PUBLICITY INQUIRY Section Principal Says Shock Caused Amnesia

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32011, 11 June 1969, Page 26

PUBLICITY INQUIRY Section Principal Says Shock Caused Amnesia

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, June 10.

Mr J. S. Burns, principal of the information and press section of the Tourist and Publicity Department today told the Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry that shock of events caused amnesia which covered the period being investigated.

The committee, which is investigating the information and publicity activities of the Tourist and Publicity Department, began its fourth day of hearings in Wellington this morning.

The 10-man committee, comprising six Government and four Opposition members, was set up by the House of Representatives after the disclosure by the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Kirk) of two allegedly politicallybiased articles which were circulated by the department to provincial and suburban newspapers. In a statement to the committee, Mr Burns said from his point of view, there were, after Mr Kirk objected to two particular information releases, five questions requiring answers: 1. What releases were objected to? 2. Were they issued by our agency? 3. If the answer to 2 was affirmative, was the objection reasonable? 4. Had any member of the Government prior knowledge that the releases had been released by our agency? (Those four questions had political aspects, touching the administrative responsibilities or integrities of Ministers.) 5. Had any member of my staff been disloyal to the management, on the presumption that, surreptitiously and with malice aforethought. someone had carried departmental papers to the Opposition? ‘Little Interest’ Mr Burns continued: “The question ‘who wrote what?’ was last in my mind. Let us call it No. 6. It was of relatively little interest to me. It was not a public question. It was a departmental one which could be put aside for an orderly inquiry as soon as more urgent matters had been dealt with. “ ‘Who wrote what?’ was, therefore, to my mind an important but not an urgent question. Nevertheless, I was anxious to get the answers as quickly as circumstances would allow. Shortly after the Leader of the Opposition had spoken on the night of May 21, it was established that both articles had been issued by the information and press section.

“On the morning of May 22. immediately I reached my

office, I obtained a copy of each article and rapidly examined them. “As to the ‘N.D.C. article’, there was no internal evidence of origin except on a negative basis: that it clearly could not be attributed to any Government department. Whoever ‘put it together’ could have gleaned the opinions expressed from a score of different sources. The manner of writing had a distinctive style. “This meant nothing to me, because no member of my staff has any opportunity of cultivating a style of his own and I would not know what it was if he had one. “I checked with the actingeditor (Mr Thomson) on the events of the preceding evening and inspected the two articles. The time was now 8.40 a.m. and, because I had not had a call either from the office of the Acting Minister or from my general manager, I began to telephone out and discovered that the telephone exchange in my building was not accepting inward calls. ‘‘l got contact with Mr Austin. He informed me that Mr Adams-Schneider wished to see him immediately and Mr Austin would call in and collect me on the way. I began to type out a statement of what the articles were. In a few minutes Mr Austin arrived and we went to the Minister’s office. ‘Riding Storm’ “From that point on, I have no precise recollections of my own of the sequence of events, nor of the particular terms of conversations. I have studied the statements made by Mr Adams-Schneider and Mr Austin, and I accept them as correct in essence. I was ‘riding a storm’ and I had no opportunity to take notes or keep records. Any further statement I made would be reconstructed from other persons’ evidence.

“Concerning Mr Lambert, I wish to make the following statement:—l do not recollect when I first saw him after the ‘storm’ broke. I think it would be not before mid-day on May 22. From the first occasion on which I spoke with him, he made it clear that he wished to take full responsibility for writing both articles. That he did so has since been proved correct.

‘‘At first, 1 accepted 'this in respect of the ‘living costs’ article, but I did not unreservedly accept it in respect of the ‘N.D.C. article’ because it seemed to me inherently improbable that Mr Lambert could have ‘put it together’

unaided. My preliminary judgment was that Mr Lambert was loyally trying to simplify matters for me to the extent that he was trying to take maximum responsibility to himself. Other Evidence “Admirable though this attitude was, I felt it was one I should not concur in, seeing that the ultimate responsibility was mine as section controlling officer. The question, as I have previously said, appeared to me not an urgent one. I hoped to ‘buy time’ on it, in the hope that I might find other evidence, or that Mr Lambert might be persuaded to modify what seemed to me an unnecessarily selfsacrificial attitude. “I therefore advised Mr Lambert not to make any statement about the ‘N.D.C. article.’ He acted on my advice, and for two or three days he conscientiously stalled all inquiries directed to him personally. “Mr Lambert has been criticised, by statement and by inference, for not ‘coming forward’ sooner. Such criticism is completely unwarranted. He remained silent, to the extent that he did, on my advice. To me, he has, I am satisfied, been completely frank. What he said in the first place has in the outcome been proved correct. I regret he has been subjected to an ‘exposure’ he did not deserve.

“From an early stage of the inquiries, pressure was put on me by the Acting Minister and by the general manager to name the writer or writers. This question seemed so irrelevant to me at a time when I was obsessed with question No. 5 that it had an exasperating effect, and I gave impatient answers based on probabilities as they seemed to me, whereas I should have been allowed time to dispose of important questions first. Exact Answers “Contributing factors were the natural anxiety of Mr Adams-Schneider to have exact answers to all questions, and the absence of the director of publicity. I was much too involved personally to keep cool. “If the director of publicity had been in Wellington and available, I am sure that he, with his long experience of Government publicity work and being non-involved personally, would have ensured a more orderly and effective inquiry. “As things were, I consider that the inquiry, as set out in the six questions set out at the start of my statement became misdirected. My anxieties were all directed to No. 5.

“Because questions 1 to 4 inclusive concerned the actions collectively of the agency of which I am principal, I said right at the start that I must accept total responsibility. I have never changed from that position. It will be for reasons in the civil service above my level to answer whether I and my section were■ adequately equipped and supported to perform without fault the work we are made responsible for, or whether justifiable warnings of danger that I gave went unheeded.” Dr A. M. Finlay: It has been suggested in some quarters that as far as the N.D.C. article was concerned you played some part in it. The word tidying up was used, and it was also said by Mr Austin at a press conference that the person who released the article would read it before it was released. Not Tidied Mr Burns: I did no subediting on it as has been suggested, and I did no tidying up. The Minister of Agriculture (Mr Taiboys), referring to Mr Burns’s statement, said witness claimed not to have read the N.D.C. article before signing the covering letter. Mr Burns: “Up to that stage I would have to assume that the sub-editor and the subeditor only would have read it. There is a hazy area in my recollection that at some prior time—it could have been in the vicinity of May 9-10—Mr Lambert handed me something which he thought I might be interested in. “Scores of people hand me hundreds of things that I might be interested in reading. Mr Lambert had been attending the National Development Conference and he was in a great state of excitement about it, as many people were. He had been talking with many of the persons involved in the conference and was telling me how things were going. Usually I try to listen politely but usually I am not listening at all.

“Recollecting things conjecturally I think he might have been thinking about something like an N.D.C. article. There is a degree of possibility that he might have put something on my table which he felt I might be in-

terested in reading. My vague recollection is that I could have taken this article with a heap of papers to take home later to read. What happened to it after that I have no idea.” Mr Burns said that if the article had been in draft form it would have been directed back to Mr Lambert automatically. Mr Taiboys asked why Mr Burns, after Mr Lambert had admitted writing the article, had still stated it was written by a private journalist.

Mr Burns: You have me here. 1 cannot advance any satisfactory explanation of this. I have said that from reading the article it appeared that it was unlikely to be wholely the product of Mr Lambert’s mind. There was this foggy bank of memory in the back of my mind that Mr Lambert had been making observations on people with whom he had been talking and on who said what. I have to suppose that I had a very powerful desire to protect Mr Lambert from blame to any extent that I could. I considered I had to protect him from any blame or fault finding.” “This became an obsession with me. It was a phantom in my mind that someone else could have written the article.” No Explanation Mr Taiboys: Coming back to the time Mr Lambert told you he wrote the article. Surely at that time when you were being questioned by the Acting Minister it must have been apparent to you that the authorship of the article loomed very large in his thinking? Why did you not tell him? Why did you say a free-lance journalist wrote it? Mr Burns: I cannot explain my own behaviour at that point. In the statement of evidence to the committee by Mr Austin we were informed that he had been contacted by the Acting Minister by telephone and asked to obtain the name of the free-lance writer. He asked Mr Burns to contact that person. Mr Burns went into another room where he made a telephone call to the free-lance writer who did not agree to any of the requests. Did you, in fact, make a telephone call?—No. Mr A. H. Nordmeyer asked Mr Burns whether he was being truthful when he told Mr Marshall that the article had been written by a freelance journalist. ‘Badly Damaged’ Mr Burns: Many areas of my memory have been very badly damaged by shock. I would agree with what Mr Marshall said. If he said I told him it was written by a free-lance journalist I would agree with that. Continuing, Mr Burns said he could offer no logical explanation for his action in making a statement to Mr Adams-Schneider later that the article was the work of a private citizen. Mr Nordmeyer: When did it become obvious to you that you were telling untruths? Mr Burns: I say this conjecturing—Monday, May 26. Mr Burns who had just read his statement to the committee, asked permission to make an oral statement. He referred committee members to a report he had put up in December, 1968, in which he stated that “the minds and nerves of the executive officers in the information and press section were being strained to snapping” by the pressures of work on them. Retraction Made “That was six months ago. Since then the situation has not got better; it has got worse.” The days after the first indication of trouble had been “agonising” for the staff, and he said it was “disastrous” from his point of view when Mr Adams-Schneider had to retract a previous statement in the House. Then came the reproduction on the front page of the Wellington morning newspaper of a confidential staff memorandum. “At that stage my mind already was in an overstrained and possibly unbalanced state, and when I saw this reproduction of a confidential staff memorandum, and with the circumstances leading up to it, with an overwhelming pressure in my mind that there was treachery in my own section, it created a degree of shock which has caused amnesia covering the preceeding week or so.

“By studying the evidence of the previous witnesses and with the help of my colleagues I have, to an extent, reconstructed the situation.

“These are only plausible reconstructions, and if I have to answer questions with ‘I am not sure’ or ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I don’t remember,’ I am telling the truth, Mr Chairman, because my memory will be found to be sadly defective.”