Fare Thee Well, Oh Valiant DWTS - by Fran O'Sullivan

Mood for "Fare Thee Well"

A young former Alliance MP Pam Corkery (pronounced to rhyme with kokiri) whose only real work experience to date is spruiking for both Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, probably spoke for a number of her peers who’ve been cast out in the wilderness that is life after politics when she whirled on her heel and said, “We’re not giving interviews you puffed up little shit, you work in news”.

Pammy (as the girlies like to call her) has had a dream run in life. For starters she is thin. Anyone who is thin can pass through doorways easily; can fit into elevators without the beeper going off and everyone else turning to stare, as if they should be the first person to get out. My good friend David Lange knows how this feels, we often used to share the angst over a Coke and pie or three.

And as I said just last week to Sir Douglas (Myers, not Roger….or should that be Sir Roger? Am I mixing my metaphor? (No, your drinks - Ed)) it is tough at the top.

So when Pammy followed up this outburst with a posting on her Facebook Page that she was henceforth about to be competing on Dancing With The Stars, I immediately knew, as New Zealand’s premier business commentator and investigative journalist (suck on that Rod Oram), that the end was nigh for this valiant current affairs programme.

Dancing With The Stars is powerful journalism. Rodney Hide, for instance, the invincible – everyone thought – leader of the Act Party was brought down by a mere slip of a reporter by the name of Krystal when she slithered from his grasp and face-planted on the ground, thereby humiliating the once former environment economics lecturer, then Minister for Local Government, in a way no other press gallery journalist had been able. Well until I conspired with Don Brash to have him replaced for no other reason really than the Singaporeans I know through my years in free trade and high level international foreign affairs wanted Don because his wife was from Singapore.

And DWTS’s Candy Lane has stood staunchly by the downtrodden – the footsore, the weary, the heavy-laden, the back-broken, and with the result that DWTS has been a frequent thorn in John Key’s side.

DWTS has not been afraid to challenge the Prime Minister when other rivals – My Kitchen Rules, My Home My Castle, Shorty Street, have taken a more supine stance.

And as I wrote long before anyone else, before I broke Watergate, the Winebox Inquiry, Equiticorp and before Alan Bond was even a twinkle in Mr Bond’s eye, Key has been joining the dots to dump DWTS.

Now I can reveal in an exclusive I have it on good authority that MBIE is taking action against DWTS participants; they must lift their game or face prosecution. Also, I have inside knowledge that NZTE has been directed by none other than the PM’s office to cease its plans to export DWTS to China. I was up in China recently (Ed - eh?). What’s that? How can I afford all these trips to China on a hack’s salary when I work in news? (Listen – I ask the questions around here boyo).

Meanwhile, let me just quote my good friend and expert in everything, Dr Frank O’Gullible who sums up in one succinct paragraph what is going on at TV3, and why DWTS was doomed: “........with new management at MediaWorks, the driving considerations have changed. Within the senior commercial world, it is said that when Mark Weldon applied for the top job at MediaWorks he drew on his relationship with Key and the public-spirited work he did outside of his prior role as chief executive of the stock exchange such as chairing an economic summit after the GFC to help build credibility for a role in a sector in which he had no prior experience.”

So listen up here, plebs. The reason MediaWorks is not working is because less than five per cent of the bathrooms are for women. What does that mean? It makes more sense than this column does. Not one of the toilets on the NZX is for women. Pitiful.  That's where the dynamism is created and the future is shaped.

We want our boards to be stacked with people who know enough to usefully challenge the status quo, whose antennae are sharp enough to sniff out managed earnings rorts and understand markets.  And I am the market. (Ed - What the hell does this mean? Who is the ‘We’? Antennae don’t sniff, neither are they sharp. Good grief woman, just as well you’re not on a real board.)

Asked by my colleagues what I was paid, they were rewarded with a snort. That's my business.

As someone slightly more famous than me said (oh alright it was Joan Rivers), it’s not who you know, but whom you know.

Editor - Fran O'Sullivan has written a weekly column since 1907. In her early career before the television set, she was a political journalist in Wellington and subsequently an investigative journalist who broke many major business stories, some of them using actual sources. She was the deep throat in Watergate; she wrote the first articles that led to the Winebox Inquiry in both NBR and the Sydney Morning Herald. She has specific expertise in relation to China where she has been a frequent visitor and is often mistaken for Hillary Clinton. She has won millions of awards including the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize so many times she’s lost count and has told everyone in earshot she has not entered the Canon Media Awards for a decade now as she wishes younger business journalists to have a chance at winning. Asked on Twitter by herself to sum up her career in one word she replied from important undercover work at CERA in Christchurch with her usual authority and lappings of modesty;