Karl du Fresne: Featherston Booktown - the book festival where books are optional

My attention was captured yesterday by a Facebook post promoting next month's Featherston Booktown Festival. It advertised a panel discussion entitled “Fixing the Bear Pit: How to Make Parliament a More Humane and Positive Place”.

How this was relevant to a book festival wasn’t clear, especially since the advertised discussion doesn’t appear to be connected with any book. But what particularly struck me was the accompanying photo of brawling parliamentarians (below), which was clearly taken in a foreign country. I guessed somewhere like Serbia, though someone who knows how to trace these things subsequently identified it as being from Ukraine.



Alongside the photo, the description “Bear Pit” seemed apt. The problem with this is that in my lifetime there has never been a scene in the New Zealand parliament that remotely resembles the one depicted. The only punch I can recall being thrown was the one Trevor Mallard aimed at Tau Henare in 2009, and that was outside the debating chamber.

I suppose the use of a picture from an overseas image library misrepresenting an event in Ukraine as having occurred in New Zealand could be passed off, at a stretch, as a legitimate exercise of creative licence (Peter Biggs, the chair of Featherston Booktown, comes from an advertising background, so may well see it that way), or perhaps as a bit of harmless frivolity. But I think it comes perilously close to dishonesty in advertising, because it sets up the false premise that the New Zealand parliament is a place of mayhem when in fact it’s relatively civilised.

Off the top of my head I can think of only three recent instances when parliamentary order was seriously challenged, none of which involved violence. One was the Maori Party MPs’ haka that disrupted proceedings last November and is now the subject of a hearing by the privileges committee. (As an aside, party co-leader Rawiri Waititi contemptuously dismissed parliament’s “silly little privileges committee” and “silly little rules”. But I wonder what his reaction would be if a group of National or ACT MPs wilfully breached protocols on a visit to a marae. I think we know the answer to that question – not that the situation is likely to arise, since Pakeha guests on a marae invariably treat their hosts’ customs and rules with great respect.)

The other examples were Green MP Julie Anne Genter’s in-your-face monstering of National MP Matt Doocey and National MP Tim de Molen’s intimidating behaviour toward Labour’s Shanan Halbert. In both cases the offenders apologised and were censured.

Otherwise parliamentary scraps are merely verbal and generally settled by the errant MP apologising or being temporarily banished from the House. Yet here’s a book festival deceitfully using an image from another country to generate a sense of moral panic over supposed bad behaviour by our elected representatives – and curiously, involving a subject about which there is no book.

Now consider the makeup of the discussion panel. We’re expected to assume that the four participants, all being former MPs, will have a special insight into what goes on in parliament. But two of those former MPs are very former. Rick Barker’s bum hasn’t touched the green leather since 2011 and Marilyn Waring left Parliament in 1984, which makes her positively prehistoric. The other two, Kiri Allan and Ron Mark, have a stronger claim to relevance: Mark was an MP as recently as 2020 and Allan retired from politics in controversial circumstances in 2023.

Of course Waring and Barker are entitled to their opinions on the conduct of parliamentary affairs, but probably no more than the rest of us, given how many years have passed since they sat in the House. Couldn’t Featherston Booktown find anyone with more recent experience of the so-called Bear Pit, if indeed that’s what it is?

We’re also entitled to question whether the panel will present anything approaching an objective view. Allan and Waring both seem to have been wounded by their political careers and left embittered. That may make for (melo)dramatic war stories, but does it make them good judges of what happens in the House? I predict that both women will present themselves as victims.

Then there’s the question of political balance. Two of the four panellists were Labour MPs, and although Waring sat on the National side during her time in parliament (and won deserved admiration for her courageous defiance of her bullying leader, Robert Muldoon), she has since re-positioned herself firmly on the feminist, anti-establishment left.

Mark will try to bring some balance but it’s not hard to foresee which way the discussion will swing. Parliament will be portrayed as a male-dominated club that reinforces the power of the white patriarchy. Don’t expect the antics of Genter (a female bully) or the Maori Party to be mentioned.

I should stress here that I think Parliament is a flawed institution that in many ways invites ridicule for its childish antics and anachronistic rituals. I don’t see how anyone who watches it live on TV, as I sometimes do, could come to any other conclusion. But we’re not likely to have a fair and balanced discussion if it’s skewed by the experiences of people who bear grudges. I wonder, did the organisers approach anyone from National or ACT, or would that have risked steering the debate in an unwanted direction?

The Parliament-as-Bear-Pit event tells us something important about the nature of book festivals generally. They are essentially ideological exercises, intended to reinforce the prejudices of those attending.

Having been to a few such festivals myself, I would suggest the attendees are typically the ageing, genteel, affluent left – the type of people who drive hybrid or electric cars, have their radios permanently tuned to RNZ (to which they listen wholly uncritically), avidly read the Listener, attend film festivals, classical concerts and yoga classes, and vote Labour or Green. They enjoy the trappings of capitalism but fondly think of themselves as socialists. Many of them are prigs, intolerant of dissenting opinions and highly judgmental.

These people wouldn’t thank you for alarming them with ideas or authors they don’t agree with. Book festival organisers know this and programme their events accordingly, which isn’t hard for them because they’re of the same mind. The book world is an ideological monoculture.

The Featherston Booktown programme bears out my theory. Sure, there are non-political sessions. For instance, you can hear the noted axeman John Campbell in conversation with a Norwegian who wrote a book about firewood. It’s hard to see politics intruding there, although you never know with Campbell. There’s also a Q & A with my friend Simon Burt about his acclaimed, politics-free book Route 52: A Big Lump of Country Unknown (a sitter for inclusion in the programme, given that its subject is more or less local).

Nonetheless there's an unmistakeable ideological thread running through the festival, as is often the case. There’s a session on how the justice system can make use of tikanga Maori (again, unrelated to any book), another called The Way of Waiata (ditto) and a discussion entitled Rogernomics: 40 Years On Through the Lens of a Wairarapa Community, in which Marilyn Waring and Rick Barker, neither of whom comes from the aforementioned region, feature again. (No book about that either, which makes you wonder whether the subject was chosen because it’s never a bad time to rake over the coals of Rogernomics yet again for the book festival crowd and declare how wicked it was, book or no book.) There’s also Invasion! The Waikato War, which at least has the merit of a book on the subject (by the leftist historian Vincent O’Malley). Oh, and I almost forgot Colonisation and De-Colonisation: Facing Them Head On (moderated by the multi-talented John Campbell, who can of course be relied on to take a rigorously impartial approach. In this case the flimsy pretext for the panel discussion is a slim book that came out, er, five years ago.)

Not all the sessions will be drearily predictable and a few of the participants have even been intelligently chosen. The adverse effect of Rogernomics on the Wairarapa is something one of the panellists, former long-serving Masterton mayor Bob Francis, knows plenty about, and at least the organisers in this instance roped in former Labour cabinet minister and key Rogernomics proponent Richard Prebble. So there will be some informed, first-hand input rather than just the usual anguished breast-beating about how heartless and immoral the 1980s economic reforms were, conveniently ignoring that the country was teetering on the brink of financial collapse when the Lange government came to power. I predict Prebble will enjoy himself immensely – in fact, will be greatly energised by the sight of all those pursed lips and disapproving faces in the audience.

(As an aside, I smiled when I saw that the Rogernomics session is sponsored by Murray Cole, owner of the Martinborough Hotel. As one of the entrepreneurs who did extremely well out of economic deregulation in the 1980s and the breaking up of state monopolies, Cole should have been shoulder-tapped for the panel. That would bring a different perspective to bear.)

Overall, the Featherston Booktown programme gives the impression of having been carefully curated to avoid offending the sensibilities of the attendees or challenging sacred leftist shibboleths. A friend of mine, a genuine lover of books, accurately calls it a wokefest. None of this should come as any surprise, given that this same festival cravenly cancelled what was intended to be a light-hearted Harry Potter quiz in 2019 because a handful of trans activists insisted on banning anything to do with J K Rowling. (So much for free speech.)

I’m reminded of an annual Sydney event pompously called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which has deservedly been mocked because the supposedly risky ideas promulgated never threaten the cosy leftist consensus. Australia’s intellectual left, like our own, still labours under the fanciful delusion that its ideas are subversive, ignoring the fact that since the 1970s the real radical thinkers – the outsiders who challenged orthodoxy and whom the literary establishment wanted to shut down – have tended to be on the political right. Literary events such as Featherston Booktown serve much the same purpose as the Sydney gabfest and could fairly be called festivals of safe ideas.

Should it bother us that a book festival includes several sessions that appear to have nothing to do with books but rather provide a convenient platform for a roster of perennially disaffected activists? After all, if that’s how festival patrons want to spend a weekend, it’s surely their business.

Problem is, it’s not just their money that pays for it. It’s ours too, because Featherston Booktown is subsidised (heavily, I suspect) by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Creative NZ. We may have a nominally centre-right government, but the steady flow of public funds to the entitled leftist literary and arts mafia continues unabated. Some things never change.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.