KEY POINTS:
I like talking, a lot, says Willie Jackson near the end of talking, a lot, for an hour. No kidding. He could talk the hind leg off a kaihe.
You don't need to speak te reo to work that one out, but Jackson would like you to. He
would like Maori to be compulsory in schools. John Tamihere wouldn't.
This is exactly the sort of issue they would have a ding-dong about, in their matey, "let's see who can say the most offensive thing about the other" manner that works so well on their RadioLive show.
Now they've got a telly show, The World According to Willie and JT ( it starts on Monday, April 9, at 10pm, on One), which is Willie and JT having ding-dongs about ... issues like whether Maori should be compulsory in schools. It is joking around with stuff with a serious intent - bringing Maori issues to a wider audience. But it is really, I say, about the pair vying for Alpha male supremacy.
Giggle, giggle, goes Jackson in that high-pitched titter many Maori men have (no, he has no idea why either). "Oh, yeah, probably there's a bit of all that." They are seriously competitive. "Oh, absolutely. We like to have a few laughs and I think that's the nature of us. And I think it's the nature of a lot of Maori too, you know. There's this competitive edge and I think there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's constructive. I don't apologise for that."
Nobody was asking him to, but he's a bit funny, I think (he denies it) about how successful he's been. He is the chief executive of UMA Broadcasting, which owns and runs Waatea and George FM. There is the radio show; the new telly show; the old telly show, Eye to Eye, coming up for its 100th episode and which starts again on One next Saturday. You might say he's made a great career out of talking.
When you go to interview somebody you want them to talk, but with Jackson you have to dart in with a question in the rare moments when he stops to draw breath. He starts talking the moment we arrive at Radio Waatea, his small but doing nicely empire. He takes us on a fruitless ramble - with him talk, talk, talking the whole time - in search of somewhere to do the interview. I think he's putting off the moment. He likes talking but he doesn't much like being asked questions.
He spends so much time taking pot shots at JT that I may as well have interviewed the pair of them. It is a fairly transparent attempt to deflect the line of questioning.
We end up back where we started, in a sort of afterthought of a building where his office is. You couldn't accuse him of building an empire of grandeur. It's all very rough and ready and functional. At home, I tease, it's very different. He won't let me, or any media, go to his Mangere house although (and partly because) there is great interest in it: it is David Lange's former home.
He won't let me see it - no amount of nagging will change his mind - because it's private, personal, and none of my business, he says. I say it's because he's got gold-plated walls and marble floors and he doesn't want anyone to know how rich he is. "Ha ha ha. Is that right?"
He hates to be called a Maori millionaire. "Yeah, I do hate that." Anyway, he says, it's not true. "Just 'cos you buy a million-dollar place you, well, you know ..." I thought it was $1.3 million. "Yeah, well, that was two titles. Let's get it right. The reality is you get a mortgage; you've got to pay a mortgage. That's the same with everyone."
The reason for sticking it to him, in a playful way, is to see whether he can take the sort of relentless teasing he likes to hand out. He and Tamihere have a running game where they try to make the other get the pip. This involves seeking out and exposing the other's vulnerabilities. On air, on a day JT wasn't in the studio, Jackson told listeners that JT had been, aah, detained for a completely fictitious reason it would be unwise to repeat here.
The TV show is, according to what JT and Jackson like to say about each other, fronted by a racist and a homophobe. "Is that your critique of it, Michele?" Jackson, of course, says he is not a racist but that everyone knows JT is a homophobe. But does JT mean that Jackson is a racist because he doesn't like white people?
"It means he's talking a load of rubbish. I think he does that to exaggerate my position because I try to put a pro-Maori position. I'm not a racist. What a load of nonsense."
Jackson, in turn, likes to poke fun at JT about trying to impress his Pakeha mates from which you could - if you have entered the spirit of the madly magnified claim and counterclaim ofthe world according to Willie and JT - extrapolate from that that Jackson doesn't have any Pakeha mates. "Bloody hell! Well, a few through the years."
He thinks it is funny to name my bloke, also a journalist, whom he has met only in the course of doing a story, as his Pakeha friend. Well, it is quite funny because it mocks the standard reply: One of my best friends is a Maori.
More seriously, eventually: "Have I got any Pakeha mates? Not as many as J.T! But I've had a few. Oh, look, the reality is mainly Maori mates. All my life I've been brought up among Maori, I've lived my life with our people. But I'm not uncomfortable in Pakeha situations."
He worked at the freezing works after school and did make Pakeha friends. He thinks that "in terms of working-class Maori and Pakeha a lot of the Pakeha understand and appreciate their Maori mates a lot better than Pakeha people who haven't been involved with Maori". Which is to make his point about proximity in another way. He thinks that the more Pakeha are exposed to things Maori, "they won't feel so alienated; won't feel so isolated".
I think he is a serious person, really, who has found a way of communicating through a combative sort of jocularity.
Like this: "So, I'll say, 'You know, Maori, that J.T. hates your guts.' And 'yes, we all know JT's a sellout. He'd sell his mother 'cos he wants to be the first Maori prime minister.' JT will go, 'Pakeha people, Willie hates you. Willie's a racist. Willie loves Mugabe."' The downside, says Jackson, is that some people actually believe this silliness.
I thought their relationship might be one played up for public consumption but Jackson says their carry-on in private is pretty much the same. They had one serious row which almost came to blows, about 10 years ago. It was "over what we were doing in terms of managing things in an urban Maori sense ... and we just had a disagreement over things. So I just said, 'well. settle the thing outside' basically. And John said, 'Yeah, okay, let's do it.' And mum [June Jackson] had to stop it." The silly buggers. They didn't speak for a few weeks then, "fine, back into it again".
The one thing JT says that is guaranteed to rile Jackson is to perpetuate the view that Maori "have got all this money because he knows the money Maori have got has been minuscule over the years. But there's a general perception out there that we've got millions and millions and billions ..."
Well, he has. "Who has? Get off." Which is where I started to get into him about his house. He absolutely hates talking about anything he deems personal. I'm not allowed to ask him about his three children. To three different women. "That's none of your business. Ask Tamihere about his life." I'm not allowed to, for example, ask a seemingly innocuous question about who does the cleaning at home. "None of your business." Ah ha. He's got a housekeeper. "It's none of your business if we've got a housekeeper. We've got a big house and we're busy people."
I should add that this is all conducted with great good nature. He likes an argument. He is, as he says, combative. He was before he became an Alliance MP from 1999 to 2002; and before that as a union organiser. So perhaps his prickliness about being seen to be filthy rich is because he fears being seen as a sellout.
He is no longer a lefty; he thinks he's about in the centre but "I hope that I would never be perceived as a sellout. Certainly not as much as that other bloke."
He says, "Well of course, I earn really good money but I'm doing about three different things but I don't like putting that in people's faces. I represent a lot of people who are living on the breadline."
Then he says, as he's said about a hundred times, that he'll have me, and his good Pakeha friend, over to see the house once he and "my darling", Tania Rangiheuea, have finished doing it up.
I think this is as about as likely as JT becoming the first Maori PM, but if he comes through I might just go. I've never seen a house with gold-plated walls.
