Leaked report (by the looks of things) led to professor being unhired from post in the PM’s war against terrorism, violence and hate

Buzz from the Beehive

Yes, the Government today made a big announcement about measures to tackle COVID-19 and flu. But we are confident the mainstream news media will give that an appropriate airing.

Point of Order instead found cause to revisit a Beehive press statement which we buzzed about on June 4.  We have done so because we fear the country’s state-subsidised and Treaty-committed mainstream media (apart from the New Zealand Herald) will not be bothering to inform their audiences of what has transpired.  

The press statement from the Prime Minister in early June announced the launch of the Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, He Whenua Taurikura.

One of the centre’s two directors is Professor Joanna Kidman.

Martyn Bradbury at that time raised questions about her fitness for the job in an article on his blog  headed Ummmm, isn’t Professor Joanne Kidman the worst person to appoint to an extremism taskforce?

This week we are hearing about someone who wasn’t appointed.  

The disturbing story was reported by the New Zealand Herald under the heading PM’s terrorism, extremism expert Prof Richard Jackson hired then dropped.

Otago University pioneers bold new approach to the study of conflict

The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies says on its website it is the only centre of its kind in New Zealand and it addresses the most enduring and intractable problems confronting humanity.  It invites people to “join our passionate faculty to study development, peace-building and conflict transformation” and it offers a Master of Peace and Conflict Studies degree, one of very few such programmes in Australasia. But it is not without its own troubles.  KARL DU FRESNE reports:  

Sometimes irony is just too delicious for words.

The Otago Daily Times recently reported that the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago has been exposed as having a culture described as “toxic”, “paralysing”, “isolating” and “divisive”.

Those words come from a confidential 31-page report leaked to the ODT, which said the centre is known on campus as the “conflict and conflict” centre. The report described the centre as dysfunctional, with “deeply entrenched conflicts”. Perhaps they could use themselves as a case study.

It’s a story that falls squarely into the “you couldn’t make this up” category, but which seems, for reasons that I couldn’t speculate on, to have been ignored by the wider New Zealand media.