Dialogue: Perceptions less than perceptive

By JOHN ROUGHAN

There is a word that wears down my teeth every time it is used in the name of journalism. Radio and television interrogators, when they have nothing better to go on, will question some poor public figure about a "perception."

"That may be so," they say, "but there is a public perception ... " Or, worse, "What are you going to do about the perception that ... ?"

What is a person supposed to say to that? "You're quite right. We're probably going to have to hire a public relations firm to explain what I have been trying to tell your audience tonight."

All too frequently the politician or public official does finally say something like that, and the interviewer relents with an air of achievement. At moments like those I miss Muldoon.

The only achievement has been to surrender journalism to the captivity of paid publicists, political spin merchants and opinion polls. Perceptions are their territory.

Reason, reportage, fair comment, the lessons of the past, informed predictions are all good grist for the television interviewer. So why is Linda Clark wearing out my teeth?

Constant carping about "perceptions" also makes a discussion dead. When the Prime Minister is invited to answer "the perception that Labour is soft on defence," there is nothing remotely interesting in the proposition and it invites a standard reply.

If a researcher compiled a set of facts, statements and solid arguments to support the contention, the Prime Minister probably could not answer on autopilot and it might be interesting to watch.

It is not just television of course. National Radio is a big offender and the word pops up in print sometimes, too.

The appeal to perception is careless and superior.

It is saying: "I don't necessarily believe this but most people do." Or, more often and much worse: "It doesn't matter whether this is true, what is important is that people believe it."

Behind it all no doubt is the educational wasteland left by the philosophy that nothing is true, all is perception (except for this philosophy).

Almost by definition the perceptions are wrong. If they had any substance, interviewers would be dealing with that. Instead, they are content to treat misconceptions as valid facts of political life and blithely forget that they are in the information business. I don't know why today's politicians let them get away with it. Possibly because they are content to retreat behind the same illusion when it suits them.

Making a fairly important announcement this week, Jim Anderton said: "While Phillida Bunkle has been cleared of any formal wrongdoing, there are still unresolved issues in the public mind following the review of her enrolment status. In my view, it is not appropriate for her to hold ministerial office while public perceptions remain that there has not been adequate political accountability."

To invoke a public perception is invariably a device for taking a position without accepting responsibility for it. It can take several different forms. In newspaper editorials, for example, it commonly leads to a complete distortion nowadays of that familiar principle of law: Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.

In the hands of many editorial writers, that has become a charter for justifying an injustice. They forget the first and more important part of the aphorism: justice must be done.

Nobody ever intended it to say that injustice must be done if it looks like justice in the public eye. The week before Easter is quite a good time to mention that.

One weekly newspaper, pronouncing on the troubles of Marian Hobbs and Phillida Bunkle, declared: "Cabinet ministers must not only be doing the right thing, they must be seen to be doing it."

Unfortunately, it had taken a fairly legalistic view of the issue and was struggling to find the two MPs guilty after the Auditor-General had found their allowances to be within Parliament's rules. The paper was left criticising the pair on the basis that "Voters do not like what they see."

A week earlier it had decided that Peter Davis, the Prime Minister's husband, should not take on politically sensitive research projects in his field. It did not believe his work would be biased, but would bar him because "justice must be seen to be done."

In strictly legal terms Phillida Bunkle has been done an injustice. Even if the ruling of the Wellington Central registrar of electors had been against her, she was hardly guilty of deliberate deception.

The only reason she deserves her fate, in my view, is her own legalistic attitude to an allowance derived from taxation. It is a common attitude to state entitlements and I am not sure public perception is with me.

Possibly most people believe that somebody in her position ought to have honoured the purpose rather than the fine print of the allowance; or perhaps they would blame those who made the rules. I wouldn't like to put it to a poll.

It is a question on which the country could do with some moral leadership. Mr Anderton has been a politician of high conscience in his time. This week his personal judgment disappeared into a mirage of his own making - public perception as he imagined it.