Journalist made Pacific news
Tony Haas was a Wellington journalist and publisher whose Pacific connections were so widespread they have only recently been matched by the internet.
He was one of the first press journalists to bridge the Pacific in a serious way.
He put New Zealand in touch, and had a 50-year habit of pitching the term ‘‘neighbourhood’’ so it included Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the Cooks and elsewhere in the Pacific.
The prevailing coverage model in the late 1960s seldom broke into New Zealand agencies or newspapers, though there was always room for a mystery ship Joyita (1955), hurricanes, royal visits and the condition of bananas landed off the Union Steam Ship Company islands freighter Matua.
Haas’ assertions ran counter to the commonly-held Kiwi view that ‘‘neighbourhoods’’ referred to the Ponsonbys and Berhampores of New Zealand but not to countries, however small.
He got the inside running on Pacific economic and business news, and was on first-name terms with Pacific leaders – a connection that eluded many other members of the parliamentary press gallery.
Dozens of trips to Pacific countries emphasised the need to make the best of two-way social relationships, especially since there had been sizeable numbers of Samoans, Tongans and Cook Islanders filling vacancies in New Zealand industries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Haas said he was prompted by historian Michael King to take on the wider Pacific news beats and eastern Asia.
They were flatmates for a time, and King did not want a partner in his Ma¯ ori endeavours.
Haas would go on to spend two years in Japan and in Singapore, writing and cultivating contacts and reporting business news to whoever was willing to pay for it – a revolutionary approach given the parsimonious payments shelled out by newspaper owners.
He was blessed with a capacity for work, and not just on his own account. He headed the Asia Pacific Research Unit, the first publicly accessible organisation of its type in New Zealand, and he created the news bulletin Asia Pacific News.
He sold news columns and opinion pieces to newspapers and magazines, and created and sold books of his own authorship and others, including cookbooks.
A more recent creation was DecisionMakers which, among other things, published guides to Parliament and its inner workings.
His achievements were borne on a degree of albinism, and he spent a lifetime with diminishing blindness. His courage was unflagging.
When engaged, his personal radar was astonishing to witness. He knew Wellington as well as fully sighted citizens (‘‘better than most’’, he exclaimed) and walked without assistance.
In his last book, Being Palangi –
My Pacific Journey (2015), his accounts of his afflictions are tiny.
Haas’ last literary endeavour was to see published an account of an interview with his father, Karl Haas, who settled with wife Amelia on a farm they bought at Pahiatua in 1938, two years before the outbreak of World War II.
They were Germans who had taken the advice of Karl’s father Ludwig Haas, leader of the German Democratic Party in the Weimar Republic, to get as far away from Germany as possible.
Ludwig, a German Jew, believed that a Nazi groundswell was apparent, and there would likely be a change of government in 1933. The advice was prescient.
Tony Haas lived at Maurice Tce, Te Aro; North West Bay (Pelorus Sound); and at Karori. He married Dr Tricia Donnelly in 1981. They retired to Greytown.
She survives him, as does an adopted daughter and her family. – By Peter Kitchin