Dialogue: Nepotism another word for kinship

By TAPU MISA

It's comforting to see that even in New York they have their tussles with nepotism.

As Tuku was getting roasted on this side of the Pacific for hiring his kith and kin to work on his TV documentary, New York's recently elected mayor, self-made billionaire Mike Bloomberg, was installing his daughter and sister in a couple of prime jobs at City Hall.

Bloomberg gave his 22-year-old daughter, Emma - newly graduated from Princeton with a degree in English literature - the flash-sounding job of mayoral programme coordinator. Her aunt, Marjorie Tiven, who has a Masters degree from Columbia, is the city's new commissioner for the United Nations and its official hostess.

The appointments raised barely a ripple. After surprisingly little fuss - New Yorkers understandably are still somewhat preoccupied with the events of September 11 - the city's Conflict of Interest Board decided there was indeed no conflict of interest.

It helped, of course, that the two women agreed to work for nothing. Like Bloomberg, who is getting a token annual salary of $1 a year as mayor, they could afford it. But, as the board pointed out, money isn't the only advantage conferred by a job at City Hall. There's also the prestige and experience - not to mention the impressive addition that would make to the CV of a political aspirant.

Was this nepotistic? Hell, yeah. But, as some folk in New York seemed to feel, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't have a problem with the idea of showering favours on one's family members. Where I come from - the cradle of Polynesia - it's positively encouraged. Neglect of one's kin is a crime of far greater magnitude.

Mind you, that's not an attitude we seem to have an exclusive on in the South Pacific. Neglecting to appoint your relatives to high-ranking positions wasn't something of which you could have accused the Kennedys. Nor, for that matter, the Clintons in their turn in the White House.

Back home, there has been a fair bit of indignation at what is seen to be our nepotistic sins and not surprisingly, most of them involve Maori.

Tariana Turia got into trouble last year when it was found that she'd tried to have a kid she had once fostered transferred out of a maximum security prison.

And among the charges being tossed at Sandra Lee last week by an aggrieved former employee at an Auckland Employment Tribunal hearing was that she gave a job to her whanau daughter, a young woman who had apparently called her mum a few times.

And then there's Tuku, of course.

I can't understand why some people get so het up about nepotism, especially when so much of it is around. Why do we persist with the fiction that family connections don't count, when clearly they do. (Hands up anyone who has ever scored a holiday job at a parent's workplace?)

What are family firms, after all, if not intrinsically nepotistic? Could the head of the Todd Corporation, the country's richest family, ever really be anyone whose last name wasn't Todd?

And as for that other old family firm, would anyone still be thinking of giving Charles the job as our next king if his mum weren't the chairman of the board?

So it seems to me there is more than a slight whiff of hypocrisy surrounding the fuss about Tuku giving his family jobs on his doco. Never mind that it is a family business - his wife is a partner and his daughter Reikura is an accomplished presenter.

Sure, it's public money, but Peter Jackson and his wife, Fran Walsh, have had their fair share of that, too, and I can't recall anyone ever suggesting any impropriety in that. (And who would dare to, now that their little family collaboration has won them a clutch of Baftas and earned them tickets to the Academy Awards?)

It's easy to level charges of nepotism. But it's hard to avoid them when you've got really big families, and when your definition of kinship tends to be a whole lot broader than most Pakeha families.

For my mother, who looked after a fair few kids in her time and unofficially adopted one or two, family tended to include just about anyone who had ever stayed the night.

Nepotism becomes meaningless and irrelevant when the entire village is your family, when your hapu is your whanau, and your iwi just your wider extended family.

And I'm not claiming some mythical quality here. Just a point of difference.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Tuku and I aren't related.