HEATHER DU PLESSIS-ALLAN UNDER FIRE FOR PACIFIC ISLANDS “LEECHES” CLAIM
Auckland: Broadcaster Heather du Plessis-Allan to her listeners last week: “The Pacific Islands don’t matter. They are nothing but leeches on us.”
The Newstalk ZB presenter told listeners it was not worth the expense of sending the PM to the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru.
“The Pacific Islands wants money from us,” she said.
On Twitter, Green Party candidate John Hart said Ms du Plessis-Allan had “casually dehumanised our Pacific peoples” and the Privacy Commissioner John Edwards addressed Ms du Plessis-Allan directly: “Hey Heather. Words REALLY do matter. Check this out and maybe think twice about calling people leeches, or cockroaches, or other non human things next time,” he wrote. What he wanted her to read was an article from Rwanda about how the genocide in that country, 24 years ago, was preceded by a propaganda campaign in the media in which ethnic Tutsis were branded “cockroaches.”
Ms du Plessis-Allan’s comments were posted on social media, prompting lots of angry reactions and some abusive and offensive putdowns of the broadcaster herself.
Ms du Plessis-Allan invited Privacy Commissioner John Edwards onto her show to debate the issue last Tuesday. He declined and she hit out. “Go back to university and do some more training. You are not good enough.”
She said Mr Edwards’ reaction was symptomatic of intolerance on the political left.
“They are like all deep-thinking and progressive but the moment someone says something that they don’t want to see the nuance in, they just take the broad brushstrokes of something.”
There was not a lot of nuance in her original comment: “The Pacific Islands are nothing but leeches on us”. On the air last Tuesday, Ms du Plessis-Allan insisted she had not “dehumanised” or insulted anyone, she had commented only on Pacific Islands’ governments.
“I will double down on this. I do not regret what I said because I was not talking about people living in this country or the people themselves. I was talking about the Pacific Islands and the people who run it [sic],” she said.
It was not an argument likely to convince Samoan-born New Zealand writer, actor and Sunday News columnist Oscar Kightley.
He said Newstalk ZB “owes our Pasifika neighbours an apology”. “This broadcaster should know that when they slag off the Pacific Islands, they’re also slagging off the nearly 300,000 Pasifika people who call New Zealand home.
“It’s not like we’re going to say: ‘It’s okay, she only means the islanders back there - not us,’ “he wrote in the Sunday News this weekend. Underlying all this was Ms du Plessis-Allan’s view that New Zealand aid to the Pacific Islands has not been well spent.
Given that increased financial aid to the region is a big part of the Pacific Reset policy now being put in place, it is something worth discussing, but the debate needs facts. Last Tuesday, she seized on Niue as an example.
She said New Zealand was “literally funding the country”.
The economy of Niue is heavily dependent upon aid from New Zealand and it gets a lot of financial assistance from New Zealand considering its size and small population.
But Niue is a bit of a special case. It is a self-governing territory affiliated to New Zealand and Niueans are also New Zealand citizens.
One of the reasons so few people live there now is that many of them have come to New Zealand to work in the past two generations, distorting the local economy and demographics.
Ms du Plessis-Allan told her listeners pension portability for Niueans amounted to “welfare sponging”.