It’s all in the TNZ wording
Three loaded terms have three different meanings in furore
A: Spies. B: Informants.
C: Whistleblowers. Three loaded terms. Three different meanings. Depending on which term is deemed to be most accurate, three different outcomes.
In the case of Emirates Team New Zealand and the missing or unaccounted for money, those three terms refer to the same person or persons.
The first two were coined by Team NZ chief executive Grant Dalton.
Dalton claims he confronted a contractor and accused them of spying, which the person in question denied.
Later, when trying to explain away a large payment to a Hungarian bank account, he said: “One of the informants was in charge of the accounts of the event.”
These are terms clearly used for effect.
A spy implies a plant working against his or her host for the benefit of an outside organisation.
An informant implies a bit of a rat. Name a single movie where the informant has been the hero. The word was chosen because of its obvious negative connotation.
A whistleblower? That’s an entirely different matter.
Whistleblowers hold the powerful to account. They expose malpractice. They’re often painted as the underdog hero. They sometimes get played by Russell Crowe.
If the person alerting the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to the inner workings of ETNZ and its subsidiary America’s Cup Events Ltd was a whistleblower rather than a spy or informant, the implications for the 2021 event are profound.
So Dalton engaged in Communications 101: Get on the front foot, control the message. Problem was, ETNZ skipped class for Communications 102, the loosely titled “What To Do When the Message is Compromised”.
Awkward questions were being asked across the organisation on Tuesday night but curiously calls to every senior staff member were going through to answer phone. Detailed messages did not get a response, texts not answered.
Which begs the entirely reasonable question: If you’ve just rooted out a spy, or perhaps an informant, saving the country’s secrets in the process, and you’ve been happy to talk about it all morning, why have you gone incommunicado in the afternoon?
There were three multi-choice options at the top of this column. ETNZ have a lot riding on the answer being A or B.
TNZ have a lot riding on the answer being A or B.