Invercargill mayor in bizarre show

Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark claimed he had not yet watched the bizarre interview with Guy Williams in which he asked the comedian if he was homosexual.

“I’m not particularly interested in seeing it,” the mayor said ahead of the screening of the episode of New Zealand Today on Three on Thursday night.

Williams interviewed Clark about using the N word at an Art Foundation event in Invercargill early last year. Clark stunned some of his audience at that event when he used the N word, queer, and “f... the bitch’’.

During the seventh episode of season four of Williams’ show, Clark asked the host if he was homosexual and if he tended towards minority groups, or “bent over towards them”.

Williams told Clark: “I’m not saying you are a bad person, I’m just saying there is a lot of things in society that have passed you by, and as a result you get yourself in these f .... ing ridiculous quandaries.”

Told he was ignorant on issues of race and sexuality, Clark, who returned to civic office after a recent health scare, was unrepentant. “You can portray me that way,” he said. In the episode, Williams said he had been involved in thousands of interviews, and “none has been as cooked as in this room in God damn Invercargill”.

“Did they replace Tim Shadbolt with someone even more cooked than Tim Shadbolt?”

The interview included Clark holding up a copy of Twisting the Treaty, a book that criticises supposed reinterpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi. Williams later added that, “Nobby was down an Internet rabbit hole, spouting numerous, obviously debunked racist conspiracy theories during our interview”.

Those conspiracy theories were not aired in the episode. However, Clark told Stuff they concerned co-governance, and his position was well known. While he “supported iwi having a voice”, he remained against Māori having a stake in a Three Waters entity. “Why that makes me a racist, God only knows.”

But Williams said Clark had shown, during his time on council, a track record of “ignorance and sowing needless racial division”.

Near the end of the interview, Clark said he would stay true to himself and “if I ruffle a few feathers, so be it”. The interview included a diagram of what words the mayor should not use, including the N word. Clark only promised to stop saying the word, if Williams said it, with that utterance edited from the show.

Clark told Stuff that at the end of the 90-minute interview, Williams stormed out saying it was one of the worst interviews he had ever done. He claimed he had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the show.