John Roughan: Lessons for today in Erebus probe fallout

The day of the Erebus disaster I was on the other side of the world. Arriving for work at Cardiff's morning newspaper, the Western Mail, I was greeted with the news that one of "your" aircraft had gone down in Antarctica.

As the hours went by the wire machines clattered out shreds of information but after a while I was the only one reading them. It wasn't a big story for Wales, not nearly as big as one the year before when All Black Andy Haden dived out of a lineout.

I'd had come in on that particular Sunday night to a newsroom abuzz about a television replay of the previous day's match. Slow-motion replays of the final minute showed Haden's dive, the penalty, the kick, another cruel defeat for the deserving. The replays also showed the penalty was in fact awarded for interference far from Haden's histrionics, but nobody else in that newsroom wanted to notice.

I watched a myth in the making. Not allowed near the story, I could only bleat the truth to deaf ears as reporters were sent to gather comment from every quarter and news editors set about producing a front-page splash. It would feature a darkly grainy television freeze of the crucial moment, a headline calling the All Blacks "cheats" and a concoction of words that carefully buried the referee's explanation in columns of outrage.

It does a journalist good to get a victim's insight sometimes to the power of the press. News has a bias to "the story" that sometimes needs to be balanced by strong people in authority prepared to stand by the ordinary boring probabilities.

Erebus eventually became the story of a cover-up. That was the conclusion of the inquiry conducted by Justice Peter Mahon and his story received eager treatment in the news then and ever after. It will be widely rehearsed again this weekend, the 25th anniversary of the crash.

Mahon decided the root cause of the disaster was the airline's navigational computer in which the pilots had absolute faith but which had been unwittingly programmed to fly into the mountain. Further, he believed Air New Zealand had realised it was at fault and had tried to pull the wool over his eyes.

It was a great story and Mahon was a great writer. I was back here and covering the High Court by the time his Erebus report became contentious. Justice Mahon was well-regarded by his peers. His decisions were written with crystal clarity and wry elegance. His report was a work of dedicated investigation, human insight and controlled fury.

Then it turned into a personal disaster. Air NZ challenged the fairness of his findings of a cover-up on the grounds that if such an accusation was to be made it should have been put to it at the inquiry. Mahon's peers at the Court of Appeal agreed.

When they found his report to be a breach of natural justice, he resigned from the judiciary and died some years later, said to be broken in spirit.

Most people's sympathies, including mine, were with Justice Mahon, particularly since the agent of his downfall was suspected to be the ever-domineering Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon.

After 25 years it ought to be possible to view of events more dispassionately. Mahon's report looks now like a creature of its time - the Watergate-infested 1970s when cover-ups where everywhere suspected, when the world was agog with the new silicon chip, when Muldoon's shadow haunted everything in this country.

Muldoon meddled in most things of national importance, none more enthusiastically than the management of Air NZ. His office was festooned with models of its planes.

But while Muldoon made no secret of his disagreement with Mahon's findings he was reasonably restrained on the subject in public. And anyway, on reflection now I think he was right.

Mahon's true insight in retrospect was not the cover-up or even the aircraft's computer co-ordinates, it was the polar atmospheric phenomenon he described. A "whiteout" was not, as most people assumed, a blizzard. It was a trick of the polar light that could obliterate the horizon on a cloudy day and cause low-flying pilots to hit a mountain they could not distinguish from a flat landscape.

The true meaning of whiteout, Mahon reported, was well-known to polar flyers who told him about it, but not to the commercial pilots who lined up for Air NZ's new Antarctic scenic flights.

The root cause of the crash, he might have concluded, was the company's inadequate preparation for low-level scenic flights to a place such as Antarctica. It speaks volumes that the airline has not resumed the flights.

Muldoon's refusal to bow to the Mahon report looks positively refreshing against the politics of the present. How good it would be today to have a Prime Minister who didn't buckle to every passing flurry.

Helen Clark was right the first time on the story this week of the Security Intelligence Service and its surveillance of Maori organisations, though it was not so much a "work of fiction" as a work of the obvious. If the SIS was not watching the activities of Maori nationalists, it would be highly negligent.

Yet once the story had run beyond a day or two, Clark agreed to a formal inquiry. Muldoon would have waved it away.

Clark has made an art of bending to every mildly embarrassing story, and receives applause for doing so. When she sacks a minister for a minor indiscretion, or even on suspicion of one, or calls an inquiry into an insubstantial claim, she is credited with supreme political cunning. The same tactics 25 years ago would have been labelled weakness and disloyalty.

It doesn't seem that long since Erebus, until you recall events and realise how much has changed. The protagonists were people of fibre. That's the story.

* John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor