Two men, two different paths

Tu Tangata, Issue 33, 1 December 1986, Page 34

Two men, two different paths

by Toni Mcßae

Toni Mcßae is a producer for Radio New Zealand in Auckland

££-w-t is the time again of Maori,” he I smiled. “We are the flavour of the -1-year. No. We are the flavour of the decade.” He was sitting eagerly on the very edge of his corporation, regulation chair, in the Karere office, down the small corridor from the TVNZ Hobson Street cafe, somewhere to the rear of the major Auckland television news division. That was about a year ago and at that moment of triumph at the tip of his fingers, no-one least of all Derek Fox himself could have guessed that bringing the then simmering Aotearoa Broadcasting System deal with the BCNZ to boiling point was going to be about as likely as tying sand with rope.

It looked too good. Too solid. BCNZ heavy and traditionally straight-shooting lan Cross was backing the deal, the corporation had already promised $74 million and Maoridom in essence appeared to throw its weight behind the bold bid for a third and ethnic channel. But in the months between Fox believing Maori was flavour of the decade and the BCNZ announcement from board level that the ABS-corporation “marriage” was over, either Fox and his Wellington cohorts, Whata Winiata and Ari Paul, didn’t get their act together to come up with the necessary co-finance ... or, they were nobbled. Whatever the case, access to the Official Information Act since discloses tht the BCNZ board made its decision to pull out of the ABS deal in February of this year and announced that decision in May. For Derek Fox, 39, member of the corporation family for 20 years and with five months of his life full-on in the third channel bid, that decision was his coming-of-age. Now he knew that he had been part of the seed-planting, but wouldn’t in his own words be around for the harvest. His high season was over. Maori may well indeed have been the flavour of the year, of the decade, but on this occasion it had been well and truly licked. And it hurt him. Personally and professionally. Fox, as it looked to many who either

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basked in his defeat, or chose instead in the vein of many men of political expediency to clamber fast on to the next wave, returned to the corporation fold, his tiger’s tail for the moment looking to be firmly clamped between pussycat legs. Meanwhile, over the way, in the Queen Street Centrecourt Building, home of most other things Maori in TVNZ, the son of the late Chief of Ngati Rangiwewehi, elder of Te Arawa, sometimes considered a pussycat in and for Maoridom, began to make sounds like the growl of the tiger. Leonard, now 55, in and around television since 1970, had been called by the corporation to sit on the TVNZ Committee on Maori Broadcasting. That was at the beginning of 1985. Along with Leonard, the names read: Bill Kerekere, Whai Ngata, Lorraine Issacs, Alan Morris and the Director General’s personal assistant, Brian Jamieson. There were grumbles and rumbles some of them optimistic among Maori. It may have been a real start. It may too have been a Pakeha ploy. Out of the recommendations of that committee were planted the foundations for the corporation’s seeking a “Head of

a Maori Unit” for TVNZ. The advertisements for the new head for the new unit were placed around September of last year. At that time Derek Fox was the chairman of the Maori Broadcasters’ Association. Ernie Leonard was not a member of the association. Unit as against department? A Head at a grading below the gradings of all other TVNZ (Pakeha) department heads? The MBA via Fox hit the proverbial roof. It was the time again of Fox turning tiger and although employed by the corporation to head Te Karere (which he had started in 1982), Fox went all out on the attack. That didn’t go down at all well behind the closed and bastioned doors of the BCNZ upper echelons and when the MBA to a man boycotted the new unit proposals, claiming the offerings were of the paltriest Pakeha kind and the proposal had no mana for Maori, Ernie Leonard was feeling a little confused. Here, on the one hand, was a launching pad for what he had dreamed of, and worked quietly for in his own broadcasting career, and there, on the other hand, was Maori broadcasting saying we won’t have a bar of it. And the problem was, Leonard basically agreed with the

reasoning behind their anger although not the way they chose to vent that anger.

“I’m not applying for it,” he confided in this writer not long prior to Fox confiding his own feeling for flavour of the decade. “They’re not putting their

money where their mouth is. It’s just not on.” It may have been an approach around that time by the MBA to Leonard asking him, too, to boycott the unit and its head proposals. It may have been simply a case of Leonard not wanting to give up what ground he thought Maoridom had gained without first pouring a little water on the seeds in the soil. At any rate, he changed his tack and decided to apply for the job - but with his own set of conditions.

The job application in itself was of the standard and presentation of the highest high-rolling public relations concerns of Pakehadom.

The 23-page document, sold Leonard to the interview committee (made up of two Maori and two Pakeha) as both very much a corporation man with a corporation man’s successful track record, and at the same time someone who’d “made it” in the outside world.

Yet it also threw down the gauntlet for Maoridom, saying the job and department description was not on. And in fact, Leonard told that committee he would have no more to do with either it, or the job, unless the corporation changed its attitude to the new role of Maori broadcasting.

Leonard got the job. Not as a unit chief, but as a department head. The Corporation rewrote the job description without re-advertising it. He was appointed. The corporation opened the appointment to appeal. Derek Fox, as a contractor to the corporation, could not appeal. Other staffers did not and Leonard became the head of the Maori Programming Department of TVNZ with a $250,000 budget just to set up the department. That was in January. In May, Derek Fox and ABS bit the dust. Both men at opposite ends, it seemed, of Maoridom began their own respective long hauls towards establishing an even perspective in Maori broadcasting as they each saw and felt it. Ironically, though seemingly at odds over the direction and pace of their higher-mana Maori broadcasting, they had been walking fairly parallel roads. It was just that, for the moment, one of them had dropped back a bit en route. So where to now for Leonard and Fox? The one, returning from the battlefield of the ABS bid to feel his Te Karere has lost ground in the five months of his absence. The Maori news service is still 10 minutes long when he, Fox,

dreamed and schemed for 15 minutes for the programme. And now, finding the new internal re-structuring of TVNZ means more delay in that direction while the two government channels define their differences and directions and those dependent on those moves sit and wait for The Sign. Says Fox: “I understand it, but don’t believe in it. It leaves me frustrated. I think if there truly is a priority for Maori programming, that should be established at the highest level and acted on. We’re still a low priority. “In fact, I’ve offered to take Te Karere to 15 minutes with no budget or staff increases. Run with one or two international stories and with one or two national stories and with purely Maori stories. All voice-overed in Maori. To me, that’s a simple and straight forward format. So what’s the delay for?” Leonard, newest corporation department head, suddenly found hmself in a horrific situation. In his preappointment days he’d lost most of his senior staff for one reason or another and, quite apart from setting up the new department, found himself still producing and at times directing Koha. At one stage, the pressure had him go back to a senior corporation head and say: “I will produce and direct Koha. You can forget your department head.”

But he put a little more of his shoulder to the wheel and set up a comprehensive hands-on training programme so at least by the beginning of 1987 he’d have some human resources. “There have never been enough Maori in television. If they’d taken heed of that five years ago, we wouldn’t be so thin on the ground now.” Next, he put together a plan for a video archival unit a bold and ambitious proposal he first put to government bodies outside TVNZ to allow Maori of the future to recall their tupuna “at the touch of a button.” TVNZ thought it politic to pitch in and a unit worth $300,000 Te Waka Huia - will be on the road the week before Christmas. Then came the first changes to Maori programming. Leonard has now put programme concepts together based on today’s prices and the department’s human resources progressing, for the next five years. Koha increases from 34 to 45 programmes next year. Waka Huia will go to air Sunday on TV2 between 11am and noon with some 20 programmes based on the recent Polynesian Festival and, when those run out, new programmes will go in. Leonard wants to build that hour out to three by the beginning of 1988. See Here becomes a 24

minute Tangata Pasifika and starts next year on Saturday mornings. (Next year, in February, is when WakaHuiaand Koha take to air again too.) For Tangata Pasifika, Leonard plans outside broadcast work as well as news from one Pacific country each week in its own language and general Pacific news in English. The OB’s, he says, will cover premier Maori events and be broadcast in Maori. Hone Kaa’s Nga Take Maori will run for another seven weeks after Christmas and then Leonard says, it’s very likely there’ll be another 13 programmes from mid-next year under the banner of the Maori department rather than TVNZ current affairs. Kohanga Reo becomes 10 minutes each weekday with a schedule of 100 new programmes and those will be repeated once to bring the total for the year to 200. Leonard has also started planning for documentaries, specials and Maori plays. “We’ve come a long way and we’re going to go a long way, but we’ve got to take it in stages,” he says. “We’re also going to learn a lot by doing these programmes. By August we’ll have a good idea with what to go for the following year. We’ll see how the staff is

performing and how the facilities are performing. We’ll know whether we can increase our output.” Leonard’s “softly softly” approach, considering the state of Maori broadcasting within the corporation when he took the job, is understandable, if not applaudable. But the saddest irony of all, is that one of the major talents in Maori is Derek Fox, who mouths the same dreams and visions for Maori broadcasting. He says them in what amounts to a different dialect that’s all. Fox seems poised on finally giving it all away at least from the stand-point of working for Maoridom from within the corporation. “They’ve cheated us for years and proven themselves untrustworthy to deliver the equity and autonomy that Maori are entitled to from public broadcasting in this country.” That’s the very attitude that has been upsetting the corporation. Yet it has been the major factor in getting the Maori department which Leonard now heads. Someone once wrote: “Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unit and lead, a better one.” For Maori broadcasting in this country, nothing could be more true of its past, nor more apt for its future.