PM Geoffrey Palmer with MPs Peter Tapsell and Mike Moore in 1990.
Feature
Sorry, Prime Minister
by Joanne Black
John Tamihere is not the first person to fall foul of a tape recorder. Joanne Black remembers with humiliation the incident she calls “Geoffrey Palmer: My Part in His Downfall”.
I’ve never been good at tape recorders. I rewind when I mean to fast forward. Batteries run out in the middle of interviews. And the one damn time I would have prayed for my tape recorder to fail, it worked perfectly.
Once, I accidentally recorded a private conversation of the then Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. If I’d ever fancied a job with the Sun, I couldn’t have done it better if I’d planned it. The problem was that I didn’t want a job with the Sun, and I didn’t plan it. Sir Geoffrey, as he later became despite my unwitting efforts to ruin his reputation, did not realise my tape recorder was on, but neither did I.
The incident happened in Kuala Lumpur at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in 1989. I was a political reporter covering CHOGM for the New Zealand Press Association and attended a press conference in Palmer’s hotel room. CHOGMs in those days were dominated by discussion of sanctions against apartheid South Africa. New Zealand was a bit player. All New Zealand journalists could do was get their Prime Minister’s view on what Margaret Thatcher’s most recent pronouncements had been. Palmer was very obliging. Problem was, he obliged in a series of thoughtful but long-winded sentences characterised by multitudes of sub-clauses with occasional bursts of Latin and legalese. It was hard enough for the print media to deal with, and a nightmare for radio. On this day, reporters sat around a coffee table boasting a huge floral arrangement. I was sitting some distance from Palmer, so my tape recorder was concealed by the flowers. That was not deliberate. He would have assumed I had one. I was simply allowing the radio journalists to sit next to him so that they could hold their microphones close. Palmer ground on, and so did our tapes. At the end, we all left.
Halfway back to my hotel, I realised that I’d left my tape recorder on the coffee table. By the time I got back to Palmer’s suite, his press secretary Karren Beanland, with whom there had been many prior discussions about the Prime Minister’s orations, was coming out holding my tape recorder. “You forgot this,” she said. I thanked her and set off, rewinding the tape about halfway to listen again to the press conference. I pressed Play and my heart sank. The press conference didn’t seem to be there. Something else was. I wound it back further. And then, with horror, I discovered what had happened. There was the sound of us journalists saying our goodbyes. There was Beanland’s voice telling us when the next day’s press conference would be. And then, oh God, what was this? It was a private conversation that occurred after we had left, all while my tape efficiently and sinisterly recorded from behind the flowers.
It recorded Beanland castigating the PM for, once again, talking too quickly and not giving more direct answers. He said he was sorry and didn’t think he could do it any other way.
Beanland said he could if he tried, but he wasn’t trying hard enough. He apologised, profusely at times.
The tape amounted to nothing more than that, and would never have gone any further had I only done what I should have and tossed it in the bin.
But, Your Honour, I’m a journalist. We sometimes behave differently. Badly, actually.
I was not in any ethical dilemma about whether to report the tape. It offered, only to those who cared, an insight about the modus operandi of the PM and his staff. It was interesting but not newsworthy, or not at that point, anyway.
My first sin was not ditching the tape immediately. The second was playing it to colleagues Barry Soper and Dick Griffin back at our hotel. By the time I returned to Wellington, word of it had spread. Tim Grafton from the Sunday Star-Times offered me $50 for it. I guffawed. Discredit the PM and lose my job for $50? I already knew newspapers were tight, but hell!
The tape had many airings in NZPA’s office before I did finally get rid of it. But the damage had been done. A short time later, during an Estimates debate on the Prime Minister’s Office, Opposition MP Ruth Richardson stood up in the House one night and almost recited word for word the content of the tape. I remember sitting in NZPA’s gallery office, listening to the House on the radio, with my knees knocking together. Truly they did. It has never happened before or since. I realised then that the only two people in Parliament who might not have heard of the existence of the tape were Palmer and Beanland. I also knew instantly that I had done them both terrible damage. To this day, I regret it.
Hastily, I scrawled a note of explanation to the Prime Minister, who was chairing the House with not a clue what Richardson was talking about. I said I was sorry and, although my apology was genuine, even as I wrote it I knew the PM would suffer far more than I would for something that was entirely my fault. Later in the evening, I wrote a much longer letter of apology to both of them.
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