Mike McRoberts on war zones, Hilary Barry’s departure and cutting his hours

For nearly 20 years, Mike McRoberts has been one of the core faces for Three as a constant presence on the 6pm news.
However, 2023 will see McRoberts cutting down on his hours next year for a very personal reason.
Speaking to the NZ Herald’s Straight Up podcast, hosted by Niva Retimanu and Beatrice Faumuina, McRoberts announced he will be taking up full immersion classes next year for te reo Māori.
“My wonderful employers have basically given me the opportunity to do that. So basically, a shorter day for me with the news so that I can go and do that and um, which means everything.
“It’s full on though. It’s 9 to 3 every day. So it’s going to be hard, but it’s the next step for me. I just need this, you know?
“I mean luckily it didn’t come down to this, but I think if I had to choose between work and doing this course, I would’ve chosen this course, because if you put something else in front of that, you’re always gonna put something else in front of that.”
The move to learning te reo fulltime comes after McRoberts filmed the documentary, Kia Ora, Good Evening, where he explored his journey with his Māori identity and learning te reo.
Raised in Christchurch, the 56-year-old said that his family were raised in a very Pākehā culture that didn’t leave room for learning about his Māori identity.
“If it hadn’t have been for the occasional family trip back to Wairoa my father comes from, I would never have heard te reo spoken and there was no opportunity to learn at school – and to be honest, no need for it.
“You know, it just wasn’t used anywhere. And, so I went through most of my young life up until early adulthood not really thinking that it was something that I needed.”
His perspective has changed in recent years, telling Niva and Beatrice that a few years ago he would have railed against being introduced as a Māori journalist – partly due to the fact he couldn’t speak the language and knew little of the cultural sides.
“I would’ve said, ‘no, I’m a journalist who’s Māori’, because I was so terrified about being called upon for stuff I didn’t know. And it was awful, it was quite traumatic.
“You know, you have all the things that come with being a brown person, but none of the gifts, none of the taonga, none of the language or the tikanga or any of that. And it was incredibly frustrating,” McRoberts said.
“And I know in my career as I got older, I was being called upon more and more as we are using te reo more and more in news bulletins and things like that. You know, spring or September for me was a time of anxiety, not a time of joy, because I knew there’d be Te Wiki coming up and I knew that I would be called upon to do stories about people’s language journeys, and I wasn’t on my own.”
Throughout his career, McRoberts has been able to cover multiple war zones and major sporting events, but found himself being part of the headline after Three saw multiple senior journalists leave during difficult times.
The biggest shock for McRoberts came when Hilary Barry, who he had been reading the news with since 2005, left in 2016 for TVNZ.
“[Three] was going through some pretty horrible times, and I could understand why she’d had enough. But it was tough. We used to joke about it being like a marriage, you know, and … it felt like a marriage was coming apart.
“I know that she needed to move on and do something else for her own self. And in the same way, that I needed to stay. We’d lost a lot of people and I have such a wonderful relationship with my colleagues, and I made a commitment then that I would stay and be part of that.”
McRoberts is approaching his 18th year co-hosting, now partnered with Samantha Hayes, who he described as “wonderful”.
“It’s a weird kind of partnership. You’re quite intimately close together in terms of your physical distance apart. You spend a lot of time together. You know, I’ll know when she’s getting sick before she’s even sick,, because I can hear it in the voice and all those sorts of things. And with that whole lack of anonymity, you share that as well and that’s quite a powerful thing that you share.”
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