How did he know who to talk to or gain his source’s trust?
The sounds of men shouting and breaking glass woke me just before dawn. It was Monday, October 15, 2007. I was in the end of my final year at Victoria University in Wellington, living in a freezing flat near the city centre.
Thinking the noise was probably just a party, I put the pillow over my head and tried my best to go back to sleep.
A few hours later, I walked past the dilapidated villa we called the “hippy house” and noticed its busted windows, and a smashed- in door.
Two girls who lived there were sobbing on the pavement. “What happened?” I asked. “The cops,” they said. The footage on the news that night was extreme. Police in stab- proof vests storming the house with sniffer dogs. More officers spilling out into the street. Across the country, similar scenes had played out at a dozen different homes. In Whakatane, Tame Iti’s partner and daughter were forced from their house in nightgowns. In Ruatoki, armed police searched every car going in and out of the town. The Urewera Raids, in my backyard. For the first time, a news item genuinely intrigued me.
I’d walked past the house at 128 Abel Smith St every day for more than two years, with its pamphlet stands out the front and piles of bikes around the back. I’d drunk beers with the bogans next door and watched as the self- declared anarchists hung new signs, my favourite urging people to grow kumara.
Could they truly be terrorists, as the police believed?
I followed every twist and turn. One week, we argued about the media coverage in my 300- level media studies class. Should TV3 — whose studio just happened to be across the road from the Wellington raid — have been allowed to film?
My instinct was yes — it made compelling coverage.
Others argued strongly against, saying it was unfair and intrusive.
By the end of journalism school the following year, the raids were still dominating the news.
The charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act had been dropped.
Some of the accused were no longer part of the case. And the Dominion Post had run the “Terror Files” — the most explosive parts of the police case — on the paper’s front page. It was a huge story. So huge, that the Dominion’s editor Tim Pankhurst ended up in court himself, accused of prejudicing the upcoming trial.
In class we learned how reporter Phil Kitchin, already renowned for his work on the Louise Nicholas case, had got hold of the police file. He walked in one day and presented it to Pankhurst, little more than a tatty stack of documents held together with string. To me, yet to write anything more than a weather report, Kitchin’s abilities seemed like superpowers.
This was top- level police information. How did he know who to talk to? How did he gain his source’s trust? I wanted to know everything about how he worked.
Our lecturer promised he would try to get him in.
In the end, Kitchin was too busy to come and talk to us. Instead, we watched a video of Nicholas talking about why she had trusted him.
Despite my disappointment, what she said was enough. He had kind eyes, she said. And he was honest. I’ve never forgotten that. Kirsty Johnston’s story on the treatment of the intellectually disabled in care, and the Government’s bid to keep the abuse secret, features in A
More recently her investigations have included articles on autistic man Ashley Peacock, who was kept largely confined to a single, tiny room in a psychiatric facility for five years; and the use of seclusion against children at primary schools.
She has also exposed ongoing issues with inequality in the education sector, and the extent of government consented water bottling across New Zealand.