OPINION: Rodney Hide.
TVNZ Political Editor Maiki Sherman — the first Māori women to hold the job — repeatedly shouted the homophobic slur “faggot” at openly gay journalist Lloyd Burr during a pre-Budget drinks event in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s parliamentary office on 13 May 2025.
Multiple witnesses, including parliamentary staff and journalists from rival outlets, confirm the exchange was loud, ugly and disruptive enough to shut the gathering down. Sherman claims it was retaliation for a racial slur; Burr denies it. The facts are clear enough: a senior state-funded journalist used a vile anti-gay epithet in a professional parliamentary setting.
For nearly a year the story stayed buried. No headlines. No breathless panels on Q+A. No demands for resignations or Press Gallery inquiries. Only rumours and whispers. Now that independent journalist Ani O’Brien has dragged it into daylight on Substack, the silence from the rest of the media is deafening.
This is not incompetence. It is intersectionality at work. In the progressive hierarchy of the oppressed, identity is destiny. A Māori woman sits near the top — indigenous, female, person of colour. A gay white man, however, occupies a lower rung: his sexuality earns him victim points, but his whiteness and maleness drag him down. When the two clash, the Māori woman remains the protected victim. Sherman can hurl a homophobic slur and the media class simply looks the other way. Individual behaviour does not matter. Group ranking does.
This is the same ideological virus that has infected Parliament, the universities and the state broadcaster. For years we have watched journalists lecture politicians about “standards,” “bullying” and “hate speech” while operating under their own two-tiered moral code. A National MP makes an awkward joke and it is front-page news for a week. A senior TVNZ editor drops a gay slur in the Beehive and it vanishes into the memory hole. Why? Because criticising Sherman would require the media to admit one of their own — elevated precisely because of her identity — behaved worse than the politicians they spend their days hounding.
Libertarians have warned for decades: once you sort citizens by group identity instead of individual conduct, you destroy accountability. Free speech, free markets and parliamentary democracy all rest on the same principle — judge the person, not the tribe. Intersectionality inverts that. It turns journalism into a protection racket for favoured groups and a weapon against everyone else. The Press Gallery protocol demanding journalists “not undermine the dignity of Parliament” suddenly becomes optional when the offender ticks the right identity boxes.
New Zealand’s media has spent years importing American campus nonsense about power-plus-prejudice. Now the nonsense is biting them. A Māori woman can call a gay colleague a faggot in the corridors of power and the commentariat shrugs because, in their hierarchy, she is still the victim. This is not journalism. It is ideological enforcement.
Taxpayers own the broadcaster. We shouldn’t. It’s bad enough their hypocritical moralising to the rest of us but to have to pay for it is altogether too much.
Ani’s substack is far better value.
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader
