Yesterday I listened to RNZ’s political commentators. The principal topic was an aspect of the recently released May 2025 international migration. Kathryn Ryan starts by reminding us of the “old saying, would the last person to leave New Zealand please turn out the lights” (a saying which has been used in places other than Godzone).

The latest figure for net immigration was an inflow of 14,800; a net gain. But you wouldn’t have realised this. Ryan went on to say there’s a big migration outflow underway right now. And she’s correct if you only count New Zealand citizens. (Non-NZ citizens are people too; indeed, in that timeframe, 53,400 non-NZ citizens emigrated!)

Kathryn Ryan said there was a net loss of 30,000. There was actually a (provisional) net loss of 46,300 NZ citizens. (Possibly she – or her producer – had subtracted the all-migrant net inflow from the net loss of New Zealand citizens, having interpreted the overall 14,800 net inflow as a net inflow of non-NZ citizens.) In fact, this 46,300 net loss of NZ citizens was offset by a net gain of 61,100 non-NZ citizens.

(We should also note that total arrivals – not just people classified as ‘immigrants’ – in the year to May 2025 exceeded total departures by 3,797; less than the 14,800 ascribed to net international migration. The sum of total net arrivals in the six years to May 2025 was 244,000; an average of 40,000 per year.)

The total number of people who featured (in the period from June 2024 to May 2025) as either immigrants or emigrants was 264,000; that is, a number of people equivalent to five percent of New Zealand’s total population featured as either a permanent arrival or a permanent departure. This 264,000 includes 114,500 “migrant arrivals of non-NZ citizens”. Half of the 114,500 estimated permanent arrivals of non-NZ citizens were citizens of either India, China, Philippines or Sri Lanka.

In addition to getting the numbers wrong, a key problem with the framing of the RNZ migration discussion is that it rendered invisible these citizens of Asian countries; as people of Asian birth have been largely invisible in our intense discussions in recent years on binationalism. This gaze aversion by the political class is a kind of passive or casual racism. It is ethnicism to simply ignore the new New Zealanders who provide so much of our labour, and who generally perform their labour roles with professionalism and competence.

An important aspect of this problem is to ignore the ‘mammoth in the room’, that there is in Aotearoa New Zealand a substantial substitution of New Zealand born residents for non-New Zealand born residents; white citizens are leaving, brown denizens are arriving. In these latest statistics, for the year to May, there were 61,100 more new New Zealanders and 46,300 fewer old New Zealanders; 61,100 minus -46,300 equals 107,400. 100,000 is two percent of five million.

So, if 70% of New Zealand residents were NZ-born in May 2024, then about 68% of New Zealand residents will have been NZ-born in May 2025. (Just under 30 percent of New Zealanders were born overseas in March 2023, according to Statistics New Zealand.) The rate of ‘replacement’ is probably not quite that great, in that some of the citizens leaving permanently will have been naturalised rather than born in Aotearoa New Zealand. Another complicating factor is natural population growth – the excess of births over deaths – which was just over 20,000 in 2024. It would appear that about one-third of births in New Zealand (maybe more) are to mothers not themselves born in New Zealand.

Population ‘Replacement’ is a sensitive subject. The ‘far right’ in much of the Eurocentric world indulges in ‘replacement theory’, a conspiracy theory that there is a liberal “elite” (sometimes “Jewish”) agenda to replace ‘whites’ with ‘non-whites’. (There used to be a comparable case on the ‘far-left’, whereby ‘globalisation’ was interpreted as an agenda rather than a description.) The descriptive reality of today’s world is that there are disproportionately more – and substantially so – ‘brown’ and ‘black’ young people than their proportion among older age cohorts.

White people are diminishing, and non-white people are increasing in numbers. That’s not a problem. But it is perceived as a problem by many white people, especially disadvantaged white people in the economically polarised Euro world. If we tip-toe around this issue of changing global ethnic proportions, we leave the field to ‘replacement theory’ conspiracy theorists. We need to have adult conversations about the implications not just of aging populations, but also the re-culturation of our populations through demographic change.

Applying this last matter to Aotearoa New Zealand, a nation state with rapid population turnover, the overall national ‘personality’ can be largely retained so long as immigrants come from a wide range of other countries. When I was in Sydney last year, I heard a story about the emergence of India’s ‘caste system’ in Australia. This is the kind of cultural change that we do not want in New Zealand; such cultural colonisation can be averted by avoiding too much immigration from a single country. And through a process of cultural fusion, rather than either assimilation or the emergence of cultural silos.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Germany’s important election last week struggled to make the news cycle, even on Germany’s own Deutsche Welle(DW), Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s BBC. Especially (but not only) in the international media, most of the focus was on a single party (AFD, Alliance for Germany) that was never going to have the most votes and was (almost) never going to become part of the resulting government.

Germany is the world’s third largest national economy, and traditionally dominates the politics of the European Union; an important example of this dominance was the Eurozone financial crisis of the first-half of the 2010s; a crisis that was (unsatisfactorily) resolved, thanks to a problematic and controversial program of fiscal austerity.

At present, Germany, like New Zealand, is experiencing an economic recession. (Provisional annual economic growthwas -0.2% in 2024 and -0.3% in 2023.) The cause is similar, too, in both countries: the same ‘balance the Budget’ mentality that gave the world the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Election Result

The ‘winner’ of the German election was the CDU/CSU Alliance (see Wikipedia for a better presentation of the results), which works a bit like the Liberal/National Coalition in Australia. (The Christian Social Union functions in Bavaria much like Australia’s National Party functions in rural Queensland.) CDU/CSU (like National in New Zealand) comfortably prevailed with 28.5 percent of the vote, entitling that alliance to 33 percent of the seats in the Bundestag (Parliament).

The new Chancellor (equivalent to Prime Minister) will be Friedrich Merz; a 69-year-old version of our own Christopher Luxon, as far as I can tell. He is strongly anti-Putin and pro-Israel. He has come to power well and truly under the international media radar; and will be in a strong position to exert near-absolute power, given that he will always be able to turn to the AFD (who got more votes than the Social Democrats; 20.8%) for support in the Bundestag for any measure that is not palatable to Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. In the new Parliament, the Greens and the Left merely make up the numbers.

Merz’s Christian Democrats will form a coalition government with the losing SPD (Social Democratic Party, like Labour in New Zealand) who came third with 16.4 percent of the vote; 19 percent of the seats. Together these two parties of the establishment centre hold 52% of the new parliament, despite having less than 45% of the vote. (The outgoing minority government was a centrist coalition of the SPD and the Greens; the election was held early because the ACT-like Liberal Party – the FPD, Free Democrats – withdrew from the coalition. The FPD vote shrunk from 11.4 percent in 2021 to just 4.3 percent of the vote this time.)

The result in Germany proved to be very much like that of the United Kingdom in 2024: a slide in support for the two major parties (‘the establishment centre’), a consolidation of power to the self-same establishment centre, and a shift of that establishment centre to the right. (See my chart in Germany’s stale (and still pale) political mainstream, Evening Report 27 February 2025, for a timeline of decline.) While both countries technically underwent a change of government, in both countries the establishment has entrenched its power, and in both countries the political assumptions of the power centre have shifted to the right.

Clearly this is problematic for democracy, because historically disastrous popular support for the ‘broad church’ parties of the establishment centre has coincided with increased power to those parties, as well as policy convergence between them. Further, based on legislative electoral requirements, neither Germany nor the United Kingdom (nor the United States for that matter) will have a new government until 2029. At a time when a week is a long time in international politics, 208 weeks is an eternity. World War Three, a distinct possibility, may be in its second or third year by then.

Voting System

Germany represents the prototype upon which New Zealand’s MMP voting system is based. There are some differences though, and some recent changes.

Germany calls its all-important ‘party vote’ the ‘second vote’, disguising its importance. It is possible that many German voters do not fully appreciate its significance. The electorate vote is called ‘first vote’, and winners (by a plurality, not necessarily a majority) are elected ‘directly’. The second (party) vote is understood as a top-up vote to ensure proportionality.

Party lists are regional in Germany. And ‘ethnic parties’ may get special privileges.

In one respect the German version is more proportional than the New Zealand version of MMP, in that it no longer allows overhang MPs. (However, the most recent result is not proportional in the important sense that two parties together with less than 45% of the vote have 52% of the seats.) In MMP, one can easily imagine an overhang situation being frequent if the ‘major’ parties, which win most electorates, only get between 16% and 29% of the party vote.

In 2013, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court decided that overhang seats were too big a threat to proportionality. So, they introduced ‘levelling seats’. In effect, it meant that if one party gets an overhang, then all parties get an overhang. The result was, in 2013, that a parliament that should have had 598 members (Deputies) ended up with 631, an effective overhang of 33. In 2017 that effective overhang grew to 111, and to 137 in 2021.

For 2025, they decided to abandon overhang representation altogether, by not guaranteeing direct election through the first vote. And they fixed the size of the Bundestag to 630 Deputies, up from a base-size of 598.

If the new German system was in place in New Zealand in 2023, then two of the Te Pati Māori electorate seats from 2023 would have been forfeit, going instead to second placed candidates; proportionality in 2023 entitled Te Pati Māori to four seats, not the six which they have. However, we should note that, if New Zealand was using the present German version of MMP, there would be no special Māori electorates, but the Māori Party would be exempt the five percent party threshold. Ethnic-privileged parties in Germany are incentivised to focus on the party vote, not the electorate vote. In Germany there is a Danish ethnic party (South Schleswig Voters’ Association) which is exempt the threshold. Its leader, Stefan Seidler, did not win his electorate. But his party got 0.15% of the nationwide vote, meaning it qualified for 0.15% of the 630 places in the Bundestag; one seat, for him.

New Zealand voters seem to have more tactical and strategic political nous than do German voters. Thus, it has been very rare for a party in New Zealand to miss out qualifying for Parliament because of getting between 4% and 5% of the party votes (noting that both countries operate a 5% disqualification threshold). In Germany, party-vote percentages just below 5% are not uncommon. In New Zealand, voters, conscious that they want to play a role in coalition-building, actively help parties near the threshold to get over the line. (Indeed, I voted New Zealand First in 2023, because I was 99.9% sure that the only post-election coalition options would be National/ACT or National/ACT/NZF; I favoured the three-party alternative, so I used my vote strategically to help block a National/ACT government.)

Indeed the latest German result was a bit like the latest New Zealand result, but with a party resembling New Zealand First (BSW) getting 4.972% of the vote, so getting no seats at all. BSW getting just a few more votes would have meant a substantial erosion of the two-party power result which eventuated. It is extremely difficult for new non-ethnic parties to get elected in Germany.

In 2025, two parties scored just under five percent of the vote. As well as the BSW, the (ACT-like) Free Democrats who had been part of the previous government, and who had indeed precipitated the early election, scored 4.3%. Indeed, fifteen percent of the votes were ‘wasted’ – that is, cast for ultimately unsuccessful parties. In New Zealand the wasted vote is typically around four percent. Indeed, this high wasted vote turns out to be a more serious challenge to proportionality in German than uncompensated overhang seats.

Both Germany and New Zealand have the contentious (in New Zealand) ‘electorate MP’ rule; the rule that’s misleadingly dubbed in New Zealand as the ‘coat-tail’ rule. (Misleading, because most MPs come in on the coat-tails of their party leadership, and always have.) In Germany the rule is stricter than in New Zealand. In order to avoid disqualification by getting less than 5% of the party vote, New Zealand requires that the party get one electorate MP. In Germany the rule (initially the same as New Zealand), since 1957 has been a requirement for three electorate MPs. In Germany in 2021, the Left Party got 4.87% of the vote and three electorate MPs; they just squeezed in, on both criteria!

Overall, United States’ Vice-President JD Vance’s pre-election comments about democracy in Germany were valid. German politics continues to exclude the non-establishment parties of both the right and the left, despite support for these parties having been increasing for a while, and now representing the majority of German voters.

Media Framing

German television electoral coverage, if DW is anything to go by, is superficial; indeed, is quite insensitive to the national and local dramas taking place. I watched the coverage live. In the hour before the Exit Poll results were announced, the discussion barely mentioned the potential dramas taking place, despite both the BSW and FDP parties pre-polling only just under the five percent threshold. The state of the economy was mentioned in a perfunctory way; clearly it was not a big issue for the political class on display.

At 6 o’clock exactly, the exit-poll results were read out, as if they were the election result. As indeed they turned out to be, more-or-less; the same as the pre-election polls. The subsequent uninterested attitude towards the actual counting of the votes was disappointing. There had been a bit of this in the 2024 UK election as well; as if the exit poll was the election result. In the UK case, Labour’s actual result (for the popular vote) was well under the exit poll result, while the Conservatives did significantly better than their exit poll tally; those facts, though, were for the nerds and psephologists.

In my observation, early votes and exit polls favour the parties supported by the political class; election day votes much less so. So, in New Zealand in 2023 it was initially looking like there would be a two-party coalition of the right. But, to the attentive, as the night wore on, the National Party percentage fell from 41% to 38%, meaning that NZF would have to be included in any resulting coalition.

I suspected something quite similar would happen in Germany, and I was only partially wrong. The exit poll results, and the subsequent counts, were presented to just one decimal place; indeed, the presentation of the numbers was very poor throughout. So, it was hard to see to what extent BSW was improving as the votes were counted.

In the exit poll, two parties – FPD and BSW – were shown as being on 4.7%, and the AFD was on 19.5%. So, the two 4.7% parties were largely written out of the subsequent discussion. We did see an early concession by the FPD, who – representing a segment of the political class – understood the polling dynamics rather well. And we did see the AFD’s Alice Weidel being asked if she was disappointed to get under 20%. Ms Weidel put on a brave face, but she did seem disappointed. When the votes were actually counted, her party got 20.8% exactly on Weidel’s prior expectations.

BSW was completely ignored. There was simply no interest in the possibility that they might reach the 5% threshold, even when the vote count had them upto 4.9%. In the end BSW reached 4.972%; so close! Out of sight, out of mind! In the official results the BSW were lumped with ‘Other Parties’. The DW election panel were too unaware to make any comments about the party itself, its philosophies, or how its possible success might influence the process of forming a coalition government. (Of particular importance was that, with just a few more votes, BSW might have given Eastern Germany a voice in a three-way coalition government.)

For DW, their perennial concern is the place of Germany within Europe and the World; they had little time to give the outside world a glimpse into the domestic lives and politics of ordinary Germans. And we heard nothing about the ‘ethnic vote’, the privileged Denmark Party notwithstanding. I suspect that many if not most of the recent immigrants who do much of the work in Germany either could not vote or did not vote. The election was about them, not for them; denizens, not citizens.

However, DW did invite on a gentleman who mildly focussed the attention of the discussants by suggesting that one of the priorities of the new Chancellor – Friedrich Merz – would be to acquire nuclear weapons! I don’t think the rest of the world had any prior insights into that; ordinary Germans were probably equally in the dark.

Who is Friedrich Merz? Who knows? It turns out that he dropped out of politics for a while, to play a leading role in BlackRock, the international acquisitions company which until recently owned New Zealand’s SolarZero (refer Update on SolarZero Liquidation by BlackRock, Scoop, 29 January 2025). Our media told us that the election was all about the “far-right” AFD Party; that is, the far non-establishment-right. We in New Zealand heard nothing about the far establishment-right; the shadowy man (or his party). Some now fear Merz will be an out-and-out warmonger. Even Al Jazeera, which can be relied upon to cover many stories about places New Zealand’s media barely touches (and in a bit more depth), had the portraits of Olaf Scholz and Alice Weidel on the screen, on 22 February, the day before the election, despite the certainty that Merz world become the new Chancellor.

In that vein, I heard a German woman interviewed in Christchurch, on RNZ on 25 February. She, disappointed with the election result, spent her whole edited four minutes railing about the AFD, as if the AFD had won. There was no useful commentary, by her or RNZ, of the actual result of Germany’s election.

Are we so shallow that we don’t care; that some of us with the loudest voices only want to rail against a non-establishment party, and to see the democratic support for alternative parties as being somehow anti-democratic?

East Germany

People of a certain age in New Zealand will remember the former East Germany; the DDR, German ‘Democratic’ Republic. Most people in Germany itself will have had knowledge of it, including the Berlin-based political staff of DW who were mostly in their thirties, forties and fifties. But the ongoing issues of Eastern Germany were barely in their mindframes.

In Eastern Germany – the former DDR – (especially outside of Berlin), support for the AFD was close to 40%, for BSW over 10%, and the Left much higher than in Western Germany. In the former East Berlin (which I visited in 1974), the Left seems to have been the most popular party. Support in the East for the establishment parties combined was between 25% and 30%, and with a lower turnout.

BSW, it turns out, is Left on economic policy and Right on social policy. And, in the German discourse, is categorised by the political class as ‘pro-Putin’. If BSW had got 5% of the vote, Merz could have tried to bring them into his government; or Merz might have turned to the Green Party instead of a ‘pro-Putin’ party. But I cannot see even the German Greens being able to govern as a junior partner to a belligerent establishment-right CDU-led government. BSW’s failure to get 5% of the vote may turn out to be one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of Germany’s future history.

As JD Vance stated, this Eastern German situation poses a danger for democracy in Germany and in Europe. Eastern Germany is where the German state is at its most vulnerable. The majority of voters there have voted for ‘pro-Putin’ parties; and, significantly, parties prioritising the problems of economic failure over the big-politics of extranational power-plays.

The new German government, it would seem, is set to aggravate (or, at best, ignore) the problems of Germany’s ‘near-East’, while setting out to inflame the problems of Europe’s ‘far-East’.

The Debt Brake

This is Germany’s equivalent of Ruth Richardson’s 1994 ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act’ (now entrenched in New Zealand law and lore). This is the major single reason why New Zealand has had so many infrastructure problems this century, and why so many young men and families emigrated to Australia in the 1990s, with some of these emigrants coming back to New Zealand in recent years as ‘501s’.

The Merkel debt-brake is the self-inflicted single major reason why many European economies are in such a mess today; and Germany in particular. Germany is congenitally deeply committed to all kinds of financial austerity, with government financial austerity being the most ingrained. Rather than circulating as it should, money is concentrating. The debt-brake is “a German constitutional rule introduced [in 2009] during the Global Financial crisis to enforce budget discipline and reduce [public] debt loads in the country” (see Berlin Briefing, below).

Germany still has a parliamentary session under the old Parliament, before the new parliament convenes. Michaela Küfner (see Berlin Briefing, below) suggests the possibility that the old “lame duck” Parliament could remove the debt-brake from the German constitution, because she sees the make-up of the new more right-wing parliament as being less amenable to address this ‘elephant in the room’. Seems democratically dodgy to me, even talking about pushing dramatic constitutional legislation through a ‘lame duck’ parliament; like Robert Muldoon, pushing through a two-year parliamentary term for New Zealand in the week after the 1984 election!

(Two-year parliamentary terms are not unknown, by the way; the United States has a two-year term for its Congress. This is almost never mentioned when we discuss the parliamentary term in New Zealand. In the United States at present, there will be many people for whom the 2026 election cannot come fast enough; an opportunity to reign-in Donald Trump.)

Future German relations with the United States

On 27 February (28 Feb, New Zealand time) – before the fiasco in the White House on 28 February – I watched Berlin Briefing on DW. This programme is a regular panel discussion of the political editorship of Deutsche Welle.

The context here is that Friedrich Merz made an important speech the evening after the election; a speech that had the Berlin beltway – “people behind the scenes here in Berlin” – all agog. Merz said: “For me the absolute priority will be strengthening Germany so much so that we can achieve [defence] independence from the United States.”

The discussion proceeded as follows:

“How important is this anchoring in Nato of the idea of the United States as ‘The Great Protector’?” Nina Haase, DW political correspondent: “I don’t think there’s a word, ‘massive’ is not enough; people behind the scenes here in Berlin … they talk about are we going to part with the United States amicably or are we going to become enemies [my emphasis] … Europe has relied on the US so much since the Second World War is completely new thinking; just to prepare for a scenario with, if you will, would-be enemies on two sides; in the East with Russia launching a hybrid attack     and then [an enemy] in the West as well.” They go on to talk about the possible need for conscription in Germany.

The political correspondents were talking like bourgeois brat adult children who had expected that they should be able to enjoy a power-lifestyle underwritten by ‘big daddy’ always there as a financial and security backstop; and just realising that the rug of entitlement might be being pulled from under them. Michaela Küfner (Chief Political Editor of DW) goes on to talk about an “existential threat from the United States”, meaning the withdrawal (and potential enmity) of the great protector. “Like your Rich Uncle from across the ocean turning against you”, she said.

Nina Haase: “Pacifism, the very word, needs to be redefined in Germany … Germans are only now able to understand that you have to have weapons in order not to use them.” She was referring to earlier generations of pacifists (like me) who saw weapons as the problem, not the solution.

Ulrike Franke: “Everything needs to change for everything to stay the same”, basically saying Germany itself may have to pursue domestic Rich Uncle policies to maintain the lifestyles of the (entitled) ten percenters.

Michaela Küfner, towards the end of the discussion: “The AFD is framing [the supporters of] the parties which will make up the coming coalition as the political class who we will challenge”. And she noted, but only at the very end of the long discussion, that the effectively disenfranchised people in Eastern Germany are “a lot more Russia-friendly”.

Maybe Merz has a plan to build employment-rich munitions factories in Eastern Germany, to address both his security concerns and the obvious political discontent arising from unemployment and fast-eroding living standards? But Merz will have to abandon his innate fiscal conservatism before he can even contemplate that; can he do a Hoover to Hitler transition? Rearmament was Hitler’s game; his means to full employment after the Depression.

Implications for Democracy

I sense that Friedrich Merz will become the face of coming German politics, just as Angela Merkel once was, and as Trump and Starmer are very much the faces of government in their countries; becoming – albeit through democratic means – similar to the autocrats that, in Eastern and Middle-Eastern countries, they [maybe not Trump] rail against.

We might note that if we look carefully at World War One and World War Two, the core conflict was Germany versus Russia. Will World War Three be the same? And which side will ‘we’ (or ‘US’) be on? In WW1 and WW2, we were on Russia’s side. (Hopefully, in the future, we can be neutral with respect to other countries’ conflicts.)

Democracy is under strain worldwide. The diminishing establishment-centre – the political and economic elites and the people with secure employment and housing who still vote for familiar major parties – is clinging on to power, and for the time-being remains more powerful than ever in Europe.

In the Europe of the early 1930s, it was the Great Depression as a period of abject political failure that resulted in the suspension of democracy. All the signs are that the same failures of democratic leadership – worldwide from the 1920s – will bring about similar consequences.

For democracies to save themselves, they should bring non-establishment voices to the table. In 2025. Germany will be another important test case, already sowing the seeds of political failure. We should be wary of demonising the far non-establishment-right while lionising the far establishment-right.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Ref.

The reported plea bargain between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the United States government brings to a close one of the darkest periods in the history of media freedom, says the union for Australian journalists.

While the details of the deal are still to be confirmed, MEAA welcomed the release of Assange, a Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance member, after five years of relentless campaigning by journalists, unions, and press freedom advocates around the world.

MEAA remains concerned what the deal will mean for media freedom around the world.

The work of WikiLeaks at the centre of this case — which exposed war crimes and other wrongdoing by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan — was strong, public interest journalism.

MEAA fears the deal will embolden the US and other governments around the world to continue to pursue and prosecute journalists who disclose to the public information they would rather keep suppressed.

MEAA media federal president Karen Percy welcomed the news that Julian Assange has already been released from Belmarsh Prison, where he has been held as his case has wound its way through UK courts.

“We wish Julian all the best as he is reunited with his wife, young sons and other relatives who have fought tirelessly for his freedom,” she said.

‘Relentless battle against this injustice’
“We commend Julian for his courage over this long period, and his legal team and supporters for their relentless battle against this injustice.

“We’ve been extremely concerned about the impact on his physical and mental wellbeing during Julian’s long period of imprisonment and respect the decision to bring an end to the ordeal for all involved.

Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 25, 2024

“The deal reported today does not in any way mean that the struggle for media freedom has been futile; quite the opposite, it places governments on notice that a global movement will be mobilised whenever they blatantly threaten journalism in a similar way.

Percy said the espionage charges laid against Assange were a “grotesque overreach by the US government” and an attack on journalism and media freedom.

“The pursuit of Julian Assange has set a dangerous precedent that will have a potential chilling effect on investigative journalism,” she said.

“The stories published by WikiLeaks and other outlets more than a decade ago were clearly in the public interest. The charges by the US sought to curtail free speech, criminalise journalism and send a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished.”

Percy said was clearly in the public interest and it had “always been an outrage” that the US government sought to prosecute him for espionage for reporting that was published in collaboration with some of the world’s leading media organisations.

Julian Assange has been an MEAA member since 2007 and in 2011 WikiLeaks won the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Walkley award, one of Australia’s most coveted journalism awards.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand-adopted Fiji journalist, sports writer, national news agency reporter, anti-coup activist, media freedom advocate, storyteller and mentor Sri Krishnamurthi has died. He was just two weeks shy of his 60th birthday.

Fiji-born on 15 August 1963, just after his elder twin brother Murali, Sri grew up in the port city of Lautoka, Fiji’s second largest in the west of Viti Levu island. His family were originally Girmitya, indentured Indian plantation workers shipped out to Fiji under under harsh conditions by the British colonial rulers.

“My grandmother, Bonamma, came from India with my grandfather and came to work in the sugar cane fields under the indentured system,” Sri recalled in a recent RNZ interview with Blessen Tom.

“They lived in ‘lines’ — a row of one-room houses. They worked the cane fields from 6am to 6pm largely without a break. It was basically slavery in all but name.”

However, the Krishnamurthi family became one of the driving forces in building up Fiji’s largest NGO, TISI Sangam.

He made his initial mark as a journalist with The Fiji Times, Fiji’s most influential daily newspaper. However, along with many of his peers, he became disillusioned and affected with the trauma and displacement as a result of Sitiveni Rabuka’s two military coups in 1987 at the start of what became known as the country’s devastating “coup culture”.

Sri migrated to New Zealand to make a new life, as did most of his family members, and he was active for the Coalition for Democracy (CDF) in the post-coup years. He worked as a journalist for many organisations, including the NZ Press Association, the civil service, Parliament and more recently with RNZ Pacific.

Tana’s ‘sleepless nights’
His last story for RNZ Pacific was about Tana Umaga ”expecting sleepless nights” as the new coach of Moana Pasifika.

“A friend to many, he is best known in the journalism industry for his long-time stint at NZPA covering sport, and more recently for his work with the Pacific Media Centre,” said New Zealand Herald editor-at-large Shayne Currie in his Media Insider column.

“During his NZPA career, he covered various international rugby tours of New Zealand, America’s Cups, cricket tours, the Warriors in the NRL and was also among a handful of reporters who travelled to Mexico in 1999 for the All Whites’ first-ever appearance at Fifa’s Confederations Cup.”

His mates remember him as a generous friend and dedicated journalist.

“He enjoyed being a New Zealander, a true Kiwi if we can call someone that,” recalled Nik Naidu, an activist businessman, former journalist and trustee of the Whanau Community Centre and Hub, when speaking about his lifelong family friend at the funeral on Friday.

“Sri was one of the few Fijians and migrants over 30 years ago who embraced Māoridom and the first nation people of our land. It is only now in New Zealand that the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi is becoming better understood by the mainstream.

“Sri lived Te Tiriti all those years ago, and advocated for Māori and indigenous rights for so long.”

Postgraduate studies
I first got to know Sri in 2017 when he rolled up at AUT University and said he wanted to study journalism. I was floored by this idea. Although I hadn’t really known him personally before this, I knew him by reputation as being a talented sports journalist from Fiji who had made his mark at NZPA.

I remember asking Sri why did he want to do journalism — albeit at postgraduate level — when he could easily teach the course standing on his head. And then as we chatted I realised that he was rebuilding his life after a stroke that he had suffered travelling from Chennai to Bangalore, India, back in 2016.

Well, I persuaded him to branch out in his planned Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies and tackle a range of challenging new skills and knowledge, such as digital media. And I was honoured too that he wanted to take my Asia Pacific Journalism studies postgraduate course.

He wanted to build on his Fiji origins and expand his Pacific reporting skills, and he mentored many of his fellow postgraduates, people with life experience and qualifications but often new to journalism, especially Pacific journalism.

I realised he was somebody rather special who had a remarkable range of skills and an extraordinary range of contacts, even for a journalist. He seemed to know everybody under the sun. And he had a friendly manner and an insatiable curiosity.

From then he gravitated around Asia Pacific Journalism and the Pacific Media Centre. Next thing he was recruited as editor/writer of Pacific Media Watch, a media freedom project that we had been running in the centre since 2007 in collaboration with the Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

In spite of his post-stroke blues, he was one of the best project editors that we ever had. He had a tremendous zeal and enthusiasm no matter what handicap was in his way. He was willing to try anything — so keen to give it a go.

95bFM radio presenter
Sri became the presenter of our weekly Pacific radio programme Southern Cross on 95bFM, not an easy task with his voice issues, but he gained a popular following. He interviewed people from all around the Pacific.

Next challenge was when we sent him to the University of the South Pacific to join the journalism school team over there covering the 2018 Fiji General Election. We had hoped 2006 coup leader Voreqe Bainimarama would be ousted then, but he wasn’t – that came four years later last December.

However, Sri scored an exclusive interview with the original coup leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, the man responsible for Sri fleeing Fiji and who is now Prime Minister of Fiji. Sri got the repentent former Fiji strongman to admit that he was “coerced” by the defeated Alliance party into carrying out the first coup.

He graduated from AUT with a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies (Digital Media) in 2019 to add to his earlier MBA at Massey University. Several times he expressed to me that his ambition was to gain a PhD and join the USP journalism programme to mentor future Fiji journalists.

At AUT, he won the 2018 RNZ Pacific Prize for his Fiji coup coverage and in 2019 he was awarded the Storyboard Award for his outstanding contribution to diversity journalism. RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor tells a story about how he had declared to her at the time:  “I’m going to work for RNZ Pacific.” And he did.

However, the following year, our world changed forever with the COVID-19 pandemic and many plans crashed. Sri and I teamed up again, this time on a Pacific Covid and Climate crisis project, writing for Asia Pacific Report.  He recalled about this venture: “The fact that we kept the Pacific Media Watch project going when other news media around us — such as Bauer — were failing showed a tenacity that was unique and a true commitment to the Pacific.”

‘Virtual kava bar’
It was a privilege to work with Sri and to share his enthusiasm and friendship. He was an extraordinarily generous person, especially to fellow journalists. I was really touched when he and Blessen Tom, now also with RNZ, made a video dedicated to the Pacific Media Watch and my work.

Nik Naidu shares a tale of Sri’s generosity with a group of West Papuan students last year when their Indonesian government suddenly pulled their scholarships and left them in dire straits. AUT postgraduate communications Laurens Ikinia was their advocate, trying to get their visas extended and fundraising for them to complete their studies.

“Many people don’t know this, but Lauren’s rent was late by a year — more than $3000 — and Sri organised money and paid for this. That was Sri, deep down the kindest of souls.”

During his Pacific Media Watch stint, Sri wrote several generous profiles of regional colleagues, including The Pacific Newsroom, the “virtual kava bar” news success founded by Pacific media veterans Sue Ahearn and Michael Field, and also of the expanding RNZ Pacific newsroom team with Koroi Hawkins appointed as the first Melanesian news editor.

But he struggled at times with depression and his journalism piece that really stands out for me is an article that he wrote about living with a stroke for three years. It was scary but inspirational and it took huge courage to write. As he wrote at the time:

“You learn new tricks when you have a stroke – words associated with images, or words through the process of elimination worked for me. And then there was the trusted old Google when you couldn’t be bothered.

“You learn to use bungee shoelaces or Velcro shoes because tying shoelaces just won’t happen. The right arm is bung and you are back to typing with two fingers – as I’m doing now. At the same time, technology is your biggest ally.”

Sri Krishnamurthi died last week on August 2 — way too early. He was a great survivor against the odds. Moce, Sri, your friends and colleagues will fondly remember your generous spirit and legacy.

Dr David Robie is a retired journalism professor and founding director of the AUT Pacific Media Centre. He worked with Sri Krishnamurthi for six years as an academic mentor, friend and journalism colleague. This was article is published under a community partnership with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

I was concerned when the story broke last month about inappropriate subediting by RNZ staff of ‘wirecopy’ from international sources such as Reuters. The wire-tampering story broke with particular reference to stories about the war in Ukraine; and, at least for that story, it needs to be understood that Aotearoa New Zealand is an aligned party to that military conflict, so certain sensitivities will apply.

I was then concerned when RNZ chief executive Paul Thomson called the RNZ subedits “pro-Kremlin garbage”. For background see Mediawatch: Further fallout as RNZ takes out the ‘Kremlin garbage’, Evening Report, 18 June 2023. For a senior professional communicator, the RNZ CE set a particularly bad example.

Subsequently, RNZ has undertaken an audit of stories published on its website, so its possible to check out the bias of the sub-edits. It turns out that there is a clear anti-Washington rather than pro-Kremlin sub-editorial line. A number of the stories brought to light – and corrected – relate to Latin America; in addition to stories featuring Ukraine, China, Taiwan, Israel and Ireland. (I have heard it said that the sub-editor in question is not only pro-Kremlin, but also has a disposition towards anti-democratic regimes. I cannot agree; I would assess the sub-editor in question to be an old-fashioned democratic left-winger who, in Cold War times, might once have had some pro-Soviet sympathies.)

Before looking at specific themes of the sub-edits, I present the following quote (8’20”) from Mediawatch, RNZ’s Russiagate, 14 June 2023.

The programme features Hayden Donnell talking to RNZ’s Anna Thomas about the purpose of subediting a “pre-subbed” wired story from an international news agency: “It’s already gone through a pretty robust process at Reuters or AP or wherever you’re sourcing it from. Most of the time it’ll just require an editor formatting it to in-house style, maybe removing some Americanisms, cutting it to length, and plonking it on the website.”

And then: “What can [ie should] you edit with wirecopy? Even if you agree with this person’s edit, the heart of the issue is that you cannot take copy and make substantive changes to its meaning. But you can add context, you can delete sections for length, you can insert relevant local information or quotes. If you cannot make any changes at all, that’s untenable.” [I have sub-edited bits of this second quotation to shorten it, to remove repetition, and to make it more like written rather than spoken language.]

The problem is that even very small additions, deletions and substitutions can subtly alter the meaning of a text. That’s of course a problem here, and it is clear that there has been an intent to steer the meaning in an anti-Washington direction. By way of contrast, disinterested subediting will be like a ‘random walk’ [a statistical concept] meaning that, on average, altered meanings are unbiased. Subeditors who are close to an issue may display unconscious bias, whereas outsourced subeditors (including robotic subeditors) who are distant from the issues in a text may be unbiased but ‘noisy’; such subeditors will on average make more mistakes, and will struggle to appreciate nuance in a text.

While the problem subeditor in question was clearly inserting an anti-Washington bias, his defence may well have been that he [other media stories refer to ‘he’] was correcting a pro-Washington bias in the material he was working on. Certainly, in any Goodies versus Baddies narrative – inherent in war stories – academic or journalist disinterest is largely absent from most stories; these are narrational contexts where a person who is not overtly on one side is too easily characterised as being on the other side. As the question goes: ‘Which side are you on?‘.

Editorial biases are commonly worse than sub-editorial tampering. These in particular involve the decision whether or not to run a story. While these are often dictated by the fast-moving news cycle – meaning that stories about Covid19, for example, were biased towards the beginning of that pandemic, and created an ‘exceptionalism’ towards that disease at the expense of contextual discussion and other health risks – they also reflect self-censorship (partly but not only because of the fear of the wrath of authorities or other power-brokers).

Another form of bias arises in the need to create headlines which will draw readers to a story; a bias compounded by the fact today that most stories have ‘click-bait’ headlines (hyperlinks) which are even more sensational and less qualified than the actual headlines to the stories.

‘Loaded’ Language

Consider this story: Organization of American States head ‘one of worst in history’ – Ebrard. The changes made and then unmade are listed at the end of the story.  With respect to former Bolivian president Evo Morales, the mischievous subeditor replaced “resigned under pressure” with “resigned and fled under threat”. Both versions are essentially true, though the original (and restored) version may have understated the danger Morales faced; or perhaps the modified version overstated the danger.

We also see, in that story, the clause “a presidential vote that the OAS said was rigged” was changed (and unchanged) to “a presidential vote that the OAS claimed was rigged”. This leads to the issue of the degree to which some synonyms are more ‘loaded’ or ‘accusative’ than others. (Note here that if the original story had used the word ‘claimed’, there would have been no issue; the question is the motive of the subeditor in making the change.)

Aside

A common sort of story takes the form ‘A abuses B’, where ‘to abuse’ means any action that is in some sense ‘bad’. Consider this story, about the November 1975 regime change in Australia (commonly known there as ‘The Dismissal’). The allegation is of Washington involvement in precipitating this particular political crisis.

This is an A abuses B story, where (in this case) ‘A’ is the American CIA, ‘abuses’ means ‘dismisses’, and ‘B’ means ‘the elected government of Australia’. The story at its most disinterested level is [passive voice] that ‘The Government was dismissed’. In the active voice, the most neutral version is that ‘sources said that the Dismissal was instigated by the CIA’. The next level would be ‘sources claimed that the Dismissal was instigated by the CIA’. Up another notch would be ‘The CIA allegedly instigated the Dismissal’, or [passive voice] ‘The CIA was accused of instigating the Dismissal’. Finally, the most overt form is the unqualified ‘The CIA instigated the Dismissal’.

In the various stories we read and hear, many which are in the ‘A abuses B’ form, we will encounter the full linguistic range from neutral (‘something bad happened’) to the presentation of an accusation as a fact. Actually, the way a story is narrated is ‘rhetoric’; and neutral rhetoric can be a way to intentionally downplay something, just as accusative rhetoric upplays that same story.

Back to the Main Narrative

We see this in this RNZ story, Two activists involved in land dispute killed in Brazil: police, in which the restored headline is in the passive voice and the word ‘said’ is only implied. The inappropriately sub-edited version is in the active voice with the abused named without ‘alleged’ as a qualification: ‘Death squad shoots dead two Brazilian land activists’.

This story Chile passes bill to boost taxes on rich, spur investment, small business shows that the subversive  RNZ sub-editor is coming from a somewhat conventional left-wing perspective, and not from an autocratic ‘far-right’ Russian perspective. People who are anti-inequality don’t usually regard Russia these days as an exemplar country.

This story for a while contained an inserted and unqualified allegation of a “2014 US-based coup”:Serbia accuses Ukraine and unnamed EU country of Air Serbia bomb hoaxes. It’s an example that shows the anti-Washington stance of the sub-editor. Indeed, articles like these are not the correct place to debate the extent of United States’ involvement (or otherwise) in the regime-change event in Ukraine in February 2014.

In this story we see the explicit anti-Washington subeditorial stance with respect to China over Taiwan, and also the more neutral word ‘says’ preferred by the subeditor over the word ‘worries’ with respect to Japan: South Korea’s president seeks closer Tokyo ties after latest North Korea missile launch. Yet this story’s subediting uses the rhetorical word ‘blunders’ with respect to China, not exactly an endorsement of Beijing.

Finally

I would regard Paul Thomson’s use of the rhetorical word ‘garbage’ to be more problematic than the sub-editors’ word ‘blunders’. Garbage is ‘waste’, not ‘lies’. Waste is a reality of life that should be regarded as normatively neutral, not wicked. In ecology and sustainable economics, waste is indeed a ‘good’, not a ‘bad’; an input as well as an output. It is not professional to oppose bad rhetoric with worse rhetoric.

And, I wonder if the mischievous subeditor has a point in interpreting much of the copy that came his way as having its own bias. If the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT was trained only on copy acceptable to today’s western authorities and power-brokers, would the bot’s outputs really be any more truthful than the ‘pro-Kremlin garbage’ that a frustrated socialist RNZ minion was (for a brief while) turning out?

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Paul and Selwyn deep dive into the battle to control a narrative, waged by all sides in a polarised combative world, and how modern mainstream media institutions, like Radio New Zealand, fall vulnerable in the absence of robust all-sides-considered analysis and debate.

In this episode, Paul and Selwyn analyse how fourth Estate bias, propaganda, and conflict-force fact-vacuums are the challenge of our times in this disinformation age.

Upon this context, Paul and Selwyn consider:

* Why Is the Radio New Zealand sub-editor pro-RU-content debacle symptomatic of a fact-vacuum environment?

* Why is all media vulnerable to disinformation in the absence of robust NATO-Ukraine-Russia analysis?

* What are the unspoken of ‘big picture’ shifts in Russian Federation / Global South relations?

LINKS and REFERENCES:

• https://KiwiPolitico.com
• https://www.dekoder.org/de/person/ekaterina-schulmann-0
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/media/180
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/news-extras/story/2018893905/rnz-editorial-audit
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/491788/nz-entering-ukraine-conflict-at-whim-of-govt-former-labour-general-secretary
• https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-russian-elites-think-putins-war-is-doomed-to-fail

INTERACTION:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

You can continue to interact with this podcast, simply by going to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Paul and Selwyn will deep dive into the battle to control a narrative, waged by all sides in a polarised combative world, and how modern mainstream media institutions, like Radio New Zealand, fall vulnerable in the absence of robust all-sides-considered analysis and debate.

In this episode, Paul and Selwyn will analyse how fourth Estate bias, propaganda, and conflict-force fact-vacuums are the challenge of our times in this disinformation age.

Upon this context, Paul and Selwyn will consider:

* Why Is the Radio New Zealand sub-editor pro-RU-content debacle symptomatic of a fact-vacuum environment?

* Why is all media vulnerable to disinformation in the absence of robust NATO-Ukraine-Russia analysis?

* What are the unspoken of ‘big picture’ shifts in Russian Federation / Global South relations?

LINKS and REFERENCES:

• https://KiwiPolitico.com
• https://www.dekoder.org/de/person/ekaterina-schulmann-0
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/media/180
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/news-extras/story/2018893905/rnz-editorial-audit
• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/491788/nz-entering-ukraine-conflict-at-whim-of-govt-former-labour-general-secretary
• https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/02/25/russia-ends-nowhere-they-say
• https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-russian-elites-think-putins-war-is-doomed-to-fail

INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:

Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.

To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/

Remember to subscribe to the channel.

For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:

• Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.

You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Political deception is as old as politics itself. There have always been political actors who have attempted to twist and manipulate information. Sometimes this includes politicians, political activists, journalists, and even governments. When the inaccuracy of information is accidental and innocent it is referred to as “misinformation”, but when it is deliberate and malign it is labelled “disinformation”.

Arguably political deception is getting worse. The technological and media landscape is changing in ways that allow disinformation and misinformation to be spread more easily, with dangerous consequences.

Unfortunately, this heightened potential for deception comes at a time when there is much greater political polarisation and fragmenting of New Zealand’s social cohesion. This is not just a consequence of the pandemic hangover, but also accelerating social dislocation caused by ongoing crises of inequality, housing affordability, access to health and education, and so forth.

Protecting democracy

Coming into a general election it’s important that we are on guard against the possibility of politics being manipulated by bad actors. It’s therefore not surprising that on Friday there was widespread media coverage of the alarmist claims by a research company called The Disinformation Project. Their main spokesperson, Sanjana Hattotuwa, warned that urgent action needs to be taken to prevent New Zealand’s election descending into hatred and violence.

Hattotuwa was speaking in the context of the transgender culture wars that escalated after the Posey Parker rally in Auckland’s Albert Park was deemed unsafe and cancelled. At the same event, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson was hit by a motorcycle, and she singled out domestic violence carried out by “Cis white men”.

The Disinformation Project was established to keep a close eye on fringe posts on social media such as Facebook and Telegram and, according to an RNZ report, Hattotuwa “says the levels of vitriol and conspiratorial discourse this past week or two are worse than anything he’s seen during the past two years of the pandemic – including during the Parliament protest”.

But what does Hattotuwa want done to protect New Zealand’s general election? He mentions the need for some sort of “legislation” to be passed, presumably in terms of greater censorship, hate speech, or tighter regulation of political activity during the election.

His critics have suggested Hattotuwa might simply be drumming up demand for business. His Disinformation Project is a research company which sells its analysis services to social media companies and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC).

The latter employed The Disinformation Project’s services in 2022, commissioning Hattotuwa and his colleague Kate Hannah to provide monthly reports on levels of disinformation and online vitriol.

Unfortunately for Hattotuwa and Hannah, the DPMC contract didn’t last long, and The Disinformation Project has also recently been cut adrift from the University of Auckland, which initiated the research vehicle through Te Pūnaha Matatini, which is based in the University’s Physics Department.

Hattotuwa is now arguing for the Government to invest more in political infrastructure, as it did during the pandemic, to control dissident or extremist views and politics. He told RNZ last week: “Every institutional mechanism and framework that was established during the pandemic to deal with disinformation has now been dissolved. There is nothing that I know in the public domain of what the government is doing with regards to disinformation.”

Questions about hyperbole

Hattotuwa and Hannah have managed to gain a great deal of media coverage about their social media research, largely because they make quite extraordinary and colourful statements about what is going on online and it makes for good stories.

Last week, for example, Hattotuwa claimed that in the aftermath of the Posey Parker visit levels of vitriol directed at the trans community had risen to “genocidal” levels. He argued that nefarious disinformation spreaders had entered into the transgender debate spreading hate about the transgender community, and claimed that it represents the importation of content from foreign “neo-Nazi, neo-fascist, anti-Semitic networks and individuals”.

These claims received plenty of sympathetic media coverage without question. Although commentator Thomas Cranmer said the claims about genocide were “absurd” and “outlandish”, and only serve “to highlight that the Disinformation Project lacks any perspective or objectivity”.

In terms of the upcoming election, Hattotuwa claimed on Friday that “the election campaigning is not going to be like anything that the country has ever experienced”, and rising distrust in authorities is the problem. He told RNZ that dissidents are “going to go and vent their frustration, it might mean with a placard, it might mean with a gun.”

There is an element of escalation in Hattotuwa’s own claims. In media interviews over the last few years, the statement is constantly made that the latest levels of extremism and hate are “worse than anything he’s seen”. Each month, each year, each debate is apparently worse than the one before. A common refrain is that they are witnessing an “exponential growth” in disinformation, or hate has grown “inexorably”.

The Disinformation Project really made its mark during last year’s parliamentary lawn occupation, when it received global coverage for its research that showed political extremism was out of control in New Zealand. Hattotuwa told international outlets like the New York Times that “There is a tsunami of bile every day” in New Zealand. He said he had left the civil war in Sri Lanka but found that, although he had discovered a peaceful country when he arrived to study in New Zealand, it was now similar to Sri Lanka. He told the New York Times: “The long and short of it is that I can’t recognise our Aotearoa from what I studied then. There is no link. It’s chalk and cheese.”

Since last year, Hattotuwa says things have got much worse. Despite the anti-vaccine movement’s public protests getting smaller, and their political influence declining, he says they are getting bigger online. Hattotuwa told the Spinoff last month that “In every measurable way… it is more toxic today and more misogynistic than it was in 2022.”

Hattotuwa says when there was a news story about anti-vaccination parents preventing their baby from getting surgery due to concerns over blood donations, the Disinformation Project found the level of online aggravation was “unprecedented. It exceeded anything, including the 2022 protest.”

Similarly, things got worse again in 2023 according to the researchers. Hattotuwa told the Spinoff that the level of violent material posted in the wake of Jacinda Ardern resigning as prime minister was “greater than the sum total of what we studied in 2022”.

That has then been surpassed once again, apparently. This week Hattotuwa has said that the levels of hate directed at the Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson are even worse than what Jacinda Ardern ever received.

Questions about The Disinformation Project’s methodology

Do the constant claims from the Disinformation Project amount to fear-mongering? Some of the claims come across as hysterical, but it’s hard to tell because no real evidence is given to back them up.

The project’s website brings up many pseudoscientific arguments, but little in the way of what would normally be viewed as scientific research. For example, RNZ reported last week that “Hattotuwa said details of the project’s analysis of violence and content from the past week – centred on the Posie Parker visit – were so confronting he could not share it.”

Hattotuwa elaborated: “I don’t want to alarm listeners, but I think that the Disinformation Project – with evidence and in a sober reflection and analysis of what we are looking at – the honest assessment is not something that I can quite share, because the BSA (Broadcasting Standards Authority) guidelines won’t allow it.”

But when extraordinary claims are made about violence and hate, and how New Zealand’s democracy is in danger, surely some basic and substantial evidence is required? Otherwise, there will be suspicions that Disinformation Project is every bit as flaky as the conspiracy theorists that they seek to expose.

For instance, Hannah and Hattotuwa appeared recently in TVNZ’s Web of Chaos documentary in which they suggested that 350,000 New Zealanders have been captured by “alt-right” politics. Elsewhere Hattotuwa claimed that 1.8m New Zealanders subscribe to extremist beliefs. But no real evidence is provided.

Care needed not to silence democratic dissent

It is troubling that the Disinformation Project only concentrates on the misinformation and disinformation of fringe actors but never on that spread by authorities. A true disinformation project would also hold governments to account for when they have been caught out distributing or endorsing misinformation. As journalist Chris Lynch argued in the weekend, “the Disinformation Project’s efforts to combat misinformation seem to have fallen short when it comes to holding the government accountable for any inaccuracies or misleading information.”

The only complaint the Disinformation Project ever makes about the Government is that they aren’t investing enough money, or seeking enough advice, on defeating disinformation. As one critic suggested last week, the message about disinformation seems to be: “It’s so bad, you need to give us money”.

Such misuse of the disinformation problem could make things worse in election year – especially in terms of silencing debate and democracy. Chris Lynch argues: “This kind of propaganda is dangerous. It creates a false narrative that casts legitimate dissent and criticism as hate speech and attempts to silence those who hold differing views. By labelling critics as ‘transphobic’ or ‘bigoted’, his comments serve to stifle open and honest discourse while simultaneously inflaming tensions and further polarising society.”

Hannah and Hattotuwa are correct that extremism, hate, and disinformation are serious issues that need serious attention. But the Disinformation Project does a disservice to democracy and the fight against disinformation when they scaremonger in an opportunistic way. Therefore the media must report on their research in a sufficiently robust way that does the subject justice. The risk is that we actually make the problem worse if we tackle such sensitive issues so poorly.

The “Chicken Little” approach of claiming the sky is falling, or the “Boy who cried wolf” strategy of exaggerating real threats, should remind us all how the seriousness of problems can be undermined by reckless or opportunistic approaches. Instead, it’s now time for a more robust and sober discussion on disinformation and extremism.

New Zealand has had the worst reported mortality rate for Covid19 in the world for the last two weeks, according to the international data. And by a significant margin. But you wouldn’t know it from the media. ‘Underwhelming’ is an overstatement. The best I could find was this from Reuters nearly two weeks ago. New Zealand COVID death rate at record levels, 22 July 2022.

From worldometer weekly trends, the comparable number to the 151 given by Reutersis 271, that’s 54 deaths per million people in the week to 1 August 2022. The top five countries (all attending the Commonwealth Games) are:

• New Zealand, 54 deaths per million
• Barbados, 33 deaths per million
• Isle of Man, 35 deaths per million
• (New Zealand revised, 33 deaths per million)
• Bermuda, 32 deaths per million
• Australia, 27 deaths per million

These are the data published on Monday 1 August. This screenshot shows the same table on Friday 22 July.

We should note that all these countries other than New Zealand and Australia have populations less than 300,000 people. (Barbados’s population is 5.75% of New Zealand’s.) For very small countries, just one death has a big impact on the death rate. Unlike these little countries, New Zealand has been in the ‘top ten’ in the world for published covid deaths continuously, for several months.)

For a few days, the people at Worldometer struggled to work out New Zealand’s new reporting system. But they eventually decided that the original measure – deaths within 28 days of a positive test for Covid19 – was both the most comparable with other countries, and the most indicative as a measure of when the deaths occurred.

(The statistic above for ‘New Zealand revised’ is the new number favoured by the Ministry of Health. It’s not shown on Worldometer, and shown here only for comparison. This number – people who would not have died had they not had Covid19 – includes a few people who tested positive more than 28 days before their deaths.)

For the last few months, New Zealand has consistently had double Australia’s weekly Covid19 death rate. Both countries saw substantial increases in Covid19 deaths last month.

Why is this news not being reported by the traditional mainstream media? It’s more than the combined total of deaths in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque tragedy. They were news.

A quick snapshot of other information, not easily accessible, about those who died with Covid19 in the last week:

• 86% of the deaths with covid in the last week were neither Māori, nor Pacific, nor Asian. Thus, mostly Pakeha.
• 83% of the deaths were people aged over 70 (ie all eligible – in principle though maybe not in practice – for four vaccination shots).
• 79% had had vaccination ‘boosters’ (though, for the vast majority of these, their immunity will have waned to minimal levels)

Good news for me on the personal front. I got my second vaccine booster yesterday, and without the intervention of petty bureaucracy to prevent me from doing so. (Refer: Answers Please? Tribulations af Getting a Covid19 Vaccine ‘2nd Booster’.) I’ll never know whether the first pharmacy simply had a wrong interpretation of the rules, or whether the Ministry of Health computer system was tweaked on Friday to fix the petty anomaly that I mentioned.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Budget-related Economic Chatter

Last week in New Zealand was Budget week, and the chatter about the burden of government debt reached a crescendo. I will highlight here comments made, on Monday 11 May, by four economists with substantial media profiles, from Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon (hosted by Kathryn Ryan), and TVNZ’s Q+A (hosted by Jack Tame).

These economists – Brad Olsen (Infometrics), Sharon Zollner (ANZ), Shamubeel Equab – (all under 40 years old, as I understand) – and Cameron Bagrie (I think in his 40s). These are all highly capable professionals, with plenty of great insights to offer the New Zealand public.

The problem comes in two ways. Firstly, the lines of questioning such economists face reflect sets of unexamined assumptions. Secondly, most of our economists come from the same ‘liberal bourgeois’ mindplace as the journalists they engage with, and therefore are susceptible to normative assumptions infiltrating their analyses.

(Note here that use of the word ‘bourgeois’ is often associated with Marxist writing. I use the word here, not out of any Marxian sympathies, but because it is the best word to describe the mindframe that governs so much of our public discourse; and it is the mindframe that prevents so many people from engaging with even simple ideas that to not fit the liberal bourgeois sets of assumptions.)

The central issue here is that of government debt, and its presumed link to intergenerational inequity. The sense is that, when governments incur debt, they are grabbing ‘money’ (understood as a synonym of ‘wealth’) from the future, to satisfy the requirements of the present.

Some quotes

“Thursday’s Budget is set to reveal a wall of debt that will see debt-to-GDP soar. … Just how much debt can the country afford to take on?” (Kathryn Ryan)

Note the presumptive use of hyperbole [“wall” and “soar”], and the assumption that the debt of the government is the debt of “the country”. This latter characterisation of public debt leads to the ludicrous idea that creditor countries such as the Netherlands and Germany are in fact substantial debtor countries. Germany has a public debt to GDP ratio of 60%, and the Netherlands has a ratio of 49%. Indeed, under this characterisation, every ‘country’ in the world has an alleged debt; Yet, by definition, the world as a whole must have a debt of zero.

“We know what’s happening, spending and debt [are] rising….” (Kathryn Ryan)

Note that ‘spending’ is presented as a negative, a bad thing that raises debt. This idea about spending is pure mercantilism, noting that ‘mercantilism’ is to economics what ‘alchemy’ is to chemistry. The supposition is that the economic purpose of life is to ‘make money’, and that spending undermines this purpose (as in ‘the more money we spend now, the more money we must make in the future, to restore the coffers’). In particular, this mercantilist narrative sees exports as good (‘making money for a nation’) and spending on imports as bad (‘losing money as a nation’). [In fact imports are an economic benefit to a nation, exports are a cost – what must be given up – and spending is the market force without which there could be no market economy.]

“… the third rail of superannuation, will it come on the table again? …” (Kathryn Ryan)

“… I think there are a few holy cows, sacred cows that might be getting a little worried; superannuation is a biggie, the fact that it’s just universal, not means-tested, and kicks in at age 65 …” (Sharon Zollner)

Actually, the most sacred of sacred cows is the ‘financial responsibility’ rule that dictates government debt should be less than 50% of GDP, and preferably at around 20% of GDP.

The general tenor of Zollner’s comment is that taxes will have to be higher than they would otherwise be, and future benefits will have to be cut, in order to restore the government debt ratio to 20% of GDP.

Forcing older people to delay retirement at a time of potentially high unemployment makes no sense whatsoever. Retirement of workers today – and funding that retirement – is part of the solution, not part of the problem. The worst possible form of intergenerational inequity being contemplated this century is the raising of the age of qualification for New Zealand Superannuation; ironically it is the young people themselves who are most strongly promoting that policy, and the oldies who would be unaffected who are most strongly defending the rights of future generations to be able to retire and enjoy some life free from the dictates of market forces.

“… borrowed money needs to be paid back sometime, and that goes back to those issues of intergenerational fairness that you touched on … we have limited fiscal resources … it’s very important given the debt we are going to leave the younger generations with that we invest in projects that increase the productive capacity of the economy so that these things will in time pay for themselves …”
(Sharon Zollner)

“… the key thing for me is who’s going to be left with this debt; I’m a young person … this is going to fall on young people if we don’t have a plan to pay it back … the people 30 years down the track, if we don’t have a plan are going to be saddled with this higher debt, so we have to have some idea what the timeframe is, and if the government is willing to take on some of these hard decisions, or if it’s going to pass the buck down to the further generations; not only to pay it back but to make those tough choices as well … (Brad Olsen)

“… look, we’ve had many decades of not dealing with the hard issues when it comes to the fiscal situation, whether it’s around aging or the superannuation questions … we have to think about, collectively, what’s the fairest way of paying [the debt] back …” (Shamubeel Eaqub)

In the abstract we may have ‘limited resources’, but the biggest present problem we are hearing about is excess labour (indeed much of the RNZ interview was about unemployment), an abundance rather than a scarcity of resources. The narrative suggests that, due to a scarcity of resources today we must conjure up resources from the future, and that these teleported resources will have to be extinguished (paid back) in the future. The narrative is that a conjuring of resources today must be accompanied by a deconjuring of these resources tomorrow.

The amount of gold (what most of us still tend to think of as real money) that is sitting in either goldmines or bank vaults will not make any difference to what is affordable or what is not affordable in the future. Money is not a limited resource, it’s a social technology.

The real issue is about how both present and future generations can have higher living standards, noting that living standards have taken a setback in 2020 due to the pandemic. Tricks around the conjuring of money today – pretending that newly created money comes from the future (rather than the present balance sheets of our central banks) – and the timing of when that money should be deconjured are in no way helpful. Failure to do the best we can today for the people alive in the world today will make things worse for future populations, not better.

“How bad are the books likely to be? (Jack Tame)

“In a word, terrible. … [we can expect fiscal deficits larger than] what I have seen in my working lifetime … ” (Cameron Bagrie)

“How are we going to pay for this? (Jack Tame)

“That’s the million dollar question on the other side [of the balance sheet]. … Borrowing today we are putting a tax or a liability on the next generation. The options are asset sales … spending restraint.… Or tax increases; look, at some stage I think that is going to be inevitable. I think we are going to need to make some pretty tough decisions in regard to those sacred cows we don’t want to talk about, such as the likes of raising the retirement age; well sorry, that one needs to get done. But the big one is, just make the economy grow faster. If the economy is doing well we are paying more tax … but its easier said than done to get a whole lot of magical growth out of this on the other side.” (Cameron Bagrie)

If governments do not borrow now – and borrow big – then interest rates in all the main national economies might have to be substantially negative in order to get desired saving and desired borrowing into balance. The biggest question for now is what would happen to the global market economy if governments fail to act as ‘borrowers of last resort’.

Bagrie is firmly wearing his ‘mercantilist hat’ when he talks about paying back the debt, and flogging our future 60-somethings as a way to help do this. But he wears his ‘economist hat’ when he says that economic growth is the best way (indeed the historical way) of achieving lower debt to GDP percentages. One real problem that economists who think inside the box face is that economic growth, as box-dwelling economists understand it, may itself be a part of the problem that future generations will need to untangle humanity from.

(The actual solution here is to expand the ‘relaxation’ ring of the economic pie chart; and to shrink the divided pie. This will require higher taxes and higher universal benefits; not to burden the rich or anyone else, but to ensure that non-labour income is distributed less inequitably. Twentieth-century solutions to inequality that focus on ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ not only will not stem rising inequality; logically labour income cannot provide a solution when it represents a falling share of total income.)

How did the New Zealand government ‘repay’ its debt after the GFC?
Did the Australian government repay its debt? The UK?

New Zealand did not raise taxes to repay the post-GFC (global financial crisis) government debt. Nevertheless, that debt did fall back to under 20% of GDP. (See Chart Analysis – National Income, Spending and Debt.) The debt fell back in large part because of economic growth; one feature of that growth in New Zealand was the government running Budget surpluses from 2015, shown in red in the third chart. By definition, Budget surpluses means the repaying of net debt on the government’s balance sheet.

There was no policy in New Zealand to repay debt. No new taxes were used to repay that debt. No benefit cuts were introduced to repay that debt. Rather, the private sector in New Zealand became confident to run financial deficits; these private sector deficits are the main drivers of economic growth, and of rising tax revenues in entrepreneurial capitalist economies.

Back in 2009 there was much angst about the prospect of a decade of deficits’. We were worried then about how we would ever pay it all back. Not only was it so easy to pay back that we didn’t notice we were doing so, but the amount of new government debt incurred was less than we thought. The media narrative at the time was that the debt would be huge.

Australia, which did not experience a recession in 2009, did however experience a decade of government deficits. It had similar economic growth to New Zealand, powered also in large part by private sector deficits. But the Australian government did not prioritise the doctrinal sacred cow of ‘fiscal responsibility’. (Australia had other priorities, like funding cancer treatments, and tax cuts.) It did not pay back the government debt it incurred over the last decade, to the point that government debt in Australia reached 41.5% of GDP in 2018. Despite its failure to pay back the debt, compared with almost all other advanced capitalist countries, the Australian government serves an example of fiscal rectitude.

In 2010, the United Kingdom tried to implement an austerity policy – called fiscal consolidation – to repay its GFC-incurred government debt. It tried to do this before the private sector was ready to run financial surpluses. Thus, the Cameron government snatched fiscal defeat from the jaws of victory. Only the 2012 Olympic Games prevented the United Kingdom from moving into a post-recession recession. The United Kingdom experience is shown in the fourth chart of Chart Analysis – National Income, Spending and Debt. The result of the United Kingdom trying to repay its government debt was a government debt to GDP percentage of 83% in 2017, up from 34% before the GFC. In the UK the government tried to reduce its deficit at the same time that the private sector was trying to repay its debt. The result was that economic growth was suppressed, and government deficits remained at over 5% of GDP until 2015.

The European Union and the rest of the World, in the long run.

The European Union had the same idea as the United Kingdom. But, in the Eurozone, the private sector showed no interest in running deficits. Thus, government deficits accommodated private surpluses. However, by Eurozone edict, governments were determined to get their deficits down. The Eurozone succeeded by running a mercantilist economy, using low interest rates and exchange rates so that the Eurozone could run large foreign sector deficits (otherwise known as current account surpluses). The Eurozone wanted to make money by exporting much more than it imported. The Eurozone sees itself as an export economy.

Government debt levels remain high in the Eurozone; for example 60% of GDP in Germany. The fifth chart of Chart Analysis – National Income, Spending and Debt reveals the Eurozone’s long run strategy. On government debt, the plan is to run balanced budgets; and I expect that the European Commission will try to revert to that plan as soon as possible, following Europe’s severe Covid19 emergency. They do not plan to ‘pay back’ the government debt; rather their plan is to let the debt percentage fall as a result of export-led GDP growth.

The guts of the Eurozone strategy, shown by the Eurozone chart, is to have annual private sector surpluses at about 4% of GDP (in blue), matched by current account surpluses (foreign sector deficits, in green). And to do this into eternity.

What it effectively means is that, over time, the Eurozone hopes to give away 4% of its GDP every year. This is because, each year, countries outside of the Eurozone will buy 4% of the Eurozone’s output on tick, and will never repay that debt. If the world economy grows each year, these countries will have a stable debt percentage of their GDPs. These countries will never need to repay their debts to their Eurozone creditors. Further, Eurozone investors and exporters will continue to knock on the doors of these countries, asking them to keep importing goods and services from Europe, without asking for payment for those imports. Because Europe wants to perpetually export more than it imports, it therefore wants the rest of the world to import more than it exports, into perpetuity.

Giving away 4% of its GDP seems a strange wish for Europe to have. But it’s a reflection of the same sorts of mercantilist thinking that New Zealand’s liberal bourgeois journalists and economists indulge in when they claim that future generations of New Zealanders will have to pay back, as a burden, the money that we today appear to be conjuring from their future.

Was New Zealand media giants NZME trying to pull a “fast one” when the company sought urgent approval to help to buy out rival media company Stuff for $1.

The New Zealand Herald owners filed an urgent Commerce Commission application at on Monday for the purchase – for $1 – and wanted to have the transaction complete by May 31.

In a who-will-blink-first move, it was seeking the government’s help with urgent legislation to help clear the way for the application.

READ MORE: NZME forces media merger issue – Colin Peacock, Mediawatch

The company revealed in a market announcement to the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) that it had entered an exclusive negotiation period with Stuff’s owner, Australian-based Nine Entertainment, on April 23.

However, Nine have said it “terminated” negotiations without a satisfactory conclusion.

As Andrew Holden, a journalist for more than 30 years, including five as editor of the Christchurch daily newspaper The Press, and four as editor-in-chief of The Age in Melbourne, told RNZ’s Nine-to-Noon programme yesterday:

“How strange it is, as Alice in Wonderland would say, it has become curiouser and curiouser.”

“At 9.34am, the New Zealand Herald website announcing precisely that, NZME has gone to the government and that it sought special legislation so it could circumvent the Commerce Commission and allow it to go ahead with the purchase,” the media commentator said.

“Pretty quickly Sinead Boucher, the CEO for Stuff comes back, and says the announcement was surprising to both to Nine and ourselves and not sure why NZME took this step given the clear message from our owners that there will be no transaction.

“That became more brutal when Nine entertainment issued its own statement to the Australian Stock Exchange saying not only that, but it had terminated further engagement with NZME,” he said.

Exclusive period
That forced NZME to issue another statement to the NZX saying as far as it was concerned it had an exclusive negotiation period with Nine and that had not finished.

“Further to that, we’ve had the regulator for the NZX asking some questions of NZME as to why their initial statement at 9.31am hadn’t mentioned the fact that talks had broken down, so there may be some further consequences,” Holden said.

“So basically, they are in a fundamental standoff and some of the commentators saying it was an attempt to bully the government,” he said.

“It leaves us in a very murky situation.”

There were also suggestions that a private equity firm in Australia were interested in Stuff, as was National Business Review owner Todd Scott.

With a day until the budget, and the government having already announced a $50 million first tranche of support for media, the question is whether NZME were already aware of what is in the budget?

Not so, said Dr Gavin Ellis, a former editor of The New Zealand and media commentator. He had a different take on what had taken place.

Budget process
“The budget process is such that it is not flexible enough to entertain 11th hour and 59th minute alterations,” Dr Ellis said.

“It is a bit puzzling I have to say,” he said of the whole process.

“The only development I’ve seen yesterday was a piece in The Australian about a medium sized private equity company having been in talks with Nine, apparently in conjunction with Todd Scott (NBR) but whether that was part of the ongoing discussion they had with a large number of people over a period of time with the possible sale of Stuff, I don’t know,” Dr Ellis told Pacific Media Watch.

His take was that there was a misunderstanding between the two parties.

“It seems to me that, both NZME and Nine, having made statements to their relative stock exchanges, that this appears to me not a matter of gamesmanship, so much as fundamental misunderstanding between the parties,” he said.

“They would not have made statements to the stock exchanges unless they believed it to be to current position because the consequences of misinforming the stock exchange are onerous.

“Particularly given that NZME share price rose yesterday,” Dr Ellis said.

‘Believed negotiations live’
“They must have believed the negotiations were live and that they were enlisting the aid of the Commerce Commission and potentially the government to ease the way for that sale to take place.

“The only unknown element is the role of Commerce Commission and the government, it is conceivable, and we’re privy to the financial details of Stuff or the liabilities that NZME would take on, but it is possible that if the government or the commerce commission were minded to facilitate a merger that they may put in place a number of binding conditions,” he said.

Meanwhile, Patrick Smellie of BusinessDesk in his column said: “Nine is ready to close Stuff down by May 31.

“It hasn’t said that publicly but BusinessDesk reliably understands that Nine has delivered that stark message to government ministers and officials,” he said.

“If Stuff were to close or were perhaps placed in receivership or liquidation next month, that could be the end not only for the country’s most-trafficked news website, but also a string of regional newspaper titles that are household names.”

That includes Wellington’s Dominion Post, Christchurch’s The Press, Hamilton’s Waikato Times, the Taranaki Daily News, the Timaru Herald, the Southland Times, and the Nelson Mail.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The National Party is in trouble again for its Facebook advertising campaigning. Late last week, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled against one of the party’s social media ads targeting the Government’s vehicle efficiency feebate scheme. The authority ruled it was “likely to confuse or deceive consumers”. The ad had claimed that the feebate scheme would cause the costs of some cars to be increased by $6000 when, in fact, the highest direct fee would be $3000.

National had provided argumentation for its claim, which the ASA ruled “insufficient”, and the party now plans to appeal the decision – see Craig McCulloch’s National told to pull online attack ad, but will appeal ruling.

According to Newshub’s Dan Satherley, despite the ASA’s ruling, the offending ad remained online and there was nothing the ASA could do about this: “As of Friday, the ads remained online. The ASA has no statutory power to force the party to take them down. The ASA has plans to set up a rapid-response unit to tackle misleading political ads with far more urgency next year, which is an election year” – see: National to appeal after ‘car tax’ advert ruled misleading.

National argued that the party had followed the spirit of the law but the ASA have got them on a technical breach: “It has been the previous view and practice of the Advertising Standards Authority that the spirit of the code is more important than any minor technical breaches… People have a right to express their views and this right should not be unduly or unreasonably restricted by rules.”

The whole issue raises questions about whether New Zealand is headed into an environment of “post-truth” online advertising of dirty politics and deliberate deception, as has been witnessed in other political systems. There is increasing debate about “weaponised advertising technology” being used by political parties.

There have been a number of recent media stories investigating the surge of Facebook advertising by various parties, with a strong concern about the dangers this poses for democracy, especially since many of the ads are dodgy. For the best investigation of this, see Q+A’s seven-minute video (and article): Voters warned to prepare for dirty politics as battle steps up online a year out from election.

Here’s the main point: “A year out from the General Election, political observers are warning voters to prepare for some dirty politics, with the battle for votes increasingly being fought online. TVNZ1’s Q+A has discovered New Zealanders are already being targeted with some of the less-than-transparent tactics seen overseas. Like never before, National is churning out the attack ads on social media, it’s campaign machine already in full throttle.”

National is particularly under scrutiny, with allegations that the party is moving into some sort of Trump-like post-truth way of operating. For example, Peter Dunne highlights in the Q+A item how National leader Simon Bridges recently claimed “one person’s facts are another person’s misinformation” when justifying misleading claims by a National MP.

The suggestion is that National is importing aggressive and negative social media tactics from its counterparts overseas – with many noting a recent trip by Bridges to meet with the Australian Liberal Party and Scott Morrison, who were notable for their aggressive social media campaigning that helped them pull off their surprise election victory this year. As the Q+A item notes, the Liberals “had the help of some Kiwi digital whizzes – Young Nats Sean Topham and Sam Guerin, and social media strategist Kelly Boxall, another Kiwi who has recently been working in Simon Bridges’ office.”

The item features Labour’s election campaign chair Megan Woods vowing that Labour won’t be going negative in its election next year, but pointing the finger at National: “I’m worried that we are seeing these green shoots of a reasonably desperate and negative campaign that’s coming through already”.

National’s campaign chair is Paula Bennett, and in the video she defends the party’s rather simplistic attack messages as being helpful for voters: “People don’t have a lot of time in their lives to sit down and wade their way through a 40-page document like this Government sometimes puts out, that literally says nothing. So we are able to take that, condense it down to what matters”.

The social media company Topham Guerin is apparently not actually being employed yet by National, according to Henry Cooke. However he notes that the party’s “current campaigning shows much similarity to the ads used by the Liberals in Australia” – see: Facebook ads will dominate the next election – but our politicians don’t have to tell us about them.

Cooke points to National’s heavy use of Facebook advertising, saying that at one point the party had 14 separate advertisements running. But the parties of Government have also embraced this platform: “Labour also runs a large number of ads on Facebook – 15 as of Thursday evening. Most of these ads promoted Labour policies, both nationally and in specific regions, or simply asked users to sign up for updates on the page. But Labour and the Greens have dipped their toes into negative Facebook campaigning.”

The attractiveness of Facebook advertising is outlined by Cooke: “Facebook ads are much cheaper to both produce and broadcast than traditional television advertising, and can be targeted at minute slices of audience and easily tested with those audiences.”

The question is whether there is enough regulation of these advertisements, especially given the increasing fears about “political parties posting untrue or exaggerated content”. As a possible solution, Cooke points to a new Facebook transparency tool that has been introduced, which might help keep the campaigning cleaner: “The ‘Ad Library Report’ is mandatory in several countries and allows the public to track every ad a political party or issue group puts out on the platform, and see how much money is being spent and who the ad is targeted at.” It keeps an archive of all the ads run by political parties and advocacy groups – so even if a Facebook ad is only up for a short period it can still be located after the fact.

Unfortunately, Cooke reports that none of the political parties have yet signed up to the tool, despite its availability. National is quoted about this: “We are already subject to a rigorous approval process of our ads by Facebook, and public transparency of the ads we are actively running on Facebook at any one time. We have yet to consider the Ad Library Report function in Facebook, and will no doubt make a decision on this in due course.”

Cooke also explores the reluctance, or lack of ability, of authorities to regulate social media political advertising in his article, Stopping viral misinformation in the next election will be a task for all of us. He adds that there’s “good reason” to avoid too much regulation: “We respect free speech, especially political speech.”

New Zealand’s official election agency is a focus for some of this debate: “The Electoral Commission regulates political ads on the authorisation level – but has no jurisdiction over truthfulness.” Cooke does suggest that “The Electoral Commission could look into demanding that parties be more transparent about their online ad spending, if Facebook itself would make them.”

Instead, it’s the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that has responsibility for dealing with claims of accuracy. But, it’s “a voluntary industry body with no legal power to compel anyone to do anything. It also generally takes about two weeks to deal with a complaint, although it does have a quicker response team during elections.”

The role of the ASA is discussed further by RNZ’s Colin Peacock, who reports: “For the last election the ASA ran a ‘fast-track’ process during the campaign period which required a response from the advertiser and any other relevant party within 24 hours of a complaint – and its website says most complaints were settled within three or four days. The ASA told Mediawatch the arrangements for next year’s election have yet to be determined” – see: Oncoming online onslaught of paid political ads?

Peacock points out another important part of the issue – that a lot of Facebook and social media ads are taxpayer funded. It’s unclear to what extent current ads are paid for out of parliamentary funding budgets, but certainly when it comes to the election they will be taxpayer-funded. Peacock explains: “Electoral law changed in 2017 to allow political parties to spend more of their own money on online ads – as well as $750,000 previously earmarked by the Electoral Commission for opening and closing addresses on TV and radio.”

This “weaponised advertising technology” is also discussed by Katie Kenny and Tommy Livingston in a good feature article which discusses “the risks of a post-truth political landscape” – see: Can Kiwis tell fact from fake news in the leadup to the 2020 elections?

In this, a distinction is made between misinformation and disinformation: “While misinformation often arises out of genuine political debate, disinformation is typically a covert attempt by a maligned state or interest group to distort public views.” The suggestion is that it’s the use of the latter which could be a challenge for New Zealand democracy, as it has been elsewhere. The argument is: “Disinformation campaigns contributed to the rise of President Donald Trump in the United States and to Brexit in the United Kingdom.”

Both major parties accuse each other of producing “fake news”, and the article cites challenges that have been made to them to commit not to. Tom Barraclough, who is researching how to detect the use of “deep fakes”, says: “I have not seen any commitment by political parties to refrain from using manipulated imagery or video”.

Technology commentator Paul Brislen also identifies in this article that it’s the Facebook platform that is particularly “dangerous”. This is because “There are growing trends among older people to just use Facebook as a source of news and that alarms me”. Young people are of less concern he explains: “Today’s students are being taught critical thinking skills in the classroom and know not to believe everything they read online”.

This week RNZ’s podcast, The Detail, also looked at the rise of social media amplifying so-called fake news, asking: Is post-truth politics creeping into New Zealand?

In this, Newsroom political editor Sam Sachdeva suggests that “post-truth” manipulation of voters has always been in politics, particularly with the central role of political party spin-doctors, but that it is potentially becoming worse with the use of Facebook and so forth: “I guess the question some people raise is, with the rise of social media, this eroding trust in politicians from the public, and the ability to amplify misinformation, or simplistic soundbites, or key phrases that you want to get out – being able to do that through Facebook, Twitter, or other mediums – has that made it worse?”

As to whether we should worry about the effectiveness of the surge of Facebook ads, it’s worth noting that Claire Robinson – who is the New Zealand authority on political advertising, and published a very good book on its history last week – has given reason not to worry: “Decades of international research has failed to find solid evidence that political ads (of any kind) have any effect on changing a voter’s mind and therefore manipulating the outcome of individual elections” – see: How Facebook has revolutionised the art of political persuasion.

Robinson says that we should be more worried about how governing political parties are now more inclined to put out official information via their Facebook pages instead of through traditional government channels. She says: “Today, video policy announcements are as – or more – likely to be posted on a Labour, New Zealand First or Green Party social media feed as they are to be logged as formal government documents on the Beehive website.”

She suggests this is “insidious” and “potentially more damaging to our democracy” because it means “the lines between the interests of, and accountability to, the public and the political party get blurred”.

In a similar way, this week the Herald’s Claire Trevett has commented that Jacinda Ardern “uses social media in a more cunning way than any Prime Minister has before”, explaining that she “enjoys a benefit none of her predecessors really had, one that was delivered to her by the Twitter and Facebook: easy livestreaming” – see: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s social media stealth propaganda (paywalled).

Trevett also challenges Simon Bridges’ recent claim that Ardern spends too much time on Twitter: “it is untrue. Ardern has tweeted only three times this year. Bridges has sent out at least 30 in the last month alone. The last time Ardern tweeted was in May to acknowledge the death of former Australian PM Bob Hawke. She did not even tweet about meeting Mr Twitter – although Dorsey did.”

Finally, there will be no surprises about what politician is doing the best on Facebook this year, see Zane Small and Taylor Sincock’s report from April about New Zealand’s most Facebook-savvy MPs revealed.

It’s also an idea that’s been spoken about a lot in the last couple of weeks as debate heats up about the Government’s current, and potential, role in keeping the New Zealand media alive and kicking. Of course, there is hyperbole and self-interest in some of the pleas being made by journalists and company executives, but there is also no doubt the industry is in a major decline, which will have an impact on politics.

“Market failure” is another phrase increasingly being used to describe the decline of the “fourth estate” function of holding powers to account. The phrase comes with the consequent notion that this failure should be met with government intervention. The market failure is the notion that traditional media outlets are now unprofitable, which might lead to some – such as TV3 – collapsing, with negative consequences for democracy.

Therefore, there all sorts of hard decisions for the Government to make about the future of the media, about its ownership of public broadcasters, it’s role in funding private media and, generally, its regulation of a sector that is in crisis. Some of these issues were canvassed earlier in the year in my column, The State of the NZ media.

Today, the state-owned broadcaster TVNZ has released its annual report, announcing a 44 per cent decline in profits, down to $2.9 million – see Chris Keall’s TVNZ profit halves, cans dividend. According to this report, “CEO Kevin Kenrick says the company’s financial results are reflective of challenging market conditions.”

And it comes after recent news that TVNZ is also forecasting a $17m loss for the next financial year. Rival MediaWorks is already making large losses from its TV3 channel.

This week also saw the NZME (owner of the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB) announce its profits are down, though its new paywall service is surpassing targets – see: NZ Herald Premium subscriptions hit new milestone, NZME half-year operating Ebitda at $19.4 million.

The article also reports on its main competitor’s recent financial results: “Last week, Australian-owned publisher Stuff (formerly Fairfax NZ) reported a 24 per cent fall in full-year Ebitda to A$28m ($30m) on annual revenue that declined 10 per cent to A$243m ($246m).”

Campaign “for democracy” by TV3’s MediaWorks

The latest round of media industry soul searching has been pushed along with a lobbying campaign by MediaWorks (the owners of TV3, Magic Talk radio, etc), that called for the Government to take action in order to ensure their television channel was not forced to go off air, or collapse in some other way. A number of MediaWorks items were broadcast or published that were designed to pressure the Government to step in and help save the industry.

The most important was an opinion piece on MediaWorks’ Newshub website from its chief news officer, Hal Crawford, who argued that loss-making media outlets like his were in danger of going out of business, which would lead to problems for democracy: “this is a good old-fashioned market failure. The thing that we need, that society needs, is not only under threat, it’s not being provided right now. The small public broadcasting news operations and the commercial players can no longer provide enough news to keep our society healthy at a local and national level. Unfortunately, all the cliches about the free press and democracy are right: we need news to keep this lemon on the road. When markets fail, governments must step in” – see: The problem with news in New Zealand.

The news boss also argued that the many ways TVNZ is being protected by the Government is having ill-effects for competitors such as TV3: “Being one of their competitors, I’m angry about this. I’m angry that the market for television advertising in New Zealand is distorted by this bizarre, anti-competitive set up. I’m angry that my newsroom, Newshub, is part of a business struggling to keep its head above such polluted waters. I’ll be damned if I lay off one more person or say ‘no’ to one more important assignment without expressing it: TV in New Zealand is broken. And it could have a big impact on news in this country.”

For Crawford, the answer is for the state to start funding independent news media operations across the board, in the same way that it funds the judicial system. And elsewhere it has been reported that MediaWorks has been lobbying Government for them to directly fund their Newshub service.

In conjunction with Crawford’s plea for Government help, various other MediaWorks staff and journalists went public, in what has been described by one media-watcher as “an extraordinary” campaign. For instance, AM Show host Duncan Garner broadcast his plea for the Minister of Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi – an old friend of his – to intervene to essentially save their jobs and profession.

This is all covered very well by former news manager at MediaWorks, Mark Jennings, who is rather scathing – see: Garner’s strange outburst fitted PR strategy – and by RNZ’s Colin Peacock – see: A media cry for help.

According to Jennings, Garner’s broadcast was “cry baby stuff”, and he asked: “What prompted it? Is the axe hovering over his and other news shows at Three? Probably.” Jennings is unimpressed with what he sees as the unprofessional use of Garner and other MediaWorks staff (Crawford, Patrick Gower, Sean Plunket) in a PR campaign for the company: “using its own journalists, on its own platforms, to attack a competitor feels like a misstep. It’s the sort of thing the Rupert Murdoch-owned media does in Australia when it attacks the ABC, or others, to further its own commercial interests.”

RNZ’s Colin Peacock was also sceptical about the campaign, concluding: “It remains to be seen if the minister is persuaded by these very public and self-interested pleas for help – and the loftier claims that democracy could die in media darkness. After years of accusing the industry’s critics of talking too much about its problems, it’s extraordinary that a media company is now using its own outlets to do the same – and push them firmly into the face of the government at the same time.”

The owner of another media outlet, the Spinoff’s Duncan Greive, assisted the MediaWorks lobbying campaign, publishing an interview the same day as the Crawford piece with MediaWorks CEO Michael Anderson. In this, Greive reports the feeling in the TV company: “a rising sense that no matter what they do, no matter how hard they fight, how many titles they cut or people they make redundant – that absent some kind of radical intervention, their business is beyond saving” – see: Contemplating the end of Three.

In this interview, the MediaWorks CEO makes it clear that without government intervention TV3, as well as other outlets, might close, and this would impact on politics: “A democratic government has to protect democracy… I have to believe it’s true of any elected government. If that’s true, then a government would need to do what it needs to do to make sure that there’s news diversity. And certainly the government could never find itself in a situation where [there’s] a monopoly on broadcast news. Just for the perceived conflict, you know. It doesn’t work for democracy.”

Debate over the future of TVNZ

A big part of MediaWorks’ angst is the way the Government is treating its main broadcaster, TVNZ, which continues to exist in a state of neither being fully commercial nor a fully public service broadcaster. For although TVNZ’s channels are mainly commercial, the current Government has declared that it’s no longer expected to deliver a dividend to the taxpayer.

To MediaWorks this is a form of subsidy, which gives it an unfair advantage in competing with the private broadcaster. All the while, TVNZ continues to hoover up much of the broadcasting advertising market, leaving MediaWorks unprofitable.

However, even TVNZ is now deemed to be unprofitable, as covered in John Anthony’s Plot thickens for TVNZ as a $17.1 million loss looms. Apparently, TVNZ’s decline represents “its worst financial result in a decade… despite its advertising revenue holding up.”

Furthermore, the article comments that “The falling profit comes as debate around the broadcaster’s future intensifies and the Government comes under increased pressure to deliver on work it’s doing to strengthen public media. Possibilities for TVNZ’s future include the removal of ads for TV One, returning to a charter and merging with RNZ.”

These solutions are highly-favoured by MediaWorks, as well as a number of other commentators. The above article reports that one public media lobby group would like to see this: “Better Public Media Trust director Myles Thomas said he hoped TV One went non-commercial and believed it would happen.” Thomas is also quoted: “The minister has made some intonation that something big was coming.”

Making TVNZ an ad-free service would apparently cost about $150m a year, and would effectively turn TVNZ1, and maybe other channels, into a public service broadcaster.

But former TVNZ broadcaster Mike Hosking thinks that would be a mistake, saying that “If the Government are going down the upheaval track, there will be more tears and disappointment than there will be problems solved” – see: TVNZ’s in trouble and they should blame their own bad decisions, not Google.

Hosking argues that turning TVNZ into a proper public service broadcaster wouldn’t really fix anything but just become a subsidy for elites: “given few watch, would anyone really care if TVNZ 1 started showing a lot of Māori programmes, bird documentaries, foreign travel shows, and long-format interview specials? No. But having worked for TVNZ under the charter invented by the last Labour government I can tell you for nothing it is not a recipe for any sort of success. But if success is not your guiding principle to start with, then it becomes a sort of creative outlet for the worthies and the single agenda ‘artists’ who have previously plied their trade at the NZ On Air application box”.

Another former TVNZ broadcaster, Damian Christie, takes the opposite approach, suggesting that it’s the NZ On Air model that is broken, with an unhealthy focus on ratings which is preventing quality TV from being made – see: The truth about public service television in New Zealand.

For Christie, it would be a mistake to go back to the old days of TVNZ’s Charter, and concludes that “public service television and advertising don’t work well together.” His suggestion is this: “Why not make TVNZ 1 commercial free and have TVNZ 2 offset at least some of the costs?”

Others wonder if we have gone beyond these old possibilities, with Finlay Macdonald saying that nostalgia for public service broadcasting and other current proposals for change ignores the fact that “Some of the best current affairs ‘TV’ is now found online” – see: An ad-free TVNZ? Technology has moved on, why can’t we?.

Similarly, see Anna Rawhiti-Connell’s No way back from media’s forbidden fruit. She argues that although the news media is indeed in a precarious position, the answer has to be bigger than just trying to save TVNZ and MediaWorks. For example, the 6pm news model is not necessarily worth saving.

The problem is more “the whole internet and 20-something years of radically changing human behaviour.” The public is now consuming our media in very different ways, and this isn’t about to change: “our VPN using, ad-blocking, Netflix smorgasbord-loving selves indulge in behaviour every day that contributes to the strangulation of the model that sustains and supports the things we hold so dear.”

A mega-merger of broadcasters?

The current rumoured proposals for TVNZ also involve merging the broadcaster with RNZ, and possibly Māori TV. The existence of this proposal has been confirmed by Nanaia Mahuta, according to Maori TV’s Heta Gardiner: “The Minister of Māori Development has officially confirmed a merger involving TVNZ, RNZ and Māori Television is an option that’s been discussed at Government level. Nanaia Mahuta confirmed the option has in fact been placed on the table but it wasn’t her preference” – see: Māori Development Minister confirms consideration of MTS, TVNZ, RNZ merger.

For the best analysis and discussion of the proposal, see Duncan Greive’s Assessing the TVNZ, RNZ and Māori TV merger that everyone is talking about. He says, “the case for a megamerger is compelling” and this option “is likely the cleanest way of averting this growing media crisis.”

After describing the merits of the individual broadcasters, Greive says the merger would be good for democracy: “the problem-solving it does for commercial media is ultimately less important than the upside it contains for the country and its democracy. A combined government mega-media agency would help paper over one another’s cracks, and create a kind of rebooted NZBC, one which could safeguard New Zealand against some of the chill political winds blowing around the world.”

Of course, there continue to be noises about two of the biggest private media companies merging – see Tim Murphy’s StuffMe 2: the return of the beast. He discusses the fact that a merger of Stuff and NZME would require legislative change from the Government, “along the lines of the law which allowed Fonterra to be created”.

And in another recent column, Murphy forecasts some big cuts and possible closures coming in the Stuff empire – see: Stuff floating on cloud Nine.

Hard decisions for the Government

The Government has indicated that it will respond to debate about TVNZ later in the year, and it’s currently undertaking a larger review of media under the watch of broadcasting minister Kris Faafoi.

Thomas Coughlan says the Government has some hard choices to make, and “the problem is fairly simple: take TVNZ non-commercial, or prop-up MediaWorks with cheap Government loans and NZ On Air funding. Either way, a lot of money is on the table” – see: The Government won’t help MediaWorks – there’s no money.

The problem for Faafoi, Coughlan says, is that the necessary money is not available: “what work he manages to achieve will be heavily constrained by how much the Government and viewers, are willing to spend on broadcasting. Currently, the answer is ‘not a lot’.”

The answer, according to economist Shamubeel Eaqub is for the Government “to find a way to tax Facebook and other internet companies more before their dominance of the advertising market kills off local media companies” – see Dan Satherley’s Taxing internet giants key to saving media industry – economist.

Eaqub says: “Ultimately if we want to fix the media, we have to create long-term sustainable funding that is not up at the whims of politics.” But he doubts that the current Government is going to be bold enough.

The NBR’s Brent Edwards has recently interviewed Kris Faafoi about some of these issues, including whether the Government will front up with the necessary cash – see: No silver bullet for news media problems (paywalled).

Edwards reports: “Faafoi said it was really important that the country had a strong fourth estate and that was why the government was intent on ensuring the future of public broadcasting.” And as to the whether Faafoi thinks the public would care if TV3 goes under, he says: “I hope they would because, as a former journalist, I do think having a strong fourth estate is important.”

Edwards has also written about some of these difficult issues facing the Government, arguing that there’s a simple choice to be made about TVNZ: “to either throw it to the commercial wolves – let it sink or swim but, let’s be clear, it would sink – or turn it into a fully-fledged public broadcaster” – see: MediaWorks’ pleas raise new fears for journalism and democracy (paywalled).

But helping out TVNZ would not, Edwards says, resolve the situation and might lead to other difficulties: “if we accept a healthy news media is critical to a well-functioning democracy then taxpayers do have some interest in their survival. It would be a sham democracy if the public became reliant on a single public broadcasting behemoth to provide them with news, analysis and commentary. But if taxpayers’ money is going to be used to sustain journalism, how would the government ensure an equal playing field? All media organisations would surely deserve some support, not just those television channels that cried loudest.”

And if it all goes badly, then Edwards foresees a degraded democracy without a proper media helping inform the public: “Perhaps democracy will be played out solely on social media as individual parties and candidates spin their messages directly to voters. But the day politicians do not have to worry about critical journalism, or even about someone pleading on the telly, then that’s the time to worry.”

Finally, it seems that ultimately Labour and National don’t much like public broadcasting, and this can be seen in their reluctance, so far, to properly fund it – see Duncan Greive’s article, One chart which reveals NZ’s incredible 30 year decline in public media funding.

In their raids on media organisations, journalists and whistleblowers, the Australian Federal Police have shown themselves to be the tool of a secretive, ruthless and vindictive executive government.

Secretive because the extensive web of laws passed under the rubric of national security, on top of the secrecy provisions of the Commonwealth Crimes Act, gives the executive wide powers to classify as secret anything it wishes to hide. As the former investigative reporter Ross Coulthart once memorably said, it could include the office Christmas card.

Read more: Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy

Ruthless because the stories revealed by whistleblowers and reporters targeted by the AFP and other security agencies have offered accounts of cruelty, misconduct, dishonesty and slyness. These include:

Vindictive because in the most recent two cases it has taken more than a year after publication for the AFP to take action, revealing how utterly lacking in any real threat to national security the leaks and publications were.

It follows that these raids are a naked attempt to take revenge on whistleblowers and intimidate the journalists who published their stories.

As for the AFP, while it is true they are acting in response to references from other government agencies, it raises questions about the way they exercise their vaunted operational independence.

What weight do they give to how real a threat to national security is posed by any particular leak? What weight do they give to the imperative that leakers be made an example of and journalists be intimidated? Or do they just want to show the rest of the executive branch that they are on the team?

In addition to this question of AFP culture, many interrelated factors have brought Australia to this point – a clear and present danger to freedom of the press.

One is the catch-all nature of section 70 of the Commonwealth Crimes Act. This makes it an offence punishable by up to two years’ jail for a public servant or former public servant to make an unauthorised disclosure of any fact or document they come across in their role as a public servant.

Another is the vast body of national security laws — about 70 of them at last count.

In the context of press freedom, one of the most oppressive is the so-called metadata law of 2015, which makes it relatively easy for the police and security forces to carry out electronic surveillance of communications between journalists and their sources.

Not only do these laws provide for the criminal prosecution of journalists, they also contain very limited public-interest defences. In many instances, they reverse the onus of proof, so the journalist has to prove a defence rather than the prosecution having to prove guilt.

A third factor is the Commonwealth’s weak whistleblower protection law, the Public Interest Disclosure Act. This offers no specific protection for a whistleblower who goes to the media, even after he or she has tried to get the wrongdoing corrected internally. We are seeing this play out in the courts now with the prosecution of Tax Office whistleblower Richard Boyle.

Three government ministers — Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Attorney-General Christian Porter — have all batted away questions about the latest police raids, taking refuge in saying it is the law taking its course.

That is not the point. The point is that the politicians have constructed a repressive legal regime designed to protect the executive branch of government, impede accountability to the public and exert a chilling effect on the press.

This is not a party-political argument. Labor has largely supported the creation of this regime, although to be fair it has forced through some amendments to give some protection to journalists.

A fourth factor is that Australia is alone among the “Five Eyes” countries that make up the West’s main intelligence network in having no constitutional protection for freedom of the press. The US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand all have this protection in some form.

Finally, laws that do exist in Australia to protect journalists’ sources offer no protection from police raids and electronic surveillance.

These laws – called “shield laws” because they are designed to shield the identity of confidential sources – apply only in court proceedings. They allow a journalist to claim a privilege against disclosing information that may identify a confidential source. The court then has to weigh up the consequences of forcing the journalist to identify the source.

Read more: Why shield laws can be ineffective in protecting journalists’ sources

If a source is identified by electronic surveillance or seizure of files or electronic devices, the journalist is powerless to keep any promise of confidentiality.

We are back to the days when communicating with confidential sources can be done safely only through snail mail or – after leaving mobile devices behind – in underground car parks.

– ref. Media raids raise questions about AFP’s power and weak protection for journalists and whistleblowers – http://theconversation.com/media-raids-raise-questions-about-afps-power-and-weak-protection-for-journalists-and-whistleblowers-118328

Last week was a big one for the media. Not only did New Zealand’s biggest newspaper launch a new paywall, but Thursday was “World News Day”, and Friday was “World Media Freedom Day”. All of this prompts the question, how well is New Zealand society and democracy served by the media in 2019?

The World Press Freedom Index recently pronounced New Zealand as having the seventh most free media in the world (up one from eighth) – see: Press freedom threatened by business imperatives. The main point made by Reporters Without Borders, who authored the report, is: “The press is free in New Zealand but its independence and pluralism are often undermined by the profit imperatives of media groups trying to cut costs.”

Commenting on the latest rankings, RNZ’s media commentator Colin Peacock says “We’re still in the top 10 for global press freedom but our media need to be vigilant against incursions on their freedoms too” – see: Uncharted waters for media freedom.

Peacock discusses various challenges for the New Zealand media, especially in terms of the post-Christchurch environment in which the state appears to have more potential control over information. He points out, for example, “The forthcoming Royal Commission is bound to uncover things various agencies want to conceal or – at the least – ‘manage.’ Investigations by the media will overlap with the official ones and could bring them into conflict with agencies citing national security needs as a reason to withhold information.”

He also points to challenges in the law regarding whistleblowers in New Zealand, who don’t have much protection if they inform the media of “illegal, corrupt or unsafe” practices in their workplaces.

The big issue this year in media-democracy conversations has been the survival of media outlets, in the context of the declining traditional business model of newspapers and broadcasters. This has been hastened, of course, with the rising influence of social media. This is dealt with well in Bruce Cotterill’s column, We need real journalists, not just social media.

Cotterill emphasises the importance of a healthy media for scrutinising the powerful, but laments that the declining business model is [working] against this. He concludes: “We aren’t seeing enough depth or debate that a community needs to become fully informed. Sadly, it seems society is looking more and more at social media, despite its inaccuracies and agendas. We need more bright people who want to be great journalists. We need universities that are prepared to develop proper journalists. And we need news organisations, with business models that work, that are prepared to invest in those people and the stories that need to be told. And we, the public, have to be prepared to pay it. Then and only then, will we have the strong democracy and informed society that we all should want to be a part of.”

In terms of the business landscape, it’s worth looking at the definitive source of information about the changing patterns of business and what the various commercial models mean for democracy – see Wayne Hope’s blog post summarising AUT’s annual NZ Media Ownership 2018.

According to the head of TVNZ, Kevin Kenrick, “the New Zealand media is not sustainable in its current form”, and we can expect to see some major changes of ownership in the near future – see Colin Peacock’s TVNZ hints at bold digital moves.

One big and imminent change is the sale of Stuff, with increasing speculation being that TVNZ could even buy it. The significance of this is discussed by Peacock: “Absorbing the country’s biggest publisher of news and the country’s most viewed news website would certainly give TVNZ the digital heft TVNZ wants. And, when asked, Kevin Kenrick hasn’t ruled out making a bid for it. But that would radically reshape New Zealand journalism. TVNZ would end up owning most of the country’s newspapers and employing more of the country’s journalists than anyone else. It could extend state ownership to a branch of the media that’s always been out of the government’s reach.”

This is also discussed in detail in Tom Pullar-Strecker’s column, Minister reassures media over ‘plurality’ in wake of hints TVNZ may want Stuff. He says, “A takeover of Stuff’s online news business by TVNZ could leave NZ Herald publisher NZME and television channel three owner MediaWorks as the only remaining major national private media businesses, while also putting them in the position of competing for audiences against a stronger state-owned competitor.”

Also in this article is a discussion with the Broadcasting Minister, Kris Faafoi, about the potential creation of a new version of the old collaborative New Zealand Press Association (NZPA), with financial help from the state: “Faafoi said he was encouraged that RNZ, NZ on Air and Stuff were investigating a model pioneered by the BBC in Britain under which the BBC and British newspapers pool some resources to provide local reporting. It is understood other media companies including NZME and Allied Press, which owns The Otago Daily Times, are also involved in the talks. Faafoi said he expected an update on the initiative soon. But he said that would be only part of a solution for the media”.

Another Tom Pullar-Strecker column discusses this and how Faafoi is going as the replacement for Clare Curran as Minister of Broadcasting – see: Government could help pave way towards a solution for the media. Pullar-Strecker discusses the plurality problem of media ownership, and whether the state might end up undermining private media, and comments “Providing state subsidies to keep private media on ‘life support’ is not a great solution either though. It risks subverting the independence of all journalism, and voters probably wouldn’t swallow it anyway.”

And for another interesting discussion of how state-sponsored news reporting and analysis could undermine democracy, see Jeremy Rose’s Journalism courtesy of (foreign) taxpayers. He reports on how “Seven senior Kiwi journalists spent a week in Hawaii late last year and produced just one story between them. It didn’t cost their organisations a cent – the tab was picked by the US State Department.”

The Herald’s editorial director of business, Fran O’Sullivan, has recently made the case for the New Zealand government to step up and “put a price on a vibrant democracy” by backing “the New Zealand media so it remains a vigorous watchdog against the abuse of power” – see Hamish Fletcher’s New Year Honours: Back media, Herald writer Fran O’Sullivan urges Govt.

O’Sullivan says: “It’s more important than ever before that journalism does what it should and holds the powerful to account, in particular in business and government, where they do have the ability to strongly influence New Zealand and people’s livelihoods”.

Therefore, the New Zealand Government should be addressing the current media business model problems: “That doesn’t mean the Government should step in and run media, but you could also set up a public-private partnership in some of these areas where contribution is made in the same way it’s made to creative arts and looking at the value that we place on media in society and making sure that it is held up because it is absolutely essential when you look at what is happening internationally with foreign interference in elections and so forth”.

For an interesting – if bizarre – case study of how governments can attempt to influence the media, it’s worth looking at the recent run-in between political journalist Hamish Rutherford and Cabinet Minister Shane Jones. Back in March, the Stuff journalist broke a story about a potential conflict of interest for the Minister. Jones responded with an attack on Rutherford, describing him as a “bunny boiler” and threatening to dish dirt on him under parliamentary privilege.

Rutherford responded in a column, explaining his side of the story – see: Bunny boiler jokes aside, Shane Jones’ threats could be chilling.

Here’s the most important part: “This would be an extraordinary situation for us to be in and it would contradict media freedom in a small country. I believe that other journalists have also stayed with Jones. After nearly a decade of journalism in Wellington, I have socialised with MPs of every political party. If any MP believes that this is a way to escape scrutiny then they should make very clear that they feel that way. The fact that no-one from the Government has properly shot down Jones’ threat to malign me in Parliament will not deter me. But it should be a chilling warning of the potential consequences for anyone planning to question this Government’s integrity.”

Other state-imposed sanctions and infringements on media practices occur from time-to-time, and are of varying seriousness or concern. This week has seen some sort of victory for journalists’ legal right to protect their sources under the Evidence Act, with a Court of Appeal ruling that a 2014 broadcast story didn’t require the media to give away information in a subsequent defamation case – see Bonnie Flaws’ Court order to reveal Campbell Live story sources overturned.

The judge in the case sided with the media involved and said the removal of source protection for journalists in this case would “serve to chill the freedom of the media to report on matters of public interest”.

There is also continued debate about the role of the New Zealand media in dealing with the post-Christchurch situation, and especially the trial of the alleged shooter. The agreement of the New Zealand media about how to cover that trial is sparking some interesting debates in some interesting places. On the Russia Today (RT) website, for example, you can read Igor Ogorodnev’s critique: Media collusion to censor Christchurch mosque shooter trial is understandable… and deeply sinister.

Politico’s Jack Shafer had this to say: “New Zealanders needn’t worry about their government censoring the press. On Wednesday, five of the country’s major news outlets proved themselves only too happy to censor themselves” – see: Why New Zealand’s press just put on blinders for its biggest story.

Shafer argues: “This kind of thinking is normally seen in an authoritarian state, where “dangerous” ideas are officially cloaked from view by leaders worried about the threat to their own power.” Furthermore, “The pact might create a precedent the government will exploit every time it wants to stifle news coverage in the name of public safety.”

In response, The Spinoff’s Alex Braae strongly disagrees, saying “I don’t believe the overseas critics of this decision have any understanding of the context they’re talking about – rather they’re taking a theoretical position and running hard on it” – see: Overseas critics don’t get why our terror trial reporting restrictions matter.

For a more positive take on the power of the media, it’s worth reading The Christchurch Press editorial from last Thursday, celebrating World News Day, championing local journalism, and proclaiming that, True or false, we need the news. The newspaper points out that in New Zealand, as in the US, the media is a good bulwark against the dangerous rise of fake news.

But it’s the rise of public relations industry the newspaper takes aim at, pointing out the recent release of statistics on the number of PR jobs overshadowing journalists: “It was reported that, for every journalist, there are more than six people working in public relations. Twenty years ago, it was one journalist for two people in PR. In New Zealand, the rises and falls are similar. There were 2214 print, radio and TV journalists in the 2006 census, evenly matched against 2247 PR professionals. In 2013, the number of journalists had almost halved to 1170 and PR professionals had grown by more than 50 per cent, reaching 3510. People in PR are not necessarily the enemies of truth. But they are tasked with promoting the interests of clients, which means accentuating the positive and sometimes obscuring the negative.”

In response to such arguments, marketing and communications specialist Cas Carter has written in defence of the public relations industry, pushing back against the concept that “there are two sides at war: Journalists and PR people. This is not the case” – see : Why PR firms shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush as Trump.

Carter defends her industry: “And the demand for information has increased, as has the number of channels people expect to get it through.  Organisations can no longer rely on the media to get our story across – nor should we. In fact, these days organisations are writing and recording their own content and sending it directly to their audiences through websites, social media, publications, events and partnerships. The media takes advantage of that content to help inform their stories and meet ever-increasing demand to provide 24/7 coverage while facing rounds of budget and staff cuts.”

Finally, at the start of this year, The Spinoff’s editor-in-chief, Duncan Greive published a series of excellent analyses of the main media players in New Zealand, based on what he said were “anonymous conversations with senior executives”. The most interesting, were the following: RNZ in 2018: will well-meaning government interference end its dream run?, TVNZ in 2018: the public broadcaster finally remembers who owns it, Stuff: the media monster no one wants to own, NZME: the media giant still at war after all these years, and MediaWorks in 2018: is the toughest kid in the media finally going to be released from private equity prison?