Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  He grew up in Nelson: ‘It was a pretty sheltered lifestyle.’ He would have loved to farm, but his family had no land to pass on. He joined the police force straight out of the sixth form. The most money he ever made was in 1999, when he earned $64,000 as a detective sergeant. His parents were lifelong socialists, and he voted Labour too, until Richard Prebble axed government work schemes in 1987 – once again, Patea was closed down. Black Power members were suddenly out of work.

  ‘They were right into that bloody Carlsberg. Yeah, Elephant Beer. They used to get juiced up on that and have these enormous fights. I’d actually negotiated with the local bottle stores so they wouldn’t carry it. I asked them nicely. It’s called force of personality. So the gangs couldn’t buy it in Patea, they couldn’t buy it in Hawera, but the trouble was they’d all drive through to Wanganui and buy a couple of cases there. What the axing of the work schemes meant was that everyone had time on their hands, and criminals with time on their hands means trouble.’

  Borrows lost out in his bids to win his way into parliament in the 1999 and 2002 elections. ‘I decided I wouldn’t stand again,’ he said. ‘It was too draining on my finances and energy.’ He quit the force, got his LLB, and worked as a defence lawyer in Hawera. ‘Funny thing, in the first six months after leaving the force and defending criminals, I got ticketed six times. I might add that I defended myself three times, each time successfully.’ When National’s popularity rocketed in the polls after Don Brash’s first Orewa speech, he was persuaded to stand against Labour’s Jill Pettis in 2005. He won with a majority of 2402.

  Did he miss working as a cop? ‘Yeah, I do. You get an inquiry like baby Jhia’s murder in Wanganui, and you can have a real hunger to know what’s going on. There’s a great esprit de corps within the police. Working together as part of a big team, and kicking in doors, executing search warrants, finding evidence, interrogating people, solving cases – it gives you a huge degree of satisfaction.’

  I had asked Black Power member Ngapari Nui what he thought of Borrows. ‘Honest guy,’ he said. Agreed.

  [June 17]

  3

  John Tamihere

  World’s Fastest Maori

  The last time I saw John Tamihere was at the Otara markets, where he gave the impression of a man who seemed to be enjoying a nervous breakdown. It was April 2005, and he was dead man running – he couldn’t sit still, as though perpetual motion might help him evade the axe that loomed over his political career. The markets had been chosen as the venue for a Labour Party policy launch. Chairs were arranged in rows in front of a stage. Tamihere sat, stood, found another seat, stood, all the while rapidly blinking his eyes, chomping down hard and fast on a stick of gum, and flashing his lovely smile – he was such a handsome fellow, and such a wreck.

  Satirically, the occasion was Helen Clark’s launch of a Families Commission campaign called, ‘What makes families tick?’ Tamihere came along to audition as Labour’s prodigal son.

  It was his first public appearance after he had so spectacularly stuck his foot in his mouth with comments in Investigate magazine. His personal attacks on his colleagues were outrageous, beyond the pale. The media were out in force at Otara to inspect the prime minister greeting her disgraced MP. It was brief: Clark gave him a quick kiss, lunged back, went about her business. I found Tamihere afterwards, backstage, standing in shadows, his teeth still bashing at the stick of gum. I mentioned Clark’s kiss, and asked, ‘How was it for you?’ He had another attack of the giggles and said, ‘Thank you very much!’ Then he legged it, a manic creature released from that tense, staged appointment.

  I don’t think I ever saw him in outline. He was more like a quick sketch, a blur. When I met him again on Thursday at the studios of Radio Live, where he co-hosted an often wildly entertaining afternoon talkback show with Willie Jackson, I lost sight of him altogether.

  He made a remark about ‘evolving’. He talked about the joys of ‘being back on the street’. He was beautifully dressed, his eyes flickered, his smooth skin really did glow; boyish at forty-eight, he was friendly and mischievous, and his words came out in a gabble. His train of thought chugged all over the shop. In short, he was bewildering. Was this the same guy who was once the media’s favourite Maori? Every story about Tamihere must mention that he was once made New Zealander of the Year by North & South, Man of the Year by Metro, and Person of the Year by The Sunday Star-Times; he had attracted a great deal of excited talk that he might become New Zealand’s first Maori prime minister.

  It came to nothing. Tamihere survived the Investigate debacle, but voters sent him packing at the 2005 election. He is back where he began when he first shot into national prominence – reappointed into his old job as CEO of West Auckland’s Waipareira Trust. Unshackled from parliament, no longer a slave to Labour Party loyalty, he is a free man and he can say what he wants. Radio Live pay him to do exactly that. On air, Jackson tempers the mania, sets out the traffic cones; alone, Tamihere puts his foot to the floor, and takes his hands off the wheel.

  How much preparation does he put into the show? ‘I’d be bullshitting if I said we did any preparation.’ Is he having fun? ‘Shit yeah. And it’s a very good policy development tool. It adds immeasurably to my thinking. Some of our sessions have absolutely been on fire, like when we opened up the lines and talked about prostate cancer, and men’s health, and wellness checks.’ Did the subject of prostate cancer make good radio? ‘I don’t bloody care.’

  He said, ‘The show provides a very wide platform of engagement because of where Willie’s politics take him, and where mine have evolved for me, so I almost count it as a therapeutic thing.’

  It was hard to tell whether the therapy was working. If he seemed like a wreck that day in Otara, exhilarated with the notion that his betrayal of Labour colleagues filled his ears with the sound of his political career whooshing down the gurgler, then on Thursday he seemed uncertain and unsteady with the freedom of his status as an outsider.

  Tamihere likes to talk in sporting analogies. I asked him that if national politics was like a test match, how would he rate talkback radio? ‘It would probably be top senior A level.’ Might he return to national politics? ‘Never say never. It’s always a possibility.’

  Immediately after his Investigate interview, he gave a mea culpa performance on Close Up, and stated that he would be a Labour Party member ‘until the day I die’. Is he still a Labour Party member unto death? ‘I’ve yet to take out my financial membership again for this year.’

  On Radio Live, Jackson’s politics are fairly easy to identify, but Tamihere’s are more … difficult. He said, ‘You’re starting to sound like Helen Clark! That’s what she used to say! The key to my politics is … it’s no longer the politics of left and right. There are some things the Old Right talk about which are absolutely right.’

  Such as? He talked for a long while about ‘the middle-class capture of welfare programmes’, how he thought ‘private-public sector partnerships are absolutely essential to unlock the talent in this country’, and the necessity of raising teacher’s salaries ‘but the quid pro quo of that is that there have to be some performance measures. It’s just like state houses. They’re not a lifetime right. There’s only 60,000 of them. And you get into situations where there are four income earners in the place with a renter down the back! I know these sorts of things, because I’m in the community.’

  How did he rate National leader John Key? ‘Let me put it to you this way: I would sleep quite easily if he was in charge of the country’s chequebook.’

  In his second term as an MP, Tamihere was promoted to number nineteen in caucus, and given several ministerial portfolios. The rising star. But he stood down from his cabinet posts in 2004, when he was accused of financial impropriety at the Waipareira Trust. Just after he was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Serious Fraud Office, Investigate published the interview he claimed was a set-up.

  He said, ‘You hit the deck, but you can always ge
t up. Life’s all about getting up. For me, you rate life not by how successful you are, but by how you handle your problems. I’m alive, and I’m respected in my community.’

  Was there a lot of stress in his final term in parliament? ‘Of course there was. Three months of it. October 14 was when I got the old ambush.’

  Hang on, was that the date in 2004 when the issue of Investigate was published? ‘Oh, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the impropriety and all that shit. Mate, I don’t resile from one thing I said in Investigate. I just didn’t know the fucking tape recorder was on! But no, no, Investigate magazine, that was nothing. Getting through the allegations and the Serious Fraud Office, that was tough.

  ‘But the point is that while I was there I made a major contribution to a number of things. More so than perhaps people who’ve been there a lot longer. There are a hundred and twenty of us down there. If you can’t work your way into the top twenty, there’s something wrong, you’re not a player. I thought for a little half-breed Maori boy out of West Auckland I did all right. Some people say I didn’t. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I could be a very wealthy drug-runner in Australia now if I stuck to form …’

  Did he ever seriously entertain the chatter about becoming New Zealand’s first Maori prime minister? ‘No, never. Unlike some guys who … Like, there’s a little tug-muscle who stands for Otaki. Darren Hughes. And Clayton Cosgrove, too – from the time they’re fourteen they’re destined. They know what they’re going to do. They’re fully focussed. But me, I’d done my whack out on the street and politics was another challenge, so I had a go at it. Being prime minister was never an issue. What it was, was go like hell with what you have in front of you to achieve.

  ‘They gave me the Statistics portfolio! But I enjoyed that. That was fun. Youth Affairs was fun. Small Business was absolutely just a dream. Hugely energising. And so was being associate minister of Maori Affairs.’

  Famously, Tamihere had said during his mea culpa on Close Up that he ‘idolised’ Michael Cullen: ‘I’d give the guy my toothbrush if he asked for it.’ And now? ‘I have the highest regard for Michael Cullen. Always will, regardless of what goes on. One, because he fascinates me with his intellectual rigour; secondly, his work acumen I found legendary; and thirdly, his door was always open to anyone in that caucus, and he would give you quality time. It wasn’t just – you know, my meetings with Maharey were just pointless!’

  How was Helen Clark at that level? ‘I never got to that level,’ he said. I remarked that perhaps Clark’s adviser Heather Simpson made sure he didn’t get that close. He got the giggles and said, ‘One time I met with her and her glasses clouded up! And she wasn’t good-looking to start with!’

  Mitch Harris, his station manager at Radio Live, had told me that the great thing about Tamihere was that he wasn’t afraid of anyone. I asked Tamihere if he was afraid of himself. ‘Well,’ he said. His eyes started blinking rapidly. The handsome man dressed in a nice cotton shirt and a beautiful black overcoat can sometimes seem like an animated cartoon. And then he said, ‘We’re all dying.’

  [June 24]

  4

  Paul Toohey

  A Very Perfunctory Act

  Bradley John Murdoch did shoot and kill Peter Falconio on a cold moonless night on the side of the road on Australia’s Stuart Highway, then held Joanna Lees hostage at gunpoint until she escaped. It was nothing more than that, something brutal and random, a violent appointment that lasted maybe five minutes – about the same time it took the High Court in Brisbane to consider Murdoch’s final available bid to overthrow his conviction and declare there had been no miscarriage of justice, signing and sealing the forms for Murdoch, who was the cliché of a lone crazed gunman, to serve out his life sentence.

  The infamous killing was July 14, 2001. An anniversary of sorts is marked this month by the publication of The Killer Within by Australian journalist Paul Toohey. Toohey’s brilliant new book on the Outback murder slams the door on the persistent myth that what happened to Falconio was any kind of mystery – other than where Murdoch dumped the body.

  I called the author at his home in Darwin, where he works as a senior writer for The Bulletin. He had been assigned to the Falconio trial, held at Darwin’s Supreme Court; I covered the final week in December 2005, and remember Toohey as tall, quiet, contained, an almost disinterested observer. Other Australian journalists spoke of him with an admiration that closely resembled awe. He may be the best feature writer in Australia.

  Most journalists enjoy or at least endure collegial banter. In an email to Toohey, I reminded him that he’d given me a lift one day during the trial. No response. During the interview, I pointed out we had a mutual friend, and remarked that I had once briefly worked at a notorious Sydney magazine, The Picture, which later employed him. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, and left a silence that closely resembled boredom.

  Oh well. It had been good of him to offer me a lift that day in December – you couldn’t walk for more than five minutes without collapsing in Darwin’s narcotic heat. It was the wet season; a two-metre saltwater crocodile was found prowling the streets, an illegal snake-dealer had been caught with two black-headed pythons in a sack. In the cool of the courtroom (a Christmas tree carved out of corrugated iron stood in the foyer), the trial played out a narrative of two colliding cultures. There was the story of Lees and Falconio, intelligent young English backpackers who had done Nepal, Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand before Australia, where they had bought a Kombi and driven through the Outback, stopping at Alice Springs to watch the Camel Cup; and there was the story of Murdoch, who left school at fifteen, lived in a caravan behind a workshop in Broome, a dope courier who drove long distances in bare feet, and stayed awake on the big drug runs by taking speed: ‘I always have it in a cup of tea.’

  On the morning of July 14, 2001, Murdoch was on his way from Sedan to Broome with about twenty-four pounds of dope hidden in his Toyota. He was with his dog Jack, a Dalmatian cross. He bought chicken at Red Rooster for himself and Jack – ‘Jack was a bit of a liker on nuggets.’ Lees and Falconio took turns driving the Kombi. She read The Catcher in the Rye. They smoked some dope Falconio had bought in Sydney and stashed underneath the dashboard, and watched the sunset. They saw a bushfire. They played The Stone Roses – Falconio’s choice, the band wasn’t to Lees’ taste.

  Darkness fell. At about 8 p.m. a man in a four-wheel drive indicated to Falconio, who had taken the wheel, to pull over, there was something about the exhaust. And then, the prosecutor said, ‘something happened’. Falconio got out. Lees heard him say, ‘Cheers, mate.’ The day of the Camel Cup, The Catcher in the Rye, The Stone Roses, a bushfire; and then on a night without a moon in it, a loud sound, and Lees screaming, more afraid of rape than death, a silver gun, looking at the man straight in the face for ten, fifteen seconds – ‘He just seemed to be all around me and over me.’ She screamed for Falconio. ‘He didn’t come,’ said the prosecutor. ‘He couldn’t have come.’

  The two narratives – English, Australian – intersected in court. And crucial to bringing it to that stage was a New Zealander, James Hepi, Murdoch’s former partner in crime and a key prosecution witness. After the trial, Hepi went to ground. The only journalist he has spoken to is Toohey.

  Hepi and Murdoch had smuggled vast amounts of dope, usually powerful skunk-weed, between Adelaide and Broome in Western Australia. Hepi was busted, and knew that he was looking at jail. ‘I had an ace up my sleeve called Brad Murdoch,’ he told Toohey. ‘And I used it.’ Meaning, he suspected Murdoch was Falconio’s killer and gave his name to the police.

  Nice guy, was he, this one-time skunk-weed magnate who came from Invercargill? ‘I liked him a lot,’ said Toohey. ‘He was a good guy to deal with and know. Quite clever. Shambolic-looking guy. But this is how open he is: he told me he’d love to be dealing again, but he can’t now that he’s known. Some people would say, “He’s a drug dealer,” and regard him with horror. But half the people I k
now smoke dope. They’ve got to get it from somewhere.

  ‘I don’t judge Hepi; I judge Murdoch, because of the type of character he was when he was dealing drugs. He wasn’t an easygoing guy like James. And that’s what it comes down to – are you a human being? And James Hepi is.

  ‘He said at one point, “I can be a very violent man if I want to be, but I don’t like to see it, because it’s so ugly when it happens.” That’s a reflection on the world he lived in. James could drink a carton of beer and you would not be concerned that he had a switch that would kick in and turn him into someone else. He’s quite level. He’s very practical. His self-interest in those drug-running years was paramount, and he was efficient and just wanted to get the job done.’

  When I read the trial transcripts in Darwin, Hepi’s testimony was vivid and arresting. There was such a New Zealandness to his laconic, truculent sarcasm. Yes, he said to the defence, he was definitely interested in collecting the police reward of $250,000 for Murdoch’s arrest: ‘If he’s convicted, I will. Who do I see – you?’

  I asked Toohey if Hepi stood out to him as a New Zealander. He said, ‘Well, he had that way of talking, of the way New Zealanders do, using quaint old-fashioned words. Like you do yourself, Steve. We don’t use words like “grand”. You guys do that, and you still drive Vauxhall Vivas. But New Zealanders and Australians move among each other without the other noticing. They don’t really know who’s who anymore.’