Te karere is flying solo

Tu Tangata, Issue 19, 1 August 1984, Page 2

Te karere is flying solo

Charlton Clark

They say you can’t buy a beer in the Ruatoria pub between 5.55 and 6pm. The reason is ‘Te Karere’, TV2’s maori language programme, which has proved highly popular with its target audience since starting 15 months ago.

Producer, director, editor, reporter and presenter Derek Fox knows of maori language classes which tape every programme as a teaching aid. Maori meetings in Gisborne are timed to finish before 5.55 or start after 6pm.

But despite its success, Derek Fox is tired tired of working and tired of fighting.

‘lt’s bloody hard. Very tiring. You get sick of it. The long hours of work drain me.’ At the time we interviewed him, he had had two weekends off in the previous 14.

He and three others, all based in Auckland, are expected to come up with a credible daily news programme covering all the maori news in the whole country. And they must make english versions of important items for the general news bulletins.

Such an undertaking calls for frequent delving into a deep bag of tricks. For example, when it’s impossible to get one of Te Karere’s reporters to a job, they give a local pakeha reporter, or even the cameraman, a list of questions to ask the inteviewees in english, but to record the replies in maori.

When the tape gets back to Auckland, Te Karere staff then retape the questions in maori.

Having to work with technicians who do not understand maori provides headaches too. When Mr Fox is reading the news, he usually does so off a rolling ‘autocue’ mounted on the camera. But because the technicians can’t read maori, they used to stop it rolling at the wrong times, forcing Mr Fox to drop his eyes to read from a duplicate script in his hands.

Most frustrating is seeing the computer programme control suddenly take the programme off the screen in mid-in-terview because it has run over time. This can happen because non-maori speaking technicians fail to understand the point in the newsreader’s script when they can start rolling film of a news scene. So they wait until the reader has finished, perhaps five seconds longer than necessary. Three items later, the over-run is 15 seconds, which could be caught up in a half-hour programme. But on Te Karere’s five minutes, it means a rude end to an interview.

But Derek Fox draws energy from doing a job he believes in.

‘l am as good as, if not better qualified, than, any other person in this field in the country. That is not a bigheaded thing, it’s just a fact. On top of

all that I am bilingual. What I am doing is using all those skills for something which I really believe in, to give maoris for the first time an indication of all sorts of things they were not aware of.’ His turangawaewae is Ruatoria on the East Coast, and his iwi are Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu and Rakai Paka. He was raised by his grandparents on the seaward side of the remote Mahia Peninsula at the northern end of Hawkes Bay. Maori the Mahia dialect of it is his first language. He was educated at Ngata Memorial College in Ruatoria, and St Stephen’s College in Bombay. One of his teachers at the latter was Education Minister Merv Wellington. He has spent all his working life in broadcasting, building a pile of experience which has made him one of the best producer-journalists in New Zealand. He was TV2’s news and current affairs editor when News At 10 became the only such programme ever to win a Feltex award. In 1976 he filed a story from London predicting that if the All Blacks toured South Africa, the Black African coun-

tries would boycott the Montreal Olympic Games. 'Lo and behold, the All Blacks did, and lo and behold, the Africans did,’ he recalls. He did two out of three planned documentaries after that one on why the Africans walked out, and one on the Rhodesian war but he was kicked out of South Africa before he could do the third, on changes in sport there. He once spent three months living in Japan on a Rotary scholarship, and this year visited China with a cultural exchange tour. Te Karere was born of a token effort by Television New Zealand to acknowledge Maori Language Week with a daily two-minute translation into maori of the day’s news. Derek Fox was the only maorispeaking journalist in the whole organisation, so he copped the job. But he wasn’t content just to translate stories about Lebanon he wanted to get stories and film about maori people and events. ‘I just did it,’ he recalls. ‘You just had to beg, borrow and bludge facilities. The presentation facilities down at the

channel were appalling. It used to be a bit of a circus.’ But somehow they blundered through. But if the TV bosses thought they had done their bit for maoridom by the end of the week, they were proved wrong. They had whetted maori viewers’ appetites for more. They had a tiger by the tail, and the tiger hasn’t stopped snarling since. ‘After that the pressure for maori news on TV just grew and grew and grew until two-thirds of the way through the year it started getting a groundswell,’ Mr Fox recalls. ‘lt was the first time, I think, that I saw positive proof of this resurgence of maori pride. People were saying: “Hey, we’re part of this system, but we’re not getting a dividend.” ‘lt’s not anti-pakeha, it’s pro-maori. People are saying it's not so bad being maori, in fact I am quite proud of it. I think people are saying: “Look, we have certain values which we hold dear, and we want to foster them.” ‘Look at the success of the so-called maori schools they are bursting at the seams. People want their children to go to these schools, not because they

will be academically better off, but because they give time to maori values and because they do not want their children getting into trouble in the cities. You would think they would not do well in a recession, but they have never done better.’ The end result of the pressure was Te Karere, which means the messenger. The first programme screened on 21 February last year.

‘lt’s politically unstoppable now,’ Mr Fox claims. ‘I don’t think there is any doubt that you cannot retract maori news on TV now. ‘There is no doubt in my mind of the acceptance of the programme by the target audience. There is no doubt in the minds of the TV executives, because if anything ever goes wrong, they certainly get to hear about it. ‘Whereas in the past these things

have usually been a sop, it has not been allowed to happen. We continue to press for things and shoulder our way in for our share of the action. ‘lt’s a growing thing. There will be 20,000 bilingual kids in the schools (from kohanga reo) in five years, and that’s our new audience.’ He thinks 15 minutes would be enough for a credible maori news programme, but he knows he faces a long,

hard battle to win more time, more staff and more facilities.

To make the programme any longer than its present five minutes would mean shortening the 5.30 news, but he doesn’t think anyone would shed any tears over that.

But Derek Fox’s vision of the future is much bigger and brighter than 15 minutes of maori news. He has a vision of an Aotearoa broadcasting corporation, financed by 12 per cent of the state broadcasting budget because maori people make up 12 per cent of the population, 12 per cent of the licence fee payers, and 12 per cent of the advertisers’ target audience. He takes his figures from the last census.

‘lf you look at Television New Zealand’s budget in those terms, we are owed about S2O million, and you can do a hell of a lot of recruiting and training with S2O million.’

‘Even if we had to pay for time and facilities (out of that S2O million), we would still get a hell of a lot more than we are getting now.’

Despite the contribution of maori people to broadcasting, Derek Fox points out that in return less than 0.2 per cent of the material on television is maori material.

‘Television New Zealand has displayed that it is not angled or geared to recruit or train maori journalists.

‘They could only find one maorispeaking journalist in the whole of Television New Zealand to do Te Karere.’ He admits that’s probably more than 99 per cent of the newspapers in the country have, but points out that TVNZ is a publicly owned enterprise, and therefore has a duty to meet the needs of all sections of the public. Newspapers are privately owned and are entitled to please themselves, he says.

He finds his position as television’s resident maori expert tough going. ‘lt’s all a bit much for a country boy from Ruatoria to be counsel, judge and jury of everything maori in Television New Zealand.

Mr Fox says Te Karere has done a number of things for the maori people. It has made them aware of events affecting them which they might not otherwise have heard about without travelling long distances to be there. And it has made them aware of news and current affairs in a way they weren’t before, and that in turn has made them critical of existing news service. They are demanding a better deal from all news media as a result, Mr Fox claims.

‘lt’s a tremendous psychological boost to those learning maori,’ he claims. During its first few weeks, maori language classes wrote in asking the reporters to speak more slowly. They did not ask for sub-titles, Mr Fox points out. Te Karere has been criticised by some pakeha for not using english sub-titles.

Mr Fox is opposed to them. The easy answer to such critics, he says, is that inserting sub-titles is a major technical exercise that he does not have the time, people or equipment to do. He disputes claims that sub-titles would be an aid to learning the language.

‘lt’s a lazy man’s approach. You will never learn a language through subtitles,’ he says.

And he claims that if sub-titles were used, they might change too fast for people to read, so there would then be demands for a voice translation, and the whole purpose of Te Karere would be eroded out of existence.

Besides, he argues, it’s not really very inconvenient to have to ‘endure’ 25 minutes a week of maori language. He compares it with Wales, where the 20 per cent of the population who speak Welsh get 22 hours a week of Welshlanguage television.

Te Karere has come about at a time when the news media are ‘discovering’ maori news and employing reporters who specialise in maori topics. At the same time, maori people are generating news in a way and on a scale they never have before.

April’s education hui at Huntly’s Waahi marae was a case in point, he says. The radical resolutions emerging from that would not have happened five years ago, but they were coming from conservative people who were fed up with being fobbed off by the system.

Te Karere has proved itself an embarrassingly able competitor in the race to get the news first. It was the first, by two days, to break the Motunui effluent outfall story which became a major talking point all around the country. It became front-page lead material, whereas Derek Fox believes in the past it would have gone unnoticed for months.

It was also the first to alert the world to the fact that one of maoridom’s most conservative organisations, the Maori Council of Churches, had declared the Treaty of Waitangi a fraud. The significance was not lost on the likes of Derek Fox. No longer could the pakeha in power dismiss maori protesters as a radical fringe minority now ordinary, middle-of-the-road maori citizens were beginning to grumble.

He is critical of the way a lot of maori news is handled by the media in general, and the way reporters who try to cover maori news sensitively are branded as ‘biased towards maoris’.

He says the came very close to lodging a formal complaint against his own employers for some aspects of their reporting of the hikoi to Waitangi early this year.

While giving Maori International three out of 10 for public relations, Mr Fox is angry about the way its affairs have been reported. He says it’s all been shallow, one-sided, ‘spot’ reporting which has created an image in

the public mind of ‘a bunch of ratbags trying to take over the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute’.

‘That’s not true,’ he says. The company’s side of the story has never been properly presented in the media, he believes, (although conceding the company itself is partly to blame), and its true significance has been missed.

That significance, he says, is that Maori International is going to manage huge areas of land and forests in maori ownership, and a lot of pakeha people who have done well out of the maori dollar are going to be hurt.

He claims that in Gisborne alone administrative centre for thousands of hectares of maori land pakeha accounting firms stand to lose $1 million a year in fees to Maori International.

He was furious with Brian Edwards’ Fair Go programme for the way it conducted a ‘poll’ of viewers’ most hated programmes. Te Karere came second.

When Mr Fox inquired into how the poll results were obtained, he says he was appalled by the programme’s sloppy methods and lack of care to gain fair and accurate results. He complained to Dr Edwards, who dismissed the whole exercise as a bit of harmless fun. But Mr Fox said he did not think his maori viewers would find it very funny, and he pointed out that such a ‘poll’ could easily tighten the television pursestrings when Te Karere asked for more money and facilities.

He feels that as time goes by, maori affairs reporters are more and more going to need to be bilingual as the maori language is increasingly dusted off and used at news-making events. Translations are second-hand news and make for second-rate reporting, he believes.

He spoke at length to a recent training course for maori affairs reporters on the need to distinguish between bias and perspective. Te Karere, he says, provides a maori perspective on the news, and there is no reason why other media cannot do the same.

On long car journeys he and fellow broadcasters Purewa Biddle and Whai Ngata used to hold “kupu sessions” when they discussed regional variations in the language. As well as being fun never heard before’ it helped him work out which maori words were most widely understood and therefore most appropriate to the people whose affairs are being reported Ngapuhi words for a story about Ngapuhi people, for example.

Mr Fox doesn’t know how much longer he will stick it out. The constant struggling for what he sees as the maori people’s entitlement, on top of his long hours of work, have clearly taken the shine off the job for him.

But if he does opt for something less draining at some stage, he can be assured of considerable mana for his part in carrying the message of maoritanga.