Anecdote about a lovely man

A dominant theme will run through all the obituaries and tributes to Parekura Horomia – that he was a lovely man.

It will be unnecessary to remind anyone who knew him of the injunction not to speak ill of the dead. The thought will simply not occur. He was a lovely man and little more needs to be said.

From time to time the lovely man was delivered by ‘the boss’ into Brian and Judy’s tender care for ‘media training’.

Parekura was ‘expansive’ when he spoke to journalists or in the House.

His expansiveness sometimes got him into trouble, and our brief was to encourage him in the view that where journalists and the opposition were concerned,  less really was more.

We decided that our client needed to learn the dark art of starving his questioners of material to use against him by answering as many questions as possible with an undecorated ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

This did not come easily to Parekura who may well have thought it abrupt or rude and whose natural instinct was to convert a word into a sentence, the sentence into a paragraph and the paragraph into a full page.  Where answering questions was concerned he was generous to a fault.    

A hard worker and a fast learner, he nonetheless got better and better at answering hostile questions with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and we eventually concluded he was match fit.

Everything went swimmingly until a debate on alleged misspending at Te Mangai Paho, the Maori Broadcasting funding agency.

Parekura had been briefed to refer any opposition questions on the issue to Wira Gardiner, who had been appointed interim chairman of the agency and was investigating the allegations.

‘Yes, No, Wira Gardiner,’ we half-joked to Parekura. ‘Yes, No, Wira Gardiner.’

Our student was brilliant, answering every hostile question ‘Yes ‘or ‘No’ or ‘Mr Gardiner is looking into it.’

But Mr Gardiner was also a former Maori vice-president of the National Party and this led Nick Smith to interject, ‘So the Nats are fixing it up?’

And that led in turn to Rodney Hide asking whether, since Mr Gardiner seemed to be doing his job for him, Mr Horomia was urging Maori to vote National so that they could get a competent Minister of Maori Affairs.

After a moment’s hesitation, and to cheers, laughter and applause from the opposition,  Parekura replied, ‘Most certainly.’

I’m pretty sure he won’t mind me telling this story at his expense – and ours. He was self-deprecating and had a wonderful sense of humour.

Maori speakers tell me he was a brilliant orator on the marae.

But to me he was and will always be that rarest of gems in the bear-pit that is politics – a lovely man

Media trainer and commentator Dr Brian Edwards has retired from posting blogs at Brian Edwards Media.