WHAT NOW?

Quid nunc (what now) is a Latin term for someone who is a busybody and a gossip.  I first heard it in 1984 when the late Tā Hemi Henare used it in a speech he made to the newly elected Lange government with reference to those who are always ready to seek, spread and expand on any bad news about Māori. 

Quid nunc came to mind on Sunday just gone with an email from a Herald reporter who wrote, “I’m working on a financial accountability project for the paper in the wake of the recent sad news that Ngati Tama has lost virtually all of its treaty settlement funds… The purpose is to find out how many iwi keep their tribal members informed and whether the information is easily accessible… Respectfully, would your organization kindly provide your annual report and tell me if it is available to your iwi members? If so, how is it available?”

I have not responded to this request because, respectfully, I don’t need to; Ngāti Kahu know where to come if they want to know anything.  But the request itself made me think.

deListed NewZealand is an independent service that provides updated information on companies that have changed their name, failed or been delisted from the NewZealand Stock Exchange.  After getting the Herald’s request, I went online and checked the stats for 2011, and here is what I found.

Last year 663 non-Iwi companies went into receivership, 4767 more went into liquidation and a further 24 were placed into administration; that’s 5,454 failed non-Iwi companies.  To get an idea of what that figure means, during the same year the New Zealand Companies Register recorded the incorporation of 43,927 new companies.  Even allowing for the fact that there are almost 570,000 registered companies in the country, the failure rate of non-Iwi companies was more than 10% of the rate of all new companies registered during 2011. 

That was news to me.  So I emailed some Chief Executives of non-Iwi companies and asked if any of them had received a similar request from the Herald.  They had not.  I then emailed some Chief Executives of Iwi entities and asked if the Herald had contacted any of them with the same request?  It had. 

Apparently, based on the losses of a single Iwi, the Herald feels compelled to do a series on the financial accountability of all Iwi.  And yet, in spite of the failure of more than five and a half thousand  non-Iwi companies during 2011, it has yet to investigate the financial accountability of all non-Iwi.  And how do I know these were non-Iwi companies that failed? Because if they were Iwi, the media would have named them individually.

Apart from being inherently racist and unhelpful, this is lazy, lazy journalism; pure quid nuncery.