How TV3 and ‘a sanctimonious little creep’ corn-ered the PM

Sunday, 5 July 2026

Mike Munro reported on politics from the press gallery for 10 years, then served as chief press secretary to Helen Clark, and Jacinda Arden’s chief of staff. This excerpt from Ringside: A Political Memoir by Mike Munro, recalls the night Clark was left seething by the Corngate interview.

Labour was in cruise control at the start of 2002. It was election year, the expectation being a November ballot. Labour had a healthy lead in the polls over the Nats, who had installed Bill English as leader in October 2001, replacing Jenny Shipley. Michael Cullen was delighting in taunting English in the House. ‘Ah, they’ve got a boy doing a woman’s job,’ was one of his put-downs. Labour’s coalition partner, the Alliance, was also beset with internal problems, but these weren’t harming the government’s ratings.

There was a period when it looked as though Labour might be able to govern alone after the July election. A National Business Review-HP Invent poll in June put Labour ahead of National 55–25. One issue that smouldered away in the election lead-up, however, was genetic modification. There was debate about the safety of GM crops, which some saw as dangerous and unproven, and a risk to New Zealand’s clean, green reputation. A two-year moratorium on the release of GM products was due to expire the following year. In 2002 an anti-GM lobby had emerged, attracting celebrated figures such as actor Sam Neill and squash champion Susan Devoy. There was talk of a popular movement developing, akin to anti-nuclearism in the 1970s and 80s. Helen was scornful of this. She told the morning phone conference one day that anti-nuclearism was about saving the planet, whereas GM fears were about what’s in a can of baked beans. That line was almost Lange-esque. But there was agreement that we shouldn’t be demonising the worthies climbing on board the anti-GM bandwagon.

I’d been called by TV3’s head of news, Mark Jennings, about an ‘election special’ that the channel was planning. They were seeking an interview with the PM about GM. I remember thinking that it was unusual for the head of news, rather than a programme producer, to be involved in the set-up for an interview. News bosses generally have bigger fish to fry. But I knew Jennings fairly well, so I was happy to handle it. In fact, I spoke with him several times about the proposed interview, and he kept circling back to the theme of trust. The GM issue was causing some public anxiety, and the interview would explore whether New Zealanders could have trust and confidence in how the government was making decisions. Helen agreed to do a pre-recorded interview with TV3’s John Campbell.

I was at home in Wellington on the evening that Helen went to the studio for the interview. Sometime around mid-evening Helen called me. I knew instantly from the tone of her voice that something wasn’t right. I had got to know Helen’s voice well over time and learned to tell when she was livid. This was a striking case of lividness. Apparently, the interview had gone very badly and Helen was obviously shaken. Campbell had confronted her with some very detailed allegations about the suspected release of genetically modified corn seed in New Zealand in December 2000. The specificity of the questions had caught Helen unawares, as they went far beyond the briefing we’d been given by TV3. Campbell made claims of a government cover-up of the 2000 corn seed affair, and of the government misleading the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification that had reported in 2001. Helen spent a lot of time telling Campbell that she couldn’t be expected to respond to such specific questions about something that’d occurred in another minister’s portfolio area 20 months ago. Helen and I talked about the need for a response strategy by the next morning, but the thing that I most remember about that conversation was her demeanour. She was seething.

Shortly afterwards I was phoned by Jocelyn Prasad, the duty press secretary that night. Jocelyn was pretty rattled herself after what’d just happened in the studio. I remember the tremor in her voice as she talked on the phone about it. ‘Mike,’ she said, ‘it was fucking awful.’ In researching this book, I asked Jocelyn again about her memory of that evening. She said that she’d marvelled at Helen’s composure and clarity during the interview:

But she wasn’t so controlled in the stairwell at TV3 afterwards though. I remember it like this. The interview ends, and Helen demands to talk to Jennings. There’s four of us, Helen, Jennings, me and the DPS [police security] guy, standing in the stairwell. Helen is furious and Campbell by this stage has disappeared. Jennings is at his unflappable best-worst and there’s a clueless press sec [Jocelyn had been in the job four months] trying to think of useful things to say. Jennings is trying to do damage control and I’m pretty sure that he’s suggesting that TV3 do the interview again.

Helen and Jocelyn were both baffled by the highly specific nature of Campbell’s line of questioning. We’d find out the next morning what was behind it. Linda Clark was then the presenter of RNZ’s nine-to-noon show. Shortly before 9am the next day, her producer Tim O’Brien phoned our office to suggest that we listen to the news at the top of the hour, and the subsequent interview. In the news bulletin it was disclosed that a new book, Seeds of Distrust, by the investigative writer Nicky Hager, was being released that day, alleging a government cover-up over the importation of contaminated corn seeds. Linda Clark’s first-up interview that morning was — you guessed it — with Hager. So the penny finally dropped. The prime minister had been done over by a Hager–TV3 stitch-up. Campbell’s questions to Helen the night before had been based on allegations in Hager’s book, of which TV3 had received an advance copy. They’d swallowed the Hager theory hook, line and sinker, and then ambushed Helen with it.

That day following the recorded interview was feverish, and one we could’ve done without, 17 days out from the election. We had to first get the interview tape transcribed (Jocelyn had it on her tape recorder) so that the relevant ministers knew the nature of the allegations. Jennings was phoning and persisting with the offer of a fresh interview on the Hager allegations. Press secretary David Lewis, who was travelling with Helen, remembers that Jennings later wrote that he, David, had told Jennings to ‘f… off’. David insists that he said no such thing. What Jennings heard was Helen, travelling in the back seat of her Crown limo, urging David — who was in the front passenger seat — to tell Jennings to fuck off. TV3’s antics had seen Helen dropping quite a few f-bombs over this period, so her intemperate response was no surprise. She instead went on TVNZ’s Holmes show that evening and got a very respectful hearing on the issue. TVNZ, or more particularly Paul Holmes, was delighted to see TV3 incurring the PM’s ire.

TV3’s treachery was upsetting Helen the most. Their offer for the interview to be re-recorded seemed like a tacit admission that they’d screwed up and needed to start again. But the idea of Helen redoing the interview was never a starter anyway. She was so maddened by what had happened the previous evening that it was far-fetched to think that she’d be able to sit down again with Campbell - someone she’d soon label a ‘sanctimonious little creep’ - and answer questions on the same subject.

What soon became apparent was the extent of the collusion between Hager and TV3. There was footage of Campbell walking through a cornfield in Marlborough, drawing conclusions before he had even interviewed the PM. There was footage, too, of Hager’s book rolling off the printing presses. It was truly beyond belief. TV3 and Hager had been working up this hatchet job for a while. The interview, which took place in a dimly lit studio, began with a couple of general questions to Helen about GM, then moved to specific inquiries about the 12 tonnes of GM corn seed that’d arrived in New Zealand in October 2000. I watched it again recently. It’s obvious as the interview progresses that Helen is furious with Campbell, but it’s a controlled fury. In fact, the coherence of her language and absence of stumbles is admirable, even when her patience with Campbell is being stretched to the limit:

“You may think this is a really smart way to set up the prime minister. But you are questioning me on things that I cannot be expected to answer. The more this interview goes on, the more offended I am that TV3 thinks it is appropriate to set the prime minister up on an issue like this. I am being harangued on a set-up interview.”

The next day, our damage-control exercise continued. Cullen, Hobbs and Hodgson hosted a press conference and emphasised that all the available evidence showed that there was no risk of contamination from the imported corn seed that had gripped Hager’s imagination. While the imported seed might’ve had minute traces of contaminated material, it couldn’t be reliably detected. And nor could it be determined that the contamination was genetic modification. By the end of the day, the conspiracy theory was starting to look a bit ragged. But the matter that would become known as Corngate was far from over.

Helen wanted us to get cracking on a complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority. Not everyone in Helen’s circle was convinced that it was a good idea. Heather Simpson had misgivings, one of them being the wisdom of devoting time and resources to lodging a BSA complaint in the middle of an election campaign. Helen’s media trainer Brian Edwards was also sceptical. He had a dim view of the effectiveness of the BSA and considered it naïve at times. He argued that complaints took ages to resolve and that the BSA lacked the power to impose significant sanctions, so why bother? But Helen’s mind was set.

TV3’s behaviour during the consideration of our complaint was nothing more than pantomime. They kept making exaggerated claims about how they’d acted in the public interest. They denied the PM had been misled. They didn’t think their actions lacked honesty or integrity. They questioned the independence of the authority, as all its members had been appointed by Helen’s government. The BSA would eventually find — about a year later — that the Campbell interview had indeed breached standards of balance, accuracy and fairness. In my view, TV3 had gone all out to try to confect a scandal where none existed. So we won our case, emphatically.

It’s difficult to say how much the Corngate issue hurt Labour in that year’s election. Labour and the Progressives, Anderton’s new party, were able to form a coalition minority government, with support on supply and confidence from United Future.

If there was an incident on which the campaign turned, to the extent that it did, it was the eight party leaders’ debate at the TVNZ Avalon studio on 15 July. This was the debate that featured the ‘worm’. It put the focus firmly on populism and television performance, rather than policy, with the leaders quickly figuring out that they needed to say things that resonated with voters. The worm would then be their friend.

The consensus afterwards was that Peter Dunne, the United Future leader, was the winner of this made-for-television stunt, though Winston Peters also fared well with his glib slogans around crime and immigration. Not only did Dunne give common-sense answers, but he made liberal use of the term ‘common sense’. The audience liked what they heard. Dunne was the voice of calm and reason, and the worm marked him accordingly, wriggling up into affirmative territory whenever he spoke.

Helen’s election-night HQ was the Mt Eden War Memorial Hall. It was the usual media frenzy as the results were posted on the television screen and the arrival of the leader drew closer. Labour held a 41–21 advantage over National by mid-evening in the party vote and those numbers hardly budged from then on. United Future were the big movers, as polls had predicted, winning nearly 7 per cent of the vote to give them eight seats.

The Corngate saga took a while to blow over — nearly two years, as it turned out. Helen treated Campbell as persona non grata throughout all of that time, perhaps even longer. Sometime in early 2004, after TV3 had lost its High Court appeal, broadcast an apology and paid its penalties, Campbell and Carol Hirschfeld (then Campbell’s co-presenter on 3 News ) got in touch and invited me to join them for lunch in Wellington. We went to Logan Brown, one of the capital’s finest restaurants, to bury the hatchet. From memory, it was a congenial occasion at which all things corn-related were definitely off the table.

I’d known and liked Campbell since my press gallery days, first meeting him when he’d joined Bill Ralston in TV3’s press gallery office in the early 1990s, when I was with the Dominion in the neighbouring office. He’s a fearless and highly capable broadcaster and enjoyable company, so I was pleased that we’d rekindled our friendship. John told me that I was a ‘good bastard,’ that classic Kiwi compliment, and Carol smiled serenely. I think at that point we had closure. I’d had enough of Corngate, and so had they.

Ringside: A Political Memoir by Mike Munro, on sale Thursday 9 July, $39.99 RRP, Upstart Press