citizenry dispensing in his matter-of-fact manner advice, if called for, gathered from his own experience in so many different fields.

He was appointed OBE and CNZM.

He is survived by his widow Verna.
David Yallop Inspired NZ's
Andrew Little to
Take Up Underdog Cause

Late Author defied institutions

David Yallop who has died in Britain at the age of 81 is credited by the New Zealand Labour Party cabinet member Andrew Little as precipitating him into a career dedicated to serving the “underdog.”

Mr Little shortly after his election as leader of the Labour Party confessed to NZ Lawyer publication that reading Mr Yallop had propelled him both into law and serving the Labour Party.

“I’d read a book about the Derek Bentley case in the UK – he was the last person to be hanged in England – and that piqued my interest,” Mr Little is quoted as saying.

“That was also at the time of Arthur Allan Thomas and the Royal Commission Inquiry, and I’d admired the various lawyers that [he] had…I liked the idea of using a legal qualification to battle for the underdog.”

Mr Little went on to study philosophy, law and public policy at Victoria University in Wellington

Upon graduation he was hired as a solicitor for the Engineers Union, which later became the EPMU and which also represented journalists.

Mr Yallop and Mr Little at various times both addressed the National Press Club.

Mr Yallop did so after the publication of his book To The Ends of the Earth about the career and eventual capture of Carlos aka The Jackal.

Mr Yallop demonstrated the depth and spread of his groundwork when in referring to the late Libya strongman Colonel Gaddafi he was asked by a member of the audience how he knew the correct pronunciation of the dictator’s name.

“He told me,” shot back the author.

After cutting his teeth on the British Craig-Bentley murder-capital punishment case in his book To Encourage The Others, Mr Yallop consolidated his reputation as a miscarriage of justice author with Beyond Reasonable Doubt?

In this he drew together many of the threads on the Pukekawa murders originally exposed by the Auckland Star’s Pat Booth (see also obituary below)

Mr Yallop along the way published other books with similarly ringing titles in which he challenged internationally sporting bodies, notably FIFA, and also the Roman Catholic church and its Papacy.

Mr Little meanwhile stood aside in 2017 to allow Jacinda Ardern MP to become leader of the Labour Party.

He continues though his destiny inspired by David Yallop as minister of justice among other cabinet-rank portfolios.
Connie Lawn
Brought Luminous Era
to Radio New Zealand

The death at 73 of Connie Lawn evokes for many the epoch in which Radio New Zealand set the news agenda throughout Oceania

Miss Lawn broadcasting from Washington became the best known of an international group of correspondents then featuring regularly on the news hours.

Miss Lawn’s renown centred on her Washington reports to Radio New Zealand’s morning segment prior to the start of the working day which in this era was required listening for what would now be described as the political class.

Her era in this role was encapsulated in her autobiographical work You Wake Me Each Morning which went through several editions.

Based on this experience Miss Lawn who died on April 2 after a long illness, Parkinson’s, became an unofficial consul in Washington shepherding itinerant New Zealanders in their desired direction.

Miss Lawn was made Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received the National Press Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the insignia of which she donated to the Washington National Press Club where it remains on display.

She was in her later years the Dean of the White House Press Corps, having served there for half a century.

Connie Lawn brought a luminous element to her foreign correspondent role thus presaging in a curious way the current RNZ scheme to recover its pre-eminence by grafting onto itself a television channel.

For most of her career she was freelance having incorporated herself as Audio Video News which was to achieve an international clientele.

She is survived by her husband Dr Charles Sneiderman and her two sons David and Daniel.

Miss Lawn is photographed in The Beehive in 2006 receiving her National Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award from Minister of Broadcasting Steve Maharey.
Auckland Star's
Pat Booth
Incarnated
Ed Asner
Newspaperman

The death of Pat Booth brings to a sharp end the era of the crusading human interest newspaperman.

Pat Booth who has died at the age of 88 was the last practising journalist anywhere in the world to have enjoyed a career that spanned the age in which newspapers flourished unrivalled all the way through to the social networking fractured picture of today.

In his acceptance speech on receiving at Government House the National Press Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award he recalled this transition.

“I came home brimming with a story that I wanted to tell my family. Instead they told me about it.”

They had heard it over the radio.

Pat Booth devoted most of his working life to the Auckland Star, rising to become editor.

During this tour he demonstrated a tenacity that saw him following stories wherever they went for as long as it took, most notably the Arthur Allan Thomas miscarriage of justice.

He bore in aspect and manner an uncanny resemblance to the television news boss played by Ed Asner, by coincidence in real life also an ardent advocate of human causes and who spoke to the National Press Club close to the time when Pat Booth received his award under the aegis of Governor General Dame Sylvia Cartwright.

Pat Booth in his ascent to becoming the nation’s pre-eminent journalist and a household name defied the prevailing belief that journalists had to work outside New Zealand in order to be successful in it.

In writing his last column three years before his death, he also stood in sharp contrast to the industry’s prevailing youth emphasis.
Jill Weyburne
1939 - 2017

The death after a long illness of Jill Weyburne brought to an end the life of one of the National Press Club’s most active members. Incisive of mind, she was adept in numerous vocations that also required dexterity, notable in the crafts sphere. These threads coalesced in her remarkable ability in bridge in which she became the New Zealand individual champion.

Jillian Marie Lynskey was born in 1939 into an illustrious New Zealand/ Irish clan. She married 53 years ago Bryan Weyburne at various times a Wellington City Councillor and an enduring mercantilist figure on the capital landscape. He is the National Press Club’s long time secretary- treasurer.

Jill Weyburne (pictured) will be remembered for her energy and her ability in many diverse fields and her willingness to put these at the disposal of the individuals and the organisation that she believed to be of value to the community at large.

She is survived by her husband and their four sons.
Warco Chris Turver
Honoured for Services
To Local Government,
Community & Journalism

National Press Club’s Chris Turver, appointed MNZM is drawn to the very different spheres of action, ideas, and public administration. He was born into strife in the industrial north of England at the height of the Blitz. He went on to become the first official war correspondent from New Zealand at the height of the Vietnam conflict.

As the New Zealand Press Association’s war correspondent of the era he was to touch down on several other conflicts of various intensities, notably in Borneo. He was embedded on the RNZN deployment to Mururoa.

Subsequently Christopher Turver (pictured, above) was to deploy here his own and still earlier experience gained as a pavement-level daily newspaper reporter in his native UK.

His near two decades as divisional editor, notably on the political desk, on Radio New Zealand brought a seasoned print-journalism level of unremittingly disciplined concision and impartiality to RNZ during its glory days before its eclipse by privatisation and then by the audience fractionalisation wrought by the internet.

At the conclusion of this tour of duty his career went anywhere but on the spike. He launched himself into local government as Kapiti district representative on the Wellington Regional Council. He became chief executive of the Royal New Zealand Coastguard Federation. He served on the district health board.

Later his public service career has embraced still further roles in which he has become president of the Paraparaumu RSA and chairman of the Electra Trust which represents district power users.

Christopher Turver JP’s Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit citation was for “services to journalism, local government and the community.”