Bouquets and fig-leaves amid the headlines

Alison Mau is my new favourite TV "personality".

Not that I'm big on TV personalities, but you have to admire the way she calmly, forensically even, stared down the barrel of the camera on TV One's Breakfast and delivered a challenge to the magazine editors whom she accuses of harassing her family.

Sometimes, when behaviour - in the media or elsewhere - goes beyond the pale, it takes a courageous head-on response to confront it, to expose in this case the shallow and voyeuristic, not to mention immature, impulses on which it is based.

Not all of us have recourse to the power of the goggle box with which to hit back at our adversaries, but it was an admirable stand nonetheless.

Ten days ago, an Auckland-based Sunday newspaper with a healthy gossip quotient - OK, it was the Herald on Sunday - thought it newsworthy to "break", if that's the appropriate verb for an item so couched in coy innuendo, the news that Ms Mau, whose 13-year marriage to Simon Dallow ended last year, was apparently in a relationship (quelle horreur!) with another woman.

Then this week came the issue of Woman's Day magazine, which contained a spread of paparazzi photos of Ms Mau beneath the headline "Alison Mau's sleepover".

Get it? In case you didn't, the caption beneath one snap explained: "Having stayed over with brunette Karleen, Ali made a brief excursion to get coffee for the girls."

On Breakfast on Monday morning, Ms Mau issued her challenge.

"A Woman's Day paparazzi photographer has been stalking me, my children and my friends for a month now . . . quite possibly more . . . following me to the supermarket . . . the kids' tennis and touch rugby . . . to and from school . . . that's a gross intrusion of our privacy . . . and frankly, more than a little creepy . . .

"But fair game some of you may say, I'm in the public eye and it's a fair cop . . . hard to disagree with you.

"But now that they've run this story, I have a question for Woman's Day editor Sarah Henry and her offsider Catherine Milford . . . perhaps you'd both be kind enough to let me know when this will stop?"

"Just give me an idea when the dogs will be called off and me, my friends and my family can go about our business without having creepy guys in Corolla stationwagons following us around?"

In a rattled damage limitation exercise, later that day the chief executive officer of ACP Media, which publishes Woman's Day - why not the editor, one might ask? - issued a statement denying that the magazine had hired paparazzi to stalk "Ali", and saying: "We know there are boundaries when researching stories and we would never intentionally step over them."

The key word here is "intentionally" - a fig-leaf to cover a multitude of ethical sins.

If it didn't know the circumstances in which the photographs were taken, and chose to publish them anyway because it suited the titillating intent of the story and would help to boost sales, the magazine and its editors are just as culpable as if they did.

More to the point, when are such rags going to grow up and stop dragging the formerly good name of New Zealand journalism into the gutter? Alison Mau, like any other citizen, is entitled to go about her business without a posse of paparazzi hounding her - unless there are serious matters of public interest at issue.

In this instance, there patently are none and Woman's Day is out of line.

I hope - a vain hope perhaps, given the public appetite for gossip - that regular readers of the magazine, appalled by the intrusion, do the decent thing and cancel their subscriptions: the only kick in the corporate goolies that media executives truly appear to feel.

Now that I've got that off my chest, a bouquet of a different kind.

The habitual posture of politicians of varying hues is to grandstand on the complex business of crime and punishment: the tougher the better.

In doing so they play into the hands of those busy, proliferating lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key pressure groups which seldom let a day go by without clamouring about a new injustice.

Frankly, they're becoming like the playground bullies who insist on shouting down anyone who dares to raise a questioning or dissenting voice.

So here's to United Future's Peter Dunne for injecting a little counterbalancing logic into the argument.

Citing a state of the nation report by the Salvation Army, and in a plea for a return to investment in rehabilitation, Mr Dunne said: "Not only are we making no progress in reducing the rates of recidivism, those rates are actually increasing: nearly 59% of all prisoners are reconvicted within 24 months of release . . .

"Sentencing remains entirely punitive in its motive, driven by fear, ignorance and entrenched prejudices."

Hmmmm.

Driven by "entrenched prejudices"? Sounds a bit like the form of "journalism" practised by a certain women's magazine.

Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.