ANALYSIS: By John Hobbs

The New Zealand government remains unwilling to support Palestinian statehood recognition at the United Nations General Assembly.

This is a disgraceful position which gives support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and seriously undermines our standing. Of the 193 states of the UN, 157 have now provided statehood recognition. New Zealand is not one of them.

The purpose of this opinion piece is to highlight the troubling lack of transparency in how the government deliberates on its foreign policy choices.

Government decisions and calculations on foreign policy are being made behind closed doors with limited public scrutiny, unlike other areas of policy, where at least a modicum of transparency occurs.

The government has, over the past two years, exceeded itself in obscuring the process it goes through, without explaining its approach to the question of Palestine.

New Zealand still inconceivably lauds the impossible goal of a two-state solution, the hallmark of successive governments’ foreign policy positions on the question of Palestine, but does everything to not bring about its realisation.

To try to understand the basis for New Zealand’s approach to Gaza and the risks generated by the government’s lack of direct action against Israel, I placed an Official Information Request (OIA) with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Winston Peters. I requested copies of advice that had been received on New Zealand’s obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.

Plausible case against Israel
My initial OIA request was placed in January 2024, after the International Court of Justice had determined there was a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. At that point, about 27,000 people in Gaza had been killed, mainly women and children. My request was denied.

I put the same OIA request to the minister in June 2025. By this time, nearly 63,000 people had been killed by Israel. At the time of my second request there was abundant evidence reported by UN agencies of Israel’s tactics. Again, my request for information was denied.

I appealed the refusal by the minister of foreign affairs to the Office of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman reviewed the case and accepted that the minister of foreign affairs was within his right to refuse to provide the material.

The basis for the decision was that the advice given to the minister was subject to legal professional privilege, and that the right to protect legally privileged advice was not outweighed by the public interest in gaining access to that advice.

The refusal by the minister and the Ombudsman to make the advice available is deeply worrying. Although I am not questioning the importance of protecting legal professional privilege, I cannot imagine an example that could be more pressing in terms of “public interest” than the complicity of nation states in genocide.

Indeed, the threshold of legal professional privilege was never meant to be absolute. Parliament, in designing the OIA regime, had this in mind when it deemed that legal professional privilege could, under exceptional circumstances, be outweighed by the public interest.

The Office of the Ombudsman has ruled in the past that legal professional privilege is not an absolute; it accepted that legal advice received by the Ministry of Health on embryo research had to be released, for example, as it was in the public interest to do so, even though it was legally privileged.

Puzzling statement
The Ombudsman concludes his response to my request with the puzzling statement that the “general public interest in accountability and transparency in government decision-making on this issue is best reflected in the decisions made after considering the legal advice, rather than what is contained in the legal advice.”

The point I was trying to clarify is whether the government is acting in a manner that reflects the advice it has received. If it has received advice that New Zealand must take particular steps to fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and the government has chosen to ignore that advice, then surely New Zealanders have a right to know.

The content of the advice is extremely relevant: it would identify any contradictions between the advice the government received and its actions. Through public access to such information, governments can be held to account for the decisions they make.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, concluded on September 16 that Israeli authorities and security forces committed four out of the five underlying acts of genocide. Illegal settlers have been let loose in the West Bank under the protection of the Israeli army to harass and kill local Palestinians and occupy further areas of Palestinian land.

At the UN General Assembly, the New Zealand government took a stance that is squarely in support of the Israeli genocide, also supported by the United States. International law clearly forbids the act of genocide, in Gaza as much as anywhere else, including the attacks on Palestinian civilians living under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In 2015-16, New Zealand co-sponsored a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the illegality of Israel’s actions in the Occupied West Bank, with the intention of supporting a Palestinian state. New Zealand’s recent posture at the General Assembly undermines this principled precedent.

That New Zealand could not bring itself to offer the olive branch of statehood recognition is morally repugnant and severely damages our standing in the international community. The New Zealand public has the right to demand transparency in its government’s decision-making.

The advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to the minister cannot be hidden behind the veil of legal professional privilege.

John Hobbs is a doctoral student at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Social cohesion is a national responsibility, and everyone, including the media, should support government’s efforts, according to Dr Shailendra Singh, associate professor in Pacific Journalism at the University of the South Pacific.

While the news media are often accused of exacerbating conflict by amplifying ethnic tensions through biased narratives, media could also assist social cohesion and unite people by promoting dialogue and mutual understanding, said Dr Singh.

He was the lead trainer at a two-day conflict-sensitive reporting workshop for journalists, student journalists, and civil society on reporting in ethically tense environments.

The training, organised by Dialogue Fiji at the Suva Holiday Inn on November 12–13, included reporting techniques, understanding Fiji’s political and media landscape, and building trust with audiences.

Watchdog journalism
Dr Singh said media played an important public interest role as ‘society’s watchdog’. The two main strengths of Watchdog Journalism are that it seeks to promote greater accountability and transparency from those in power.

However, he cautioned reporters not to get too caught up in covering negative issues all the time. He said ideally, media should strive for a healthy mix of positive and what might be termed “negative” news.

Dr Singh’s doctoral thesis, from the University of Queensland, was on “Rethinking journalism for supporting social cohesion and democracy: case study of media performance in Fiji”.

He discussed the concepts of “media hyper-adversarialism” and “attack dog journalism”, which denote an increasingly aggressive form of political journalism, usually underpinned by commercial motives.

This trend was a concern even in developed Western countries, including Australia, where former Labour Minister Lindsay Tanner wrote a book about it: Sideshow, Dumbing Down Democracy.

Dr Singh said it had been pointed out that media hyper-adversarialism was even more dangerous in fragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable settings, as it harms fledgling democracies by nurturing intolerance and diminishing faith in democratically-elected leaders.

“Excessive criticism and emphasis on failure and wrongdoings will foster an attitude of distrust towards institutions and leaders,” he said.

Conflict-sensitive reporting
According to Dr Singh, examples around the world show that unrestrained reporting in conflict-prone zones could further escalate tensions and eventually result in violence.

The number one aim of conflict-sensitive reporting is to ensure that journalists, are aware of their national context, and shape their reporting accordingly, rather than apply the “watchdog” framework indiscriminately in all situations, because a “one-size-fits-all” approach could be risky and counterproductive.

Journalists who adopt the conflict-sensitive reporting approach in their coverage of national issues could become facilitators for peaceful solutions rather than a catalyst for conflict.

“The goal of a journalist within a conflict-prone environment should be to build an informed and engaged community by promoting understanding and reconciliation through contextualised coverage of complex issues,” he said.

A rethink was all the more necessary because of social media proliferation, and the spread of misinformation and hate speech on these platforms.

Challenges in maintaining transparency and accountability in journalism
According to Dr Singh, in many Pacific newsrooms today journalists who are at the forefront of reporting breaking news and complex issues are mostly young and relatively inexperienced.

He said the Pacific media sector suffered from a high turnover rate, with many journalists moving to the private sector, regional and international organisations, and government ministries after a brief stint in the mainstream.

“There is a lot of focus on alleged media bias,” said Dr Singh.

“However, young, inexperienced, and under-trained journalists can unknowingly inflame grievances and promote stereotypes by how they report contentious issues, even though their intentions are not malicious,” he said.

Dr Singh emphasised that in such cases, journalists often become a danger unto themselves because they provide governments with the justification or excuse for the need for stronger legislation to maintain communal harmony.

“As was the case in 2010 when the Media Industry Development Act was imposed in the name of professionalising standards,” said Dr Singh.

“However, it only led to a decline in standards because of the practice of self-censorship, as well as the victimisation of journalists.”

Legislation alone not the answer
Dr Singh added that legislation alone was not the answer since it did not address training and development, or the high rate of newsroom staff turnover.

He said the media were often attacked, but what was also needed was assistance, rather than criticism alone. This included training in specific areas, rather than assume that journalists are experts in every field.

Because Fiji is still a transitional democracy and given our ethnic diversity, Dr Singh believes that it makes for a strong case for conflict-sensitive reporting practices to mitigate against the risks of societal divisions.

“Because the media act as a bridge between people and institutions, it is essential that they work on building a relationship of trust by promoting peace and stability, while reporting critically when required.”

This article was first published by The Fiji Times on 24 November, 2024 and is being republished from USP Journalism’s Wansolwara and The Fiji Times under a collaborative agreement.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Radio Australia was conceived at the beginning of the Second World War out of Canberra’s desire to counter Japanese propaganda in the Pacific. More than 70 years later its rebirth is being driven by a similarly urgent need to counter propaganda, this time from China.

Set up within the towering framework of the ABC, Radio Australia was, and remains, an institution with a lively multilingual culture of its own. Sometimes it has thrived and sometimes, especially in recent decades, it has struggled as political priorities and media fashions waxed and waned within the ABC and the wider world.

Phil Kafcaloudes, an accomplished journalist, author and media educator who hosted Radio Australia’s popular breakfast show for nine years, was commissioned by the ABC to write the service’s story for the corporation’s 90th-anniversary celebrations. The result is a nicely illustrated and comprehensively footnoted new book, Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story, which uses the original name of the service for its title. (With appropriate good manners, Kafcaloudes acknowledges previous accounts of the Radio Australia story, by Peter Lucas in 1964 and Errol Hodge in 1995.)

The overseas service’s nadir came in 2014 after the election of the Abbott government. At the time, Inside Story’s Pacific correspondent Nic Maclellan described in devastating detail the impact in the region of the eighty redundancies brought on by the government’s decision to remove the Australia Network, a kind of TV counterpart to Radio Australia, from the ABC. The network had controversially been merged with key elements of Radio Australia to create ABC International.

Among the casualties was the legendary ABC broadcaster Sean Dorney, known and loved throughout the Pacific. Programmes for Asia were axed, as was much specialist Pacific reporting, with English-language coverage to be sourced from the ABC’s general news department.

The ABC’s full-time team in the Pacific was reduced to a journalist in Port Moresby and another (if it counts) in New Zealand. Australia’s newspapers had already withdrawn their correspondents from the region, and online-only media hadn’t filled the gap. Where once, in 1948, Radio Australia had helped beam a signal to the moon, the countries of our own region now seemed even more remote.

Despite the steady erosion of the service over decades, though, Kafcaloudes’s book has a happy ending of sorts. Its final chapter, titled “Rebirth: Pivoting to the Pacific,” tells how Radio Australia benefited from the Morrison government’s “Pacific Step-Up,” launched in response to China’s campaign to build regional connections. Steps to rebuild Radio Australia’s capacities have since been enhanced by substantial new funding from the Albanese government.

Placing listeners at scene
When current affairs radio is at its most effective, it places listeners at the scene. Kafcaloudes tells of being on air when a listener in Timor-Leste called to tell of an assassination attempt on José Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmão.

“Radio Australia instantly changed its scheduling to broadcast live for three hours so locals would know whether their leaders were still alive.”

But, as Kafcaloudes explains, “for all the good work, global connections and breaking news stories, the truth is, for many Australian politicians there was little electoral capacity in a service that a domestic audience did not hear.” Thus the abrupt funding reverses and the constant tinkering.

Former ABC journalist and manager Geoff Heriot describes how, during a challenging phase for the ABC about 25 years ago, managing director Brian Johns’s desire to defend the ABC meant that, “if necessary, you could cut off limbs.” And Radio Australia was the limb that often seemed most remote from the core.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Kafcaloudes says, the service “was often at or near the top of the polls as the world’s best.” Many listeners, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, testified to having learned English from listening to Radio Australia.

Its popularity in Asia and the Pacific was boosted by the fact that it broadcast from a similar time zone, which meant its morning shows, for instance, were heard during listeners’ mornings. In 1968 alone, the station received 250,000 letters from people tuning in around the region.

For decades, broadcasts were via shortwave, the only way of covering vast distances at the time. But the ABC turned off that medium for good in 2017, so Radio Australia now communicates via 24-hour FM stations across the Pacific and via satellite, live stream, on-demand audio, podcasts, the ABC Listen app, and Facebook and Twitter.

New audiences emerging
With new audiences emerging in different places, the geography of Radio Australia’s languages have changed too. As the use of French in the former colonies in Indochina declined, for instance, new French-speaking audiences developed in the Pacific colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

One of the continuities of Radio Australia is the quality and connectedness of its broadcasters. Most of them come from the countries to which they broadcast, and together they have evolved into a remarkable cadre who could and should be invited by policymakers and diplomats to help Australia steer and deepen its relations with our neighbours.

Kafcaloudes rightly stresses the importance of that first prewar step, when Robert Menzies, “a man who believed he was British to the bootstraps, despite being born and bred in country Victoria,” decided “Australians needed to speak to the world with their own voice.”

How best to do this has frequently been disputed. In a 1962 ministerial briefing, the Department of External Affairs argued that Radio Australia’s broadcasts “should not be noticeably at variance with the broad objectives of Australian foreign policy” — an instruction that John Gorton, the relevant minister, declined to issue publicly.

Tensions have inevitably resulted from the desire of the service’s funder, the federal government, to see its own policies and perceptions prioritised. Resisting such pressure has required greater stamina and skill at Radio Australia than at the ABC’s domestic services, which can count more readily on influential defenders.

Kafcaloudes says it was Mark Scott, who headed the ABC a dozen years ago, who linked Radio Australia with American academic/diplomat Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power.” Then and now, this was a seductive phrase for politicians. It also became a familiar part of the case for restoring, consolidating or increasing funding, while underlining the familiar, nagging challenge for the station’s “content providers” of choosing between projecting that kind of power on Canberra’s behalf and dealing with stories that might well be perceived as “negative” for the Australian government.

Of course, the conventional public-interest answer to that dilemma is that fearless journalism is itself the ultimate expression of soft power by an open, democratic polity. But not everyone sees it that way.

Public broadcasting ethos
The public broadcasting ethos of the station’s internationally sourced staff has meanwhile stayed impressively intact. Kafcaloudes introduces one of them at the end of each chapter, letting them speak directly of how they came to arrive at Radio Australia and their experiences working there.

Running Radio Australia has been complicated for decades by its being bundled, unbundled and bundled again with television services that have sometimes been run by the ABC and sometimes by commercial stations. Technologies have of course become fluid in recent years, freeing content from former constraints. So too has the badging — the service is now “ABC Radio Australia,” which morphs online into “ABC Pacific.”

Radio Australia continues to broadcast in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Khmer, French, Burmese and Tok Pisin (the Melanesian pidgin language spoken widely in PNG and readily understood in Vanuatu and, slightly less so, in Solomon Islands), as well as in English.

Dedicated, high-quality journalism remains the core constant of an institution whose story, chronicled so well by Kafcaloudes, parallels in many ways Australia’s on-again, off-again, on-again engagement with our region.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Journalists may face decades in prison for “foreign interference” offences unless urgent changes are made to Australia’s national security laws, according to a University of Queensland researcher.

PhD candidate Sarah Kendall from UQ’s School of Law warned that reporting on issues relating to Australian politics, national security or international relations while working with overseas media organisations could place journalists at risk of criminal prosecution under the Espionage and Foreign Interference Act 2018.

“The law could apply to any journalist, staff member or source who works for or collaborates with foreign-controlled media organisations,” Kendall said.

“There could also be repercussions for journalists working overseas, as any news published in Australia is subject to these laws.”

The Espionage and Foreign Interference Act 2018 covers nine foreign interference offences, with penalties ranging from 10 to 20 years imprisonment.

“While these offences require some part of the person’s conduct to be covert or involve deception, this does not exclude legitimate journalistic activities,” Kendall said.

“Journalists could be acting covertly whenever they liaise with a confidential source using encrypted technologies or engage in undercover work using hidden cameras.”

Public interest protection
In a Foreign Interference Law and Press Freedom briefing paper, Kendall recommended that the government introduce an occupation-specific exemption to protect journalists working in the public interest.

The paper argues that the scope of offences be narrowed to remove “recklessness” and “prejudice to Australia’s national security” as punishable elements.

“For example, a journalist could be accused of recklessly harming national security when they publish a story that reveals war crimes by members of the Australian Defence Force,” Kendall said.

“Journalists and their sources could face up to 20 years in prison if any part of their conduct was covert, even if they are engaged in legitimate, good faith reporting.”

Kendall said the law’s Preparatory Offence, which carries a potential jail term of 10 years, risked creating a dangerous precedent when combined with the offence of conspiracy.

“This offence can capture the earliest stages of investigative reporting so a discussion between a journalist and source about a potential story on Australian politics could see them charged with conspiring to prepare for foreign interference,” Kendall said.

Foreign Interference Law and Press Freedom is the latest report in UQ Law School’s Press Freedom Policy Papers series, a project aimed at laying the groundwork for widespread reform in laws spanning espionage, whistleblowing and free speech as they affect the media.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“Public interest journalism plays a crucial role in promoting the quality of public life, protecting individuals from misconduct on the part of government and the private sector, and giving real content to the public’s ‘right to know’.” – The Crucial Role of Public Interest Journalism in Australia and the Economic Forces Affecting It, by Henry Ergas, Jonathan Pincus and Sabine Schnittger, 2017.

No sooner had New Zealand’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) been announced back in February than the howls of prejudice from the privileged few bubbled to the surface.

The notion that the PIJF was a political construct as the fund is overseen by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and administered by NZ On Air, whose board members are appointed by the Minister for Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi, found favour in the apprehension of the displeased.

Accusations of media bias in favour of the incumbent government, instilling Article 2 of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi as well as the perception that Māori were being given preferential treatment in the PIJF have since been debated long and hard.

Goal 3: The PIJF says: “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner.”

Among those who questioned the media’s impartiality in the wake of the PIJF goals was opposition National Party leader Judith Collins.

“You have to wonder, does that buy compliance or what? And if it doesn’t buy compliance then why is part of that, that says that you’ve got to be seen to be promoting the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, what the hell has this got to do with it,” Collins said with incredulity in an interview played on RNZ’s Mediawatch.

“You are talking about free media, free speech and you’ve got a government going around telling people we’ll help you out in the media because we think its good for you to have a media but you have to say what we think, I don’t buy it and I don’t think media should be buying it, obviously some have completely drunk the kool-aid.”

Then there was Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research who on Sky News Australia said:

“We’re in a situation where the government has spent $55 million on a public interest broadcasting fund. [This] is something the media can apply for to get grants and one of the conditions of doing that is they have to, if you like, speak out in favour of this Treaty partnership agenda.”

A grain of truth?
Is there a grain of truth to some of the critique and to the accusations of the media selling out its independence?

Former editor of The Dominion Karl du Fresne seems to think so as he has said in his blog:

“The line that once separated journalism from activism is being erased, and it’s happening with the eager cooperation of the mainstream journalism organisations that are lining up to take the state’s tainted money. We are witnessing the slow death of neutral, independent and credible journalism.

“Last month, The Dominion Post published a letter from me in which I challenged an article by Stuff editor-in-chief Patrick Crewdson headlined, ‘Why government money won’t corrupt our journalism’, in which Crewdson insisted Stuff’s editorial integrity wouldn’t be compromised by accepting government funding.

“I wrote: “ … what he doesn’t mention is that before applying for money from the fund, media organisations must commit to a set of requirements that include, among other things, actively promoting the Māori language and ‘the principles of Partnership, Participation and Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi’.

“In other words, media organisations that seek money from the fund are signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.

“The PIJF should be seen not as evidence of a principled, altruistic commitment to the survival of journalism, which is how it’s been framed, but as an opportunistic and cynical play by a left-wing government — financed by the taxpayer to the tune of $55 million — for control over the news media at a time when the industry is floundering and vulnerable.”

‘Politicised project’
As Melissa Lee, National’s broadcast spokesperson, who is a former Asia Down Under broadcaster, said in the House during question time on August 4:

“Any news outlet that seeks money from the fund is signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.”

Melissa Lee questions the Minister for Broadcasting and Media on August 4. Video: NZ Parliament on Vimeo.

Media consultant and former New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief Dr Gavin Ellis, who was one of a group of independent assessors who made initial assessments and had his Knightly Views column come under scrutiny from former North and South, Newsroom and Spinoff journalist Graham Adams, who wrote on the Democracy Project that:

“Some of journalism’s grandees have derided critics of the fund who object to its Treaty directions as ‘embittered snipers’ and as members of the ‘army of the disaffected’.

“In a column titled ‘Trashing journalists is not in the public interest’, Gavin Ellis, a former editor-in-chief of the NZ Herald, dismissed critical colleagues as ‘siding with conspiracy theorists who are convinced the nation’s mainstream media are in the government’s pocket’.

“He also passed off criticisms of ‘the emphasis on the Treaty of Waitangi in the criteria’ with: ‘There is no doubt that part of the funding will redress imbalances in that area and some of the already-announced grants aim to do that.’

“Given the fund’s criteria, redressing ‘imbalances’ can only mean amplifying the prescribed notion of the Treaty as a partnership — and certainly not questioning whether that interpretation is logically or constitutionally defensible.”

‘Sheer nonsense’
However, Dr Ellis wouldn’t have a bar of the insinuation that the media had sold out.

“The suggestion the media have been bought off is sheer nonsense,” Dr Ellis says.

“Look at it rationally: This is a modest amount of money spread over a number of years and across all eligible media organisations.

“If they were capable of being bought off – and I contend they are NOT – this would hardly be a winning formula for achieving it. Frankly, I think every working journalist in this country would be insulted by this suggestion.”

Faafoi was adamant that the fund remained independent of political interference.

“I am confident that any decision made around funding support announced recently is completely and utterly clear of any ministerial involvement, and quite rightly is undertaken by New Zealand on Air,” Faafoi said.

To the widespread view pushed by those suspicious of the PIJF that it would impact on media freedom and create bias, Selwyn Manning, publisher of Evening Report, says nothing could be further from the truth.

‘Simply silly’ argument
“The argument that the PIJF is an instrument of a Labour-led government is simply silly. The reality is, the lead appointment of the PIJF (NZ on Air Head of Journalism, Raewyn Rasch) is a former executive producer of TVNZ’s Seven Sharp.

“She was the executive producer when right-wing shock-jock Mike Hosking was the lead-host of that show.

“It beggars belief that some right-wing elements from within mainstream media are harping on that the PIJF will impact on media freedom,” Manning says.

“Now, I don’t know the politics of this former executive producer, but if the Labour-led cabinet was truly controlling NZ on Air operations, I doubt it would appoint Mike Hosking’s former gatekeeper into the key role of overseeing who and what gets a slice of the millions being dished out of the PIJF.”

The suggestion that the media had been ‘bought’ by the government earned a rebuke from Manning.

“The claim is absolute tripe. The same people who make the accusation are the very ones who have benefited from decades of corporate employment,” he says.

“Their former employers failed to develop new-century business models, and, many who believed they had a job for life, found themselves having to share the experience of the unemployed.

‘Smug mainstream complacency’
“Once cast into the wild, their lack of logic follows their years of smug mainstream complacency. The PIJF is designed to serve the public interest — not entrap an independent Fourth Estate. I’m not surprised that these practitioners of self-interest fail to understand the difference.”

Meanwhile, MP Melissa Lee has been conducting her own review into the media.

“Having met with dozens of broadcasting, media and content creators and industry leaders around New Zealand it is clear there needs to be a fundamental shift in the understanding of the future of media,” Lee says.

“Not just in funding, but in regulation and creativity in New Zealand; in other parts of the world global content creation platforms are innovating and embracing local markets and this needs to be considered within the framework as to how we fund these directly from the Crown and taxpayer.

“If there are commercial markets open to adapting Kiwi Stories that may have not had the same level of marketability before. We should be championing and discussing better partnerships on shore with all international and domestic content creators.

“When I set out on my own review, it showed me the industry, not the government and actually, not the taxpayer either, should be front-footing the future of their sector.

“Simply put, outside of directly non-commercial content there is a serious question as to some of the things we are seeing NZ on Air and other public-funded platforms supporting.”

Google and Facebook issue
As hinted by Minister Faafoi, the government may follow Australia’s lead, in seeking advertising revenue from Google and Facebook which was legislated for last year.

“Media is changing, the way people are consuming media is changing. We do think we need to assist some of the changing business models in the media at the moment,” he said in a recent podcast with Spinoff’s ‘The Fold’.

“At the time it was happening I said we wouldn’t take a similar approach and we haven’t.

“They have got an outcome and we have had discussions at the start of the year.

“If those (further) discussions happen it might go some way to replacing some of the revenue; we have put the PIJF to assist in the transition so we are keeping a very close eye on those discussions.

“We’ve sent the message to both Google and Facebook, after the round of talks (with local media). I would like to see more momentum there having said that officials are giving us advice on what other options are available to us.”

For once, Lee was in agreement with Faafoi as to the time limitation on the fund. Nor would she suggest a revenue gathering model for the industry to adopt.

‘Excessive level of funding’
“The government considers the PIJF to be a short term measure so I’m hoping it won’t be there when National returns to the Treasury benches. I wouldn’t support the model and the excessive level of funding that has been given in its current format and heavy conversations need to actually be had with the people of New Zealand as to what they want in the future of publicly funded journalism,” she said.

Dr Ellis considers that some form of assistance will need to go to the industry after its three-year duration.

“I sense that there will need to be ongoing support for initiatives like the Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) and the court reporting scheme, among others. However, we should not forget that among the grants are a number of (mainly TV and radio) programmes that have already been receiving long-term support from NZ on Air that have been moved into the PIJF.”

He pointed to the Reporters Without Borders Media Freedom Index in Nordic countries where the PIJF has been trialled successfully for 40 years.

“Look at the Freedom Index. New Zealand sits alongside those Nordic countries in terms of government attitudes to non-interference in media,” Dr Ellis says.

“There is a fundamental difference between trying to persuade — and all governments do that — and the type of coercion that ‘buying off the media’ suggests. There are legislative and constitutional safeguards against it.”

Māori and iwi journalism
One of the areas that has caused much consternation is under “Māori and iwi journalism in the general criteria is the section which says: “This spectrum of reporting is integral to the protection of te ao Māori under article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and includes (but is not limited to) focus areas such as:
● Te reo Māori and tikanga
● Political matters
● Historical accounts
● Profile-based reporting
● Tangihanga
● Māori interest
● Sports (Ki O Rahi, Waka Ama, Touch Nationals etc.)
● Civil Emergencies “

Yet under the what PIJF is NOT section, is the offending topic “National Political coverage”.

Although it has tried to justify this by comparing mainstream journalism with Māori journalism that is culturally specific.

That has been troubling for Manning, who saw it as a deficiency of the PIJF.

“A failure of this year’s PIJF remit was to exclude from consideration foreign affairs reporting and political reporting efforts,” he says.

‘Two vital elements’
“To me, that decision stripped two vital elements of public interest journalism from securing access to sustainable funding.

“It follows that communities, ethnicities that make up Aotearoa’s diverse multicultural experience, see politics and Pacific-wide affairs as essential components of their make-up.

“It is in the public interest that their experience and intellectual interaction with politics, and the world, be encouraged, supported and funded. But this was excluded from even being considered.

“That decision simply amplifies a Eurocentric bias. It was eyebrow-raising, to say the least, that New Zealand on Air stated to applicants that politics and foreign affairs reportage was excluded as it was already satisfactorily covered.”

It was a foible that drew the attention of Lee who said the fund draws over the cracks when it came to pluralism.

“I was deeply troubled and concerned at NZ on Air deciding to allow some forms of political journalism funding but not others and have yet to see a clear rationale for this from them or a clear answer from the Minister if he believes such funding plans were in scope for his policy proposals,” she says.

“While more ethnic media may get a temporary uplift through the fund, the reality is an effort to ensure diversity in reporters should be industry-led and not something that needs to be prescribed.

‘Other ethnicities excluded’
“One of the more discriminatory elements of the way the PIJF has been established is to pre-suppose Māori political reporting should be allowed but other ethnicities is excluded because for some reason the government believes Māori culture is innately political but other political reporting based on different ethnicities is barred; that is simply not right.”

Manning has another view on why Māori media matters specifically to New Zealand.

“Let’s seek some solutions. Ideally, the PIJF effort should be split into two camps; the first where Māori media develop an expression of public interest journalism that serves the needs of the Māori community; the second where all others express the development of public interest journalism through a multicultural frame.

“If that was embarked upon, then the challenge of measuring reach and diversity would be resolved through meritocracy and need, as opposed to racial through Eurocentric considerations,” Manning said.

He pulls no punches when he casts a caustic eye on media saying they are as much to blame for young talent not emerging from their own ranks as the Crawford Report in the Fund’s Stakeholder consultations and recommendations noted: “There was a consensus that the pipeline of talent into NZ journalism is broken. Newsrooms cannot find experienced journalists to fill vacancies and many in the industry believe the tertiary sector is not supplying sufficiently skilled graduates.”

As Manning explains: “If I may, I’ll speak to the degrees of blame emitting from mainstream media outlets. I’ll try to explain… The fact is the business models of many mainstream media are beyond their golden years.

“They cannot sustain the viability of their effort for much longer. They operate within a competitive paradigm where the value of an investigation is calculated by how popular it is; how it affects the time-on-site analytics; and how it may devalue an opponent’s brand (clickbait).

Reasons for journalism
“Public interest doesn’t come into it, that is unless it serves these elements. Nor does holding the powerful to account.

“Or creating an understanding that promotes common ground or positive change. A Fourth Estate endeavour couldn’t be farthest from their managers’ minds.

“Compare this to the reasons why young professionals study journalism and choose it as their preferred career path.

“I’d suggest 90 percent of those graduating with tertiary degrees majoring in journalism have made the commitment due to a desire to make a difference; to hold the powerful to account; to serve the public interest, and are dedicated to the ethics and ideals of a real Fourth Estate.

“The two cultures: the old corporate conservative dinosaur and the young idealistic professional, simply do not mix well. I fail to see any common ground between them.

“The consequence is a well-healed blame-game where the former media elites complain about the quality of entry-level journalists, and the rarity of the experienced.

“The reality is they want underpaid journalists, of all levels, that will serve them rather than public interest ideals”

Fourth Estate recognition heartening
Manning, in his final thoughts on the PIJF, said:

“If New Zealand on Air is sincere in its resolve (i.e. to learn from the PIJF early rounds) then a solid sustainable funding framework will emerge. From a media point of view, it is heartening that our democracy’s executive government has recognised how important is to have a sustainable Fourth Estate.

“It is disappointing in equal measure that the PIJF effort’s biggest critics come from mainstream media backgrounds.

“I suggest this reveals a pathetic state of intellectual decay that sadly is rife among those who once were journalists but are now yesterday’s news.”

That is the nature of the still-evolving media industry.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Fiji’s Assistant Minister for iTaukei Affairs Selai Adimaitoga said quite a lot on Friday in her end of week statement on the Media Industry Development Act 2010 in Parliament.

She blamed reckless reporting by journalists as “one of the causes of violence and economic destruction over the past years”.

She said dishonest media had played a role in every troubling event in Fiji’s history. For that, she said, media organisations had a duty to tell the truth to the public and not to publish things that would stir political instability or violence.

“We must ensure that history does not repeat itself as Fijians deserve honest and fair media,” Ms Adimaitoga said.

She said every media organisation should only speak the truth and fairly report on facts, adding “Fiji cannot afford the reckless reporting of the past. The media have a responsibility to publish the truth. They also have a responsibility to maintain professional standards, a responsibility to maintain integrity”.

We totally agree with her that media organisations have a duty to tell the truth and fairly report on issues. We do not just talk about it. We do it, every day.

We try, every day, to fairly report on issues of importance to the nation, and to provide coverage that cuts through any imaginary demarcation line.

There are many such lines — political leanings, ethnicity, gender and religion for instance. Any good news organisation lives on its reputation for reliability. If its information is reliable it has the trust of its readers or viewers. But a key part of the media’s role is to hold power to account.

Ms Adimaitoga, whose [FijiFirst] government has held power (in one form or another) for more than a decade, said nothing about that. Our editorial decisions on what information we present must factor in what is of public interest, and the public interest requires close scrutiny of those who exercise power over us.

So when a government politician talks about “anti-government” news, she must think carefully about the fact that the public expects accountability from her government. Keeping the trust of our readers requires us to maintain a balance and not to be partisan advocates for one political side or the other.

Ms Adimaitoga needs to better appreciate and understand the role of the media. And we will say to her what we have said to the government in the past when we have faced the same “anti-government” label.

We are not anti-government, nor are we pro-government, and neither she nor anyone should try to put us into one corner or another.

The Fiji Times does not exist to create positive headlines for the government. It exists to publish all views and to ensure there is balanced coverage of the news and balanced political debate.

The public in any democracy expects to read diverse news and opinions which are representative of our whole society and the different viewpoints and perspectives that exist in our nation.

And we believe in serving the public in line with those democratic expectations.

The Fiji Times was founded at Levuka in 1869. This editorial was published in The Sunday Times edition of the newspaper yesterday (September 26) under the title “The role of the media” and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

On Tuesday, March 30, we lodged a series of questions to the Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi, seeking answers to allegations that 10 Chinese workers, who were detained in custody pending deportation orders, were in fact victims of a human trafficking scam.

Throughout last week, the ten workers’ lawyer, Matt Robson, and union advocate Mike Treen of Unite Union, had been racing against the clock, seeking to halt deportation orders that Immigration New Zealand officials were advancing – seemingly with haste.

Two days later (April 1), two of the ten workers in fact received their deportation orders and were en-route to Auckland International Airport, escorted by Police.

Then, as the Police vehicle neared Auckland Airport on George Bolt Memorial Drive, one of the two, Ning Yu ‘escaped’!

How? The Chinese worker simply unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the Police car’s unlocked rear door, and ran away. Apparently, back in China, Ning Yu is a marathon runner.

While a number of Police units (including from the Police Dog Section, and Police helicopter) searched unsuccessfully for him, Ning Yu took refuge in a tree near a Golf Course on Nixon Road, Mangere. Then, once the Police helicopter flew off, he wandered about Mangere throughout the early hours of the morning.

After dawn rose on April 2, Ning Yu noticed a Chinese man jogging. As he passed, Ning Yu spoke to him in Mandarin. They had a conversation. Ning Yu told him his predicament. The jogger convinced him to hand himself in to Police. He agreed, and made his way to Auckland Central Police.

On arrival, Ning Yu told Police he absconded because he wanted to collect some money owned to him; “So he could take it home with him”. He was arrested, and later appeared before the Courts charged with escaping Police custody.

The charge sheet states: “At approximately 1952hrs on Friday the 1st of April 2021, Police were dispatched by the Northern Communication centre to assist NZ Immigration in escorting two deportees to the Auckland Airport as their flight was scheduled to depart from Auckland to China later in the evening.

“Police arrived at the Mount Eden Correction facility and received into their custody Ning YU, the Defendant in this matter.

“Due to the demeanour and background of the Defendant, he was not handcuffed. The Defendant was seated at the back of the Police Vehicle.

“On the way to the Airport, as the vehicle approached Cyril Kay Road on George Bolt Memorial Drive, the Defendant opened the petrol [sic] vehicle door and escaped,” The charge sheet stated.

On Saturday April 3, Ning Yu appeared before the Courts in Auckland. While there, the Police charge of absconding was withdrawn. He was returned to Police custody pending renewed deportation orders.

***

At this juncture, it is worth checking this worker’s allegations.

Throughout the ordeal (since Immigration investigators identified Ning Yu and the other nine as illegal workers) Ning Yu’s position was simple. He insisted he wanted to stay in New Zealand to work and earn some money. The wages he earned, he intended to send home to China for his wife and child. Ning Yu believed he was owed wages by an employer in Auckland, and that he had not earned enough, yet, to cover the USD$20,000 he states he paid an individual in China – who had initially arranged to expedite his Visa application to enter New Zealand. Back then, after paying the agent, Ning Yu said it took two days for his Visa to be allocated to him.

If true, this suggests corruption. Remember New Zealand is regarded as the least corrupt country in the world, equal to Denmark. If agents are demanding money from hopeful foreign workers, securing entry visas within days, and on arrival at Auckland Airport, these people are scooted off to work for employers as black labour – then that situation questions the corruption-free status New Zealand enjoys. And that, is clearly a public and national interest issue.

The seriousness of these allegations also draw forward concerns that New Zealand Government’s practice of out-sourcing Immigration New Zealand visa applications to agencies inside China, may have been corrupted.

Such concerns, in a democracy such as New Zealand, demand an expectation of thorough and transparent investigation. This case however, draws forward examples of bureaucratic control, silence, and an obvious ministerial convention being observed that prevents open and accountable oversight.

Far from answering allegations of serious crimes, questions remain unanswered.

Questions such as these:

• Who is the individual (the agent) that received approximately USD$20k from Ning Yu, the agent who allegedly managed, in two days, to acquire a Visa for this person to enter New Zealand?
• Who was the initial ‘employer’ that received Ning Yu and the other nine workers, and put them to work illegally in Auckland?

• Why were there no employment records held for Ning Yu and the nine other Chinese workers?
• Why were there no IRD numbers? No tax records?
• How many dodgy employers were Ning Yu (and the nine other workers) handed over to, to be exploited, paid under the table, under the minimum wage, without holiday pay, without health and safety protection, without the rights that a legitimate working visa demands?
• Why were New Zealand Government employment and labour inspectors prevented by Immigration New Zealand, and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Enterprise (MBIE), from interviewing the ten Chinese workers about their situation?
• Does this bureaucratic refusal-to-interview prevent an investigation from taking place into allegations of human trafficking and illegal employment by New Zealand-based companies and contractors?
• Do not the ten workers come under the protection of New Zealand Government’s Migrant Exploitation Policy?
• What is the definition of human trafficking that applies to victims of this type of crime in New Zealand?

On that last question, the United Nations defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a person by deceptive, coercive or other improper means for the purpose of exploiting that person.

The United Nations definition appears relevant to the allegations in this case.

Despite the concerns as noted above, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Enterprise (MBIE)’s ‘Delegated Decision Maker’ replied to the Chinese workers’ lawyer, Matt Robson, on Thursday April 1 stating:

“Under the immigration delegations, the delegated decision makers have the authority to make certain ministerial intervention decisions on behalf of the Associate Minister of Immigration. I have carefully considered your representations. I advise I am not prepared to intervene in this case. As section 11 of the Immigration Act 2009 applies, I am not obliged to give reasons for my decision. Your clients will be deported from New Zealand at the discretion of Immigration New Zealand.”

***

Back to Thursday April 1, Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi’s office continued to resist answering specific questions, electing rather to issue this statement:

‘Investigations are continuing and the Minister does not consider it appropriate to comment further than the statement he has provided to other media requests, which is:

“Ministers do not get involved in enforcement. That is an operational matter.

“We have been assured that the appropriate processes have been followed and Immigration NZ has not found any evidence of trafficking.

“Agencies are satisfied further investigations around employment and immigration breaches can be carried out without the need for the men to remain in New Zealand.

“As investigations are continuing, and this is an operational matter, it would not be appropriate to comment further.”’

The questions that were put to Minister Faafoi, prior to Ning Yu escaping from Police custody included:

Should New Zealand Police be heading an investigation into alleged human trafficking?

12: If so, has NZ Police been approached by you as Minister of Immigration or by your office or by Immigration New Zealand? And, is an investigation underway by New Zealand Police on this element of this issue?

The lawyer acting for the ten workers found there were:

a: No written employment agreements;

b: No wage and time records;

c: No paid holidays;

d: No legal wages;

e: No training in health and safety measures on construction sites.

13: Do you accept that the above points (a – e) are an accurate assessment of the ten workers situation? If not, why not? If so, does this suggest that they fall within the considerations of the Migrant Exploitation Policy? And if so, as suspected exploited foreign workers, do they have the right to seek recourse via New Zealand’s judicial process, and does this recourse halt deportation proceedings from occurring?

Regarding answers to these questions, the silence from the Beehive prevailed.

For the record, through their lawyer, Matt Robson (a former minister in the Labour-Alliance coalition government) and union representative Mike Treen (of Unite Union), the ten workers allege they:

• Were recruited by agents in China to go to New Zealand to work
• Paid the agents between USD$15,000 – $30,000
• Received their Visas within two to six days of applying
• Were met by agents (on arrival) at Auckland Airport
• Were taken to prearranged accommodation in Auckland
• Worked for various ‘employers’ at building sites around Auckland
• Never had employment contracts, wage or time records, or paid tax
• Were paid in cash
• Were put to work by the employers without work visas.

In a letter to Minister Faafoi dated April 1, 2021, Robson and Treen asserted that the above allegations demanded a robust investigation – that this situation meets the New Zealand Government’s Migrant Exploitation Policy, and, as such, the ten workers are witnesses to an alleged breach of New Zealand’s immigration and employment laws, and also human trafficking crimes.

They questioned why the Minister Kris Faafoi (who is also Minister of Justice) was determined to be satisfied with Immigration NZ officials who insisted to deport the workers with haste.

Minister Faafoi’s response, as noted above is, that it is an operational matter and that he is satisfied that Immigration has investigated the situation, including the allegations, and found no substance to them. The Minister was also satisfied that New Zealand’s employment and labour agencies can continue to investigate allegations of employment law breaches even after the ten workers have been deported back to China.

Also, for the record, the ten Chinese workers were scheduled for deportation on five flights to China leaving New Zealand between April 1st to 15th, 2021.

CONCLUSION:

The New Zealand public seldom has an appetite for bureaucracy. It is especially intolerant of government officials operating behind a shroud when issues of public and national interest are in question.

In reviewing this case it is clear, the allegations underlying this case demand an open and transparent investigation be held – even if that investigation should unearth cases of corruption and human trafficking – victims of exploitation between the People’s Republic of China and New Zealand. To avoid public scrutiny to the satisfaction of a reasonable standard, well, that is a national disgrace.

***

Ref. Questions from Selwyn Manning to Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi, dated Tuesday, March 30, 2021.

For an article/editorial for EveningReport.nz (an associate member of the New Zealand Media Council)  and syndicated outlets, I request the Minister of Immigration, Kris Faafoi, answer the following questions regarding the ten Chinese nationals detained (nine in Mt Eden Corrections Facility and one in Police custody) pending deportation proceedings. Thanks in advance for your considerations:

Regarding Employment Status (I ask this as it appears this has relevance in determining whether the ten fall under Migrant Exploitation Policy as exploited individuals):

1: Did the 10 workers (as individuals) have employment contracts while working in New Zealand?

2: Did their employer calculate tax PAYE deductions from their gross pay and pay Inland Revenue Department for money earned in New Zealand?

3: Did their employers calculate the cost of labour on their respective company accounts?

4: If not, is this a breach of New Zealand employment law and should this be investigated? If it should be investigated, what agency should conduct this investigation?

5: Do you believe under the currently known circumstances, that Mt Eden Corrections Facility is an appropriate place for the ten to reside pending the outcome of any inquiries?

6: On the facts so far, do you feel the 10 workers have potentially been exploited?

7: If you do not feel they have been exploited, why do you feel this is so?

8: If you do feel they have potentially been exploited, who or what do you feel is culpable? And, do you accept that they ten workers are key witnesses in an alleged human trafficking ring?

The lawyer representing the ten workers, the Honourable Matt Robson, said on Radio New Zealand’s Checkpoint programme (March 30, 2021) that he believed the ten workers are victims of exploitation by a human trafficking ring.

9: Do you believe this element has been satisfactorily investigated, and if so why?

10: If not, what should happen now?

11: Should New Zealand Police be heading an investigation into alleged human trafficking?

12: If so, has NZ Police been approached by you as Minister of Immigration or by your office or by Immigration New Zealand? And, is an investigation underway by New Zealand Police on this element of this issue?

The lawyer acting for the ten workers found there were:

a: No written employment agreements;

b: No wage and time records;

c: No paid holidays;

d: No legal wages;

e: No training in health and safety measures on construction sites.

13: Do you accept that the above points (a – e) are an accurate assessment of the ten workers situation? If not, why not? If so, does this suggest that they fall within the considerations of the Migrant Exploitation Policy? And if so, as suspected exploited foreign workers, do they have the right to seek recourse via New Zealand’s judicial process, and does this recourse halt deportation proceedings from occurring?

14: Has the Minister of Foreign Affairs been alerted (corresponded with) to this issue by your office, if so, what was the nature of that correspondence?

Thank you for your attention to the above questions. Your consideration is appreciated, and I request, that due the urgency relating to the situation and potential deportation of the ten workers, that your answers be given a priority.

Veteran journalist Robert Fisk, who for decades covered events in the Middle East and elsewhere as a foreign correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, has died after suffering a suspected stroke at his Dublin home.

Fisk became unwell on Friday and was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital where he died a short time later, reports Al Jazeera English.

Almost six months ago, RNZ Saturday Morning’s Kim Hill did the following interview with Fisk. The Pacific Media Centre republishes this article here as a tribute to the celebrated journalist.

Celebrated veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk believed that journalists aren’t automatons keeping neutral battle scores between oppressed and oppressors and are duty-bound to ensure history isn’t written by politicians.

Fisk, who had spent the past 40 years living in war zones covering conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans and Ireland, died last Friday. He was 74.

He argued that journalists and editors cower from reporting honestly because of corporate and political influence.

He told Kim Hill in an interview in May that the notion unbiased reporting must not take a moral position was a nonsense and that journalists should, at the very least, challenge narratives of power, which were usually distortions of truth.

The high-profile career of the Englishman who took Irish nationality was the focus of This Is Not A Movie, a documentary by Canadian director Yung Chang about the journalist screened in New Zealand’s 2020 Doc Edge Festival.

Fisk broke several big stories in his time, even landing an interview with Osama bin Laden, notorious Saudi founder of the pan-Islamic terror group al-Qaeda.

A story that didn’t make it on to the front page of The Times – his former employer – was one exposing US responsibility for shooting down a Iranian passenger aircraft in 1988, at the tail end of the Iraq-Iran war.

Verified story spiked
The story, which Fisk verified using local air traffic control sources, was spiked and instead the paper published claims by the US navy that the pilot had tried to carry out a suicide mission on a US warship in the Gulf. His story was eventually published by Ireland’s Sunday Tribune, with Fisk resigning and moving to rival newspaper The Independent.

“I thought, that’s the time I go. If I’m going to risk my life for a newspaper but my editor will not risk his reputation with his owner over a story of mine then it’s time I left,” he said.

Fisk said The Times editor toed owner Rupert Murdoch’s political line, telling him his story was rubbish. An official inquiry by US authorities subsequently backed the content of Fisk’s story.

“It’s a sort of self-censorship… the problem is once you have a ruthless owner and you know your livelihood is in the pocket of that man – and if you’re not fortunate enough to have the reputation that can possibly get you another job – there is a tendency to start not wanting to rock the boat… so it’s in the journalists’ blood, as it is the editors’, not to do something that will cause a ‘crisis’.”

He said this power dynamic affected the way reporters framed stories and reflected the type of politically-contrived language used too. Not least in the Middle East, and especially when dealing with Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“That’s why, for example, journalists refer to the Israeli wall separating the West Bank as a ‘security fence’, because they don’t want to offend the Israelis and Israel’s supporters by calling it a wall, even though it is higher and longer than the Berlin Wall.

“That’s why we call it a ‘Jewish settlement’ in the West Bank, when it’s a Jewish colony… which has a kind of soft impression of settlements in the Wild West perhaps, of course, you think of the Native Americans attacking them.

Distorting the Palestinian struggle
“And also you have this thing where you must never talk about a war between Israel and the Palestinians, it’s always a dispute… it’s more of course, it’s one group of people stealing other people’s land. By de-semiticising this conflict, because we are frightened of what editors or owners will say… we effectively say ‘there must be something wrong when the Palestinians throw stones, they must be generically a violent people’. So, in a sense, we contribute towards warfare, by self-censorship.”

He rejected the concept of giving a false “balance” to stories – that, in some fashion, balance was the ultimate measure of reporting. It was not enough that a journalist merely kept an accurate score of events in a conflict situation, without taking into account history or power differentials.

The argument that a slave owner’s views on the slave trade must be used to strike balance in a story for it to be fair and accurate, he argued, was morally absurd. So too with a Nazi’s views in a story dealing with the extermination of Jews.

Fisk cites a contemporary example – the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982. Scores of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites were killed by a militia linked to a right-wing Lebanese party, allies of Israel.

The names of at least 1390 were identified, with some death-toll estimates nearly tripling that number. Fisk was on the scene in Lebanon.

Robert Fisk on ’50/50 journalism’. Video: Pacific Media Centre

“I did not spend my time giving equal time to the killers,” he said. “I talked to the relatives of the dead and tried to find out the identities of the dead… My feeling is, you must be neutral and unbiased, but unbiased on the side of those who suffer.

“The idea that we are some kind of robotic creature that reports wars as if it’s a football match, where you give equal time to each side, is a bloody tragedy. It is not a football match.”

Landed in hot water
Fisk’s manner of reporting landed him in hot water at times. In Belfast, he was accused of giving succour to the IRA because he exposed British security force brutality during the Anglo-Irish conflict, which ended in the 1990s.

More recently, he was attacked for undermining those attempting to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, after a story questioned proof Assad’s forces had carried out a deadly chemical attack in April 2018.

The documentary This Is Not A Movie highlights a story Fisk wrote that found no trace of a chemical attack in Douma that had supposedly killed dozens of civilians, a story widely disseminated by western media.

He travelled to the Syrian town and talked exhaustively with local people to find proof of the attack, even inspecting underground tunnels of interest, again finding nothing to back the veracity of the claims.

Fisk talked to a doctor, who said respiratory distress by civilians had been caused by a dust storm created by nearby joint Syrian and Russian bombings.

“The final report of Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons did in fact censor out some of the evidence by its own scientists so that it would say that it’s an open-and-shut case that Assad did use gas. In fact, its own staff could not finally prove gas was used,” he said.

This didn’t stop verbal attacks suggesting he’d done Assad a favour. Fisk brushed this off as merely something to be expected if a journalist was doing their job properly.

“If we don’t do that we’re handing over the writing of history to political parties,” he said.

‘Do our best to get at the truth’
“We simply have to bash on and do our best to get at the truth, even though in Douma I couldn’t establish what it was, at least  we raise the doubt.”

Getting to grips with history was essential if serious reporters wanted to do their jobs properly, illuminating meaning behind what would otherwise seem random or vindictive acts of violence, Fisk said.

“I do very much think you cannot report a war or go to a war without at least a very good history book in your back pocket… without knowing what lies underneath the embers you don’t know why the fire is burning.”

An understanding of World War I and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war between Germany and allied forces, could account of much of the antecedents of conflict in the Middle East, he said. The treaty, in part, amounted to a carve-up of imperial rights to occupy nations and created divisive, artificial lines of territory across the region.

“I think there’s an automatic connection between the collapse of industrial civilisation and WWI and then a peace treaty that was effectively going to collapse the ruins of the Ottaman Empire in 1919 and from that came all these borders… particularly the borders of Iraq and Lebanon and Syria and Turkey and all my working life in the Middle East and indeed also in Yugoslavia and Belfast I’ve watched over the past 50 years all the people within those borders burn.

“I said to my friend in Beruit yesterday I think the reason we’re not finding evidence of covid-19 among the Middle Eastern people is that, for them, it was covid 1919 – Versailles was their infection and that continues now to spread its disease across the Middle East, of injustice, lack of independence and lack of freedom.”

Good journalism was needed as much now as at any time in history. He said the hope that the world was getting better with the defeat of Fascism and the establishment of post-war institutions like the United Nations and human rights organisations had proven false. The historical causes of conflict hadn’t be resolved.

Living with tragedy every day
“When you go into the alleyways of the world, the Palestinian camps in Beirut for example, and you actually talk to the people there you realise that they are living in squalor and dirt because Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, signed the Balfour Agreement in 1917, and because the victorious allies, principally the French and the British divided up the Middle East. Britain would have Palestine and France would get Syria and Lebanon in the aftermath of that war and for those people, waking up in their hovels everyday, Balfour signed the declaration last night.

“For them Versailles happened yesterday and history in their experience is something that they are living tragically with every day.

“Whereas we people can luxuriate in a post-war world with values of civilisation, or we think we do, and technology to look after us.”

Journalism should question our cozy, false impression of ourselves as enlightened and civilised Westerners, who conveniently see others embroiled in conflict as lacking these values. He also pointed out a Western hypocrisy of rightly attacking anyone who denied the German holocaust against the Jewish people, yet those in the West allowed Turkey to deny its own Armenian holocaust in 1915, when 1.5 million Christians were killed.

Our complicity in imperialist wars and attitudes should be challenged by reporting facts within an authentic historical context, shorn of political spin.

“One of the things I think journalists have to do, as well as recognise the goodness of ordinary people, is to try and find out why ordinary people do wicked things,” Fisk said.

“We all sort of participate in it in the sense that we wring our hands with anguish when a hospital is destroyed in northern Syria but when a hospital is destroyed in Mosul by an American aircraft we do not wring our hands.

Pandemic pushes Yemen from sight
“We wait to see if the Americans will give us an explanation and then we hope that their claim that they didn’t hit the hospital is true. Same applies to wedding parties and medical centres in Afghanistan and so on.

“When you consider that half a million Iraqis might have died as a result of the Anglo-American illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, when people used to say to me, ‘why don’t you want Tony Blair and George Bush put on trial’, I would always say ‘because they are not going to be put on trial’ there’s no point in wasting your energies’. Now I’m not so sure that would be my reply.”

With the current pandemic the focus of the world’s attention, the situation in places like Yemen had fallen from sight. But, he said, the intractable problems of the region were continuing without any respite.

“One of the great tragedies of the coronavirus pandemic is that the whole Middle East tragedy, of injustice, dispossession and blood, has basically faded away from all of us who are concentrating on our own families, our own countries, and we’ve largely forgotten that long after Covid-19 is in the history books, the same terrible history will continue in these regions.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It all boils down to this: The timeline of latest revelations suggests National Party MPs placed their want to GET their opponents – the Ardern Government – ahead of concerns that Covid-19 was potentially un-contained and again infecting New Zealanders. Is this a step too far for the Todd Muller-led party?

We are debating the issue where two women, who had recently arrived from the United Kingdom and were in isolation, were released on compassionate grounds to travel freely between Auckland and Wellington to visit a dying parent – this while infected with the Covid-19 virus.

In the latest revelations to Parliament on Thursday June 18, 2020 (the Government revealed) National Party MP Chris Bishop had lobbied for the two women asking officials to  “expeditiously” consider releasing the women from quarantine so they could visit their dying parent.

While Bishop was just doing his job, it set in train a failure by New Zealand officials to follow Government instructions to keep those who have recently crossed our borders isolated and quarantined. That is, until international travellers have proved to be free of Covid-19.

Earlier this week, National MP Michael Woodhouse delivered a bombshell in Parliament. He revealed that two women – who had recently arrived in New Zealand, who had travelled from the United Kingdom to New Zealand via Doha (in Qatar) and Australia – had been released early from quarantine prior to their Covid-19 status being determined.

Woodhouse revealed, citing a “reliable but confidential source” that the two women had now presented as Covid-19 positive, that they had borrowed a car from a friend, had got lost on the Auckland Motorway, were in physical contact with that friend, and had driven from Auckland to Wellington.

As Radio New Zealand reported: Woodhouse said:

“They called on acquaintances who they were in close contact with and that was rewarded with even more close contact – a kiss and a cuddle.” The source also told him the women had borrowed the car, raising the question of whether there was further undisclosed contact.

Once in Wellington, they had visited their dying parent before tests showed they were carrying the deadly virus. It was not clear how many New Zealanders they had actually come into contact with – some reports suggested up to 320 people had potentially been infected with the Covid-19 virus.

Woodhouse’s claims rocked the government. Reeling and on the back-foot, Ministers, including the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, scrambled to gather information. Later that afternoon, it was confirmed that Woodhouse was correct. Health officials were summoned. Breaches of the Government’s strict controls were discovered.

The Prime Minister, clearly appalled and fed up with having earlier received official assurances that the controls were being followed, was later informed that that was not the case. Her response? She ordered the military to replace public servants, that Air Commodore Digby Webb would oversee and manage the quarantine and isolation control requirements.

Throughout Wednesday National MPs, supporters, some commentators, and a tribe of social media zealots called for the resignation of the Health Minister, David Clark. The Prime Minister refused and stood by her minister stating he was a part of efforts to fix this issue, and not a part of the problem.

BUT, what Woodhouse did not reveal, was that one of his fellow National Party MPs, Chris Bishop, had lobbied to have the two women released early so they could drive from Auckland to Wellington.

Here’s the crucial timeline as Bishop has now confirmed:

To RadioNZ’s Checkpoint he said:

On Friday (June 12) a “mutual friend” sent him a Twitter message describing to him the plight of the two women who had arrived in NZ to see their dying parent but who were in secure quarantine while their parent’s condition was deteriorating.

“I said [to the mutual friend] they should send me an email.”

“I was contacted on Friday night by the two women via email, when I saw the email on Saturday afternoon I forwarded it to the email address provided to MPs for that purpose, and asked the officials to look at it ‘expeditiously’, I think was the language used.”

Afterwards, Bishop said he emailed the women back to let them know he had passed on their request, and their correspondence ended after that with the pair thanking him.

Bishop added: “I did what MPs are … obliged to do and dozens of MPs from around the Parliament will have done over the last three months or so, I’ve dealt with probably hundreds of inquiries and forwarded them on to the appropriate address, everything from essential businesses to immigration matters through to this case.”

Now, that may have been the case. MPs are often compelled to act on the interests of constituents and citizens. And, it should be said, Chris Bishop is a hard working and well-respected member of Parliament.

But this is where the snakes and mirrors creeps in.

Every Tuesday morning, when Parliament sits, National MPs hold a caucus meeting where, in private, they discuss, among other things, party issues and organise what information they will raise in Parliament later that day.

It is reasonable to realise, on the morning of Tuesday June 16, while at caucus, National’s MPs will have discussed the bombshell. At caucus they would have decided who among them would deliver the blow, a strategy would have been decided upon on how the politics of it all would be handled.

And here, it is likely, where National decided to sit on information until it set this political dynamite alight in the debating chamber.

As vital hours passed, it appears National placed political interests ahead of the public interest.

National’s MPs knew, as the good New Zealand public knows, that Covid-19 is the most deadly virus to have swept the world in our lifetimes. The pandemic is raging offshore as you read this.

It appears, National MPs, and its leadership, willingly withheld information it had acquired from its “reliable but confidential source” from health officials and the Government.

As they stated later, hundreds could have caught Covid-19 in the days the two women were among our communities. And as Radio New Zealand’s political editor Jane Patterson wrote: “The next few days will be crucial. Testing and contact tracing that will be frantically happening should give us a better idea of whether this is limited to just the two women, or if the failures at the border are going to have more wide-reaching consequences.”

Time, when it comes to Covid-19, is crucial.

Morally, on being informed of the two women having tested as Covid-19 positive, National should have immediately informed the Prime Minister’s office of the issue, called a press conference where it cited their informant, exposing the Government’s officials for having placed New Zealanders at further risk, and claimed the political highground.

Instead, it sat quiet, while the hours ticked away, while New Zealanders who may have been in contact with the infected women went about their daily tasks, contacting others, placing more people at risk.

If Covid-19 gets away on us again, New Zealand could return to lockdown. That would cause huge strain on an already strained economy and could see more New Zealanders die.

National’s decision is, in my opinion, beyond dirty politics. It exposes a party to being prepared to put New Zealander’s lives at risk just so it can deliver a political hit job.

In defence of his own actions, on Thursday MP Chris Bishop said: “This was a desperate attempt by the government to distract away from their incompetent management at the border and I think it’s frankly pretty disgraceful that an MP doing their job is being dragged into this.”

Bishop, in my view, on the evidence available so far, has little to apologise for. He was doing his job. But as for National’s leadership team, rather than the Minister of Health resigning, decency would insist they should front-up to explain why they put Kiwis lives at risk by holding on to that crucial information. On the information at hand, it is they, rather than the Minister of Health David Clark, who should resign.

But we all know – despite this revelation – they will not.

Ref. Parliament TV, Oral Questions, Todd Muller to the Prime Minister, June 17, 2020.

Ref. Parliament TV, Oral Questions, Michael Woodhouse to the Minister of Health, June 17, 2020.

Ref. Radio NZ (Morning Report, S Ferguson IV Michael Woodhouse),  (7:26 am on 18 June 2020).

Ref. Parliament TV, Oral Questions, Michael Woodhouse to the Minister of Health, June 18, 2020.

Ref. Parliament.nz oral questions, June 17, 2020.

Pacific Media Watch

An Australian federal court decision upholding the legality of the police raid on the Sydney headquarters of the national public broadcaster ABC last June has dealt a major blow to the protection of journalists’ sources and poses a grave danger for the future of public interest journalism, says Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

In its ruling issued on February 17, the court rejected the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s challenge to the legality of the search warrant that allowed federal police to search computers, emails and USB sticks at its headquarters on 5 June 2019.

The police were trying to identify the source for The Afghan Files reporting by ABC journalists Sam Clark and Dan Oakes in 2017 about the role of Australian special forces in the illegal killing of civilians in Afghanistan.

READ MORE: The Afghan Files: Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australia’s special forces

The reporters used material provided by a whistleblower within the Defence Ministry.

“If confirmed on appeal, this federal court ruling will set a disturbing legal precedent by turning investigative reporters and whistleblowers into criminals,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“The ABC story never compromised national security and clearly served the interests of the Australian public, who have a right to reliable and independent information freely reported by journalists.

“We call on the federal judges to guarantee this right on appeal by recognising the search warrant’s illegality.”

Ruling fraught with consequences
Under the warrant, the police were authorised to search for evidence that the two journalists had “unlawfully obtained military information” and “dishonestly received stolen property”.

The supposedly stolen property was the leaked documents that exposed the illegal killings reported in The Afghan Files.

The federal police raid on ABC was all the more shocking for coming just one day after a raid on News Corp political editor Annika Smethurst’s home in Canberra. The timing of the two raids was widely seen as a deliberate attempt to intimidate investigative journalists.

The judicial precedents set by these two cases are particularly fraught with consequences inasmuch as Australia’s constitutional law contains no guarantees for press freedom.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Are our politicians doing a good job? Are they on top of the urgent problems that need fixing? These are some of the big questions that have arisen from reflecting on the last year in politics, especially as we shift into an election year.

Yesterday’s Political Roundup looked at the politicians who performed strongly in 2019 – see: Evaluating NZ’s politicians. But many end-of-year reviews also focused on where the politicians failed, especially the Government, given that 2019 was pronounced by Jacinda Ardern to be her Year of Delivery. The consensus is that the Year of Delivery failed to eventuate.

The Year of Stagnation?

So, do the politicians even deserve to be awarded the various “politician of the year” prizes given out at this time of the year? Former Cabinet Minister Peter Dunne doesn’t think so. He says that “2019 was an unsatisfactory and unsettled year, dominated by awful tragedies and missed opportunities”, and hence it’s inappropriate to “perpetuate the myth of celebrity” by focusing on personalities at the expense of dealing with serious issues. He argues that “Politicians should be judged on their achievements, not their appearance, turns of phrase or witticisms” – see: Goodbye to a year of stagnation and tragedy.

Elaborating on this and the superficiality of contemporary politics, Dunne says: “singling out a politician of the year as some sort of superstar simply fuels that vacuity. Rather, the focus should be on the progress the country has made during the year under review. In short, are we in better heart than we were at the start of the year, and has our emotional, social, and economic prosperity been advanced?”

For Dunne, 2019 was actually “the year of stagnation”. And the Government is responsible: “What was touted boldly at year’s start as the year of delivery slowly but surely morphed into the year of whimpered excuses. The failure of KiwiBuild is the most dramatic example – achieving only about 3 percent of its projected first year target, making only the slightest dent in the demand for affordable first homes. Elsewhere, optimistic deadlines for various projects were constantly announced, and then steadily pushed further back as reality struck, with decisions on the planned TVNZ/RNZ merger deferred being but the latest to join the ever-lengthening lists of delays.”

Dunne then catalogues the many areas in which things have stagnated or got worse: economic growth, job growth, rising fuel costs, poor public transport, child poverty, suicide levels, state housing waiting lists, health and education staffing, and the state of the environment. He concludes that “Too many timebombs are ticking, faster than ever.”

I’ve also argued that our politicians failed to make much real progress in 2019 – see my end-of-year column for the Guardian: New Zealand’s year of style over substance. In this, I contend that “politics was dominated by spin doctors, PR professionals and talented communicators”. Both major parties need to improve their game and move away from the soundbite-driven policies and sloganeering.

The Year of Spin?

In my column I also look at the question of whether we should be holding the Government to account based on the promise that 2019 would be their Year of Delivery. This is in light of recent revelation from Beehive sources that Ardern’s “Year of Delivery” promise in January last year was an impromptu creation from a spindoctor, rather than from Ardern herself, when she needed a soundbite for the media.

I argued that this exemplified the PR-approach of contemporary politics: “The explanation from the Beehive was to convey that it’s not actually fair to hold the PM to account for a catchphrase that was never intended to be taken so seriously. It is extraordinary that something presented as a solemn promise to the electorate is now being explained away as nothing more than a manufactured PR soundbite.”

The origins of the catchphrase were reported on 21 December by two different political journalists. Here’s Audrey Young’s account: “Ardern’s first mistake was made during her opening remarks to the MPs at the retreat, with media present. She didn’t have a prepared speech and she and chief press secretary Andrew Campbell put their heads together shortly before the start. Having copped so much flak in 2018 for it being a year of reviews and task forces Campbell came up with the crisp phrase that 2019 would be The Year of Delivery. She duly delivered the line and it became instantly mockable” – see: And my politician of the year is… (paywalled).

Young gives her own critique of such promises: “Both the KiwiBuild promises and Year of Delivery catchphrase epitomise the single biggest weakness of Ardern – a propensity to over-promise and a failure to manage expectation. Whether it is promising ‘transformational Government’, ‘the most open and transparent Government’ or ‘the Year of Delivery’ she fails to grasp that there is often little difference between a great sound-bite and a superlative that sets yourself up for failure.”

Stuff political journalists also reported the Beehive line about how that Year of Delivery line came about: “It was a sunny day in Martinbrough and KiwiBuild was falling over. Just days before the out-of-office caucus meeting in January, Housing Minister Phil Twyford had admitted that KiwiBuild would not be getting anywhere near close to 1000 homes ready by July. Jacinda Ardern, facing her caucus with the media pack watching, needed a line that might change the narrative that her Government hadn’t really done much so far. Her press secretary Andrew Campbell came up with just the thing: The ‘year of delivery’. It led headlines everywhere. But it also would come to haunt the Government” – see: The biggest political moments of 2019, from tragedy to farce.

Stuff political journalist Henry Cooke also reported on the origins of the spin-line, adding that “It is housing which Ardern pointed to as the biggest problem in her ‘year of delivery’ when talking to Stuff for an end-of-year interview” – see: Jacinda Ardern found new heights of power in 2019 – and hit hard limits. And he points out that a few months later, “Labour lost its decade-long battle to introduce a capital gains tax, a key tool in the party’s planned assault on high house prices.”

Also at Stuff, Thomas Coughlan looks at the results of the Government’s Year of Delivery, and he declares them to be “mixed” – see: Tragedy and triumph: the moments that defined politics in 2019.

Here’s Coughlan’s list of Government achievements: “The Government has built thousands of public houses, unveiled $1.9 billion of mental health spending, and passed the Zero Carbon Act, alongside making vital reforms to the Emissions Trading Scheme.”

And here’s the disappointments: “KiwiBuild is all but dead, as are the key recommendations from the Tax Working Group, which received the bullet in April. Child wellbeing remains something of an open question, but the Government has shelved the heavy-hitting recommendations from its Welfare Expert Advisory Group, which was tasked with alleviating poverty in New Zealand.” In fact, he says, “Poverty looks like it’s here to stay.”

According to Coughlan, Labour’s coalition partners were “horrified” at Ardern’s promise to make 2019 their delivery year. He reports their reaction: “Had Ardern, whose political education was as a staffer in the Clark Government, forgotten that Government’s maxim: ‘under promise and over deliver’?”

Lack of progress in housing and infrastructure

Financial journalist David Hargreaves is despairing about the lack of progress made by the Government in housing and infrastructure, saying: “I think we’ll look back at this three-year term of Government as a lost opportunity. It’s been a time of a reasonably stable economy and very low interest rates. It’s a time when as a country we could have been getting things done. Like building some much-needed infrastructure and the Government helping out in meaningful way with reducing our housing shortage. For me, the over-riding impression coming out of 2019 is that the current Government is big on the symbolic gestures but very lousy at implementation” – see: The year that didn’t quite get started.

It’s the effective abandonment of KiwiBuild that Hargreaves is most disappointed about. And he thinks it’s not good enough that the Government won’t implement such promises: “Amazingly it does seem like the Government, from a public perspective, is going to ‘get away with it’. At least for now. I find it remarkable that any political party can make something like a KiwiBuild policy such a central part of its election policy, walk away from it once in Government, and seemingly not get caned.”

The other major “lost opportunity” is tax reform to affect the housing market: “With the abysmal failure of KiwiBuild, then so the Government’s decision to ditch any suggestion of Capital Gains Tax becomes more significant – and again possibly something that will cost us in the long run.”

The Spinoff’s Alex Braae also sees this as the biggest disappointment of the year: “The sheer wtf-ness of that moment still stands out, given how important a CGT was in the discussions and final report of the Tax Working Group. Not just a flop, but a moment of profoundly pathetic weakness from Labour to refuse to fight for something that there was previously every indication they believed in” – see the Spinoff’s New Zealand politics in 2019: we pick the champs and the flops.

Also in this Spinoff feature, rightwing political commentator Ben Thomas expresses his disappointment that more hasn’t been done in terms of mental health by David Clark, who he says is therefore one of the biggest “flops” of the year: “Seemingly unable to translate Labour’s much derided commissions of inquiry and working groups – and the better part of $1.9 billion in the ‘Wellbeing Budget’ – into any meaningful action on mental health.”

From the left, Morgan Godfery is also somewhat disappointed in his own Green Party, suggesting their time in Government this year has been to “compromise all our principles!”.

Godfery has also written that the Government has been very disappointing for Māori this year: “The government said no to a capital gains tax, no to most of the recommendations from its own welfare working group, and a ‘maybe’ to returning Ihumātao to its people. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern came to power promising a ‘politics of kindness’ and a ‘transformational government’. It fails on the first count, refusing to lift all sanctions on beneficiaries, and fails on the second, content to preside over the system as is. Even the good things – like lifting the minimum wage – are things that were happening under the last government anyway” – see: The decade in the Māori world: from Taika to Tariana.

Former Act Party leader Rodney Hide says that Ardern’s promise of delivery in 2019 “has proved, like her government, empty and meaningless. The tragedy is that we accept it. It’s enough that politicians feel and emote; there’s no need to do or achieve anything. We should perhaps rename the country New Feel-Land” – see: Year of Delivery got lost in the post (paywalled).

He elaborates, suggesting that the current policy-making is driven by a new phenomenon: “The prime minister has plastics again in her sights. She says it’s what children write to her about most. There are news reports she’s planning on banning plastic stickers on fruit. I scoffed when we had government by focus group. We now have government by school project. It’s the age of social media. There is no thought and no analysis. It’s just the appearance, the look, the feel. There’s no need to do anything.”

Perhaps for a more objective measure of how the country has been going over the last year, we can look at our performance on key indices that compare us to other countries. In this regard, see Alexander Gillespie’s NZ’s report card shows excellence in some areas, failures in others (paywalled).

According to this summary of the various international reports, New Zealand is doing well in terms of corruption, peace, democracy, press freedoms, happiness, and economic, civil and political freedoms. But we’re doing poorly in terms of the environment and suicide.

And for the latest report comparing New Zealand to the rest of the world, see John Anthony’s New Zealand ranked seventh in 2019 global prosperity ranking. This covers the Legatum Institute rankings, which is very positive for New Zealand, with the major exception of “living conditions”, for which the country received its lowest ranking.

Finally, for satire on the Government’s spin about the “Year of Delivery” and Simon Bridges’ lightweight approach in 2019, see Steve Braunias’ The secret diary of New Year’s resolutions.

OPEN LETTER: By Keith Jackson

I joined the Australian Journalists Association (now the MEAA – Media Alliance) in, I think, 1971, when I still lived and worked in Papua New Guinea.

When I formally retired from paid work a few years back, I was given honorary membership but, to bolster the journalism profession and its union, I recently asked to return as a paying member – which was accepted.

Given that I still scribble the PNG Attitude blog, book reviews for The Australian, a column in Noosa Style and other bits and pieces, that seemed appropriate.

READ MORE: Journalists call for legislation to protect press freedom and the public’s right to know

It may seem implausible, but freedom of the press is under attack in our country. The actions of federal authorities have been nibbling at that freedom for some time, and most recently the federal police took a large bite at it.

I’m concerned. That’s why I’m sharing this letter:

A GRAVE THREAT TO MEDIA FREEDOM

Dear Llew O’Brien, MP,
cc Prime Minister Scott Morrison,
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese

I support in full the following letter from the MEAA calling upon the Australian Parliament to act to guarantee the freedom of the press in Australia.

Recent events have shown that this implied right of Australians is under threat. Legislative and constitutional changes are required:

The Australian Federal Police raids on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) represent a grave threat to press freedom in Australia.

We welcome the Prime Minister’s stated commitment to freedom of the press and openness to discuss the concerns that have been raised.

A healthy democracy cannot function without its media being free to bring to light uncomfortable truths, to scrutinise the powerful and inform our communities. Investigative journalism cannot survive without the courage of whistleblowers, motivated by concern for their fellow citizens, who seek to bring to light instances of wrongdoing, illegal activities, fraud, corruption and threats to public health and safety.

These are issues of public interest, of the public’s right to know. Whistleblowers and the journalists who work with them are entitled to protection, not prosecution. Truth-telling is being punished.

The raids, a raft of recent national security laws, and the prosecutions of whistleblowers Richard Boyle, David McBride and Witness K all demonstrate the public’s right to know is being harmed. Truth-telling is being punished.

It is also clear from the global response to the recent raids that Australia’s proud reputation around the world as a free and open society is under threat.

We urge Parliament to legislate changes to the law to recognise and enshrine a positive public interest protection for whistleblowers and for journalists. Without these protections Australians will be denied important information it is their right as citizens to have.

We urge you to take prompt action to protect our democracy for all Australians.

Yours sincerely,
Keith Jackson AM

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealanders will be right to feel extremely suspicious that they were deceived last week by authorities. The whole scandal is a big deal, and the announcement last night of an independent investigation is welcome. The issues at stake go to the heart of integrity in public life.

The main problem is that Treasury boss Gabriel Makhlouf, followed by Minister of Finance Grant Robertson, informed the public there had been a “deliberate and systematic hack” of Treasury’s website, when we now know that this account was untrue.

The second problem is that Government politicians then used this claim to suggest the Opposition were somehow involved in criminal activity.

A lot of this is well explained today in Tim Watkin’s blog post, Gabriel Makhlouf’s already had three strikes. Can he really avoid being ‘out’? According to Watkin, “Makhlouf is in serious trouble. A new inquiry will have to uncover something yet unknown to excuse the three strikes he committed last week”. He says that Grant Robertson also has some big questions to answer, as there is a chance that “Makhlouf is covering for Robertson”, in which case “both are toast”.

For more details on how the whole scandal could have so easily been avoided, see Richard Harman’s How the Treasury leak could have been contained. He reports that “From what we now know, it is clear that the whole question of the Budget ‘leak’ could have been resolved last Tuesday afternoon. This is it when it appears the GCSB, National Cyber Security team concluded that Treasury had not been hacked by the National Party.”

According to Harman, the story about the “hack” could have been clarified early on: “The GCSB could have cleared that up on Tuesday, and either the Prime Minister or Robertson should have insisted they made a public statement and at the same time”.

For more on how the whole episode unfolded, see Stacey Kirk’s article, Smartest men in the room? Pffft! Treasury stands alone on Budget bungle. Her conclusion is this: “How Gabriel Makhlouf is still in a job is beyond me.” She says the actions of Treasury over the “hack” were “a total waste of police resources and an example of extreme arse-covering.” She argues “All signs suggest Makhlouf knew what had happened, and went ahead with his own version anyway.”

On the political right, there’s been outrage over the “hack” scaremongering. David Farrar, for example, says: “If these reports from within Treasury are true, we should expect resignations or sackings. Making false accusations of criminal activity to police to deflect from one’s organisation’s own basic incompetence is not acceptable” – see: No Dorothy, using a search engine is not a hack.

Farrar suggests the Government is essential guilty of incompetence at best or of dirty politics at worst: “Both Grant Robertson and Winston Peters have smeared National. Jacinda Ardern claims to lead a Government of kindness. Does smearing your political opponents as criminals because they used a search engine, fit with that? Robertson may claim he acted on Treasury advice, but he didn’t. He explicitly linked National’s material to an illegal hack, which goes beyond what Treasury said. But regardless a competent Minister should push back when an agency says ‘hey boss, we were hacked, it wasn’t incompetence’ and ask for at least some basic details of what is alleged.”

In contrast, the political left have mostly been inclined to respond to the scandal with silence or defend the Government. According to one leftwing blogger, this isn’t good enough. Martyn Bradbury challenges his own side to take the issue more seriously: “Comrades of the Left. If Treasury had just pulled a hacking manipulation this audacious while National was in power, we would be screaming for heads to roll, yet the majority of the Left are ignoring what Treasury did out of a misplaced loyalty to Jacinda & Grant. It’s infantile” – see: I think almost everyone on the Left who are trying to underplay what Treasury did hasn’t read this….

Bradbury concludes: “Shouldn’t we be incandescent with rage at such a manufactured deception by one of the most powerful Government Departments? If Grant doesn’t sack him, Grant should be sacked. It’s as simple as that.”

However some on the left have strongly condemned what has occurred. The best example is No Right Turn, who says: “I’m surprised they didn’t charge Treasury with wasting police time. Meanwhile, Treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf has presided over incompetence and smeared the opposition. We pay public sector CEOs the big bucks supposedly to take responsibility. We pay Makhlouf over $600,000 a year on that basis. So how about we get what we paid for? By running a muppet show, Makhlouf has f**ked up his agency’s biggest event of the year” – see: What a muppet show.

Other political commentators have taken a hard-line stance on the issue. For example, veteran political journalist John Armstrong makes the case that Makhlouf has now spoilt Treasury’s important neutral image, and should resign – see: Grant Robertson and Treasury boss should resign over Budget data leak.

Armstrong also makes the case for the Minister of Finance to go, but concedes that simply won’t happen: “Robertson is exempt from having to fall on his sword. That exemption is by Labour Party decree. He is just too darned valuable. Both he and the Prime Minister have made it very clear that they will move mountains to ensure Robertson emerges from this episode as untarnished as possible by placing responsibility for the breach fairly and squarely in the Treasury’s lap.”

The focus is increasingly on Robertson now. Many suspect he was likely to have been fully aware that he and Treasury were unfairly smearing his National Party opponents with criminal allegations, or at least allowing such insinuations to continue. Therefore, questions will be asked about what he knew about the so-called “hack”.

Richard Harman explains that the public needs to know what happened in the Minister’s office: “This whole affair now centres on one critical meeting or conversation; between Makhlouf, Robertson and Ardern’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Press Secretary around 7.00pm last Tuesday night. After that meeting, Makhlouf issued a statement saying that Treasury had been subject to a systematic and deliberate hack and then 17 minutes later, Robertson went one step further and linked the National Party to the hack” – see: What did Makhlouf say to Robertson.

David Farrar asks some difficult questions: “What was said in this meeting. Did Robertson and the PMO really ask no questions about the basis for the claim of being hacked? And when did Ministers learn there was no hack? It almost certainly was well before 5 am Thursday. It may have even been Tuesday evening. Yet they said nothing” – see: SSC launches investigation of Treasury Secretary.

He also asks why the Government or the GCSB didn’t make any sort of statement to correct the incorrect perception last week that a “hacking” had occurred: “We now know that the GCSB did not regard Treasury as having been hacked. When Treasury then put out a release saying they had been hacked, surely GCSB informed one or more Ministers (or at least DPMC) that this information was incorrect. Could you imagine the GCSB saying nothing for 48 hours while stories around the world were proclaiming the NZ Treasury had been hacked? Treasury did not correct the record until 5 am Thursday. But when did Ministers get informed the statement was incorrect, and why did they allow the misinformation to persist?”

There are obviously some major issues of public accountability at issue. Some are wondering why the Treasury boss has neither resigned nor been fired. Economist Eric Crampton suggests the whole episode “extends the stench of Wellington unaccountability” and asks: “Just how bad does a public sector Chief Executive’s performance have to be before accountability kicks in?” – see: Protecting the privileged (paywalled).

Crampton argues that “when a resignation is not offered for performance this far off the norm, and the appointee continues in the position, something is manifestly wrong – either employment law as it relates to senior executives, or the government’s willingness to put up with exceptionally poor performance.”

But it could be, Crampton argues, that the Government is worried about a legal challenge from Makhlouf, especially if the State Services Commission review results in the departing Treasury Secretary also losing his new position at the Central Bank of Ireland.

Problems of accountability are also examined by former Reserve Bank economist Michael Reddell who sums up the hack debate as being “an extraordinary couple of days, and an extraordinary display of poor judgement by one of our most senior public servants” – see: On Makhlouf and standards in public office.

Reddell is trenchant in his criticism of the Treasury boss: “of things that have come to public view, it is hard to think of any (departmental chief executive) episodes that plumb the low standards on display by Makhlouf in the last week (not just a single choice, word, or act) but the accumulation of words, actions, choices over several days, each compounding the other, with no sign or act of any contrition). He should go, and if he won’t resign, he should have been dismissed (yesterday’s Cabinet would have been the opportunity).”

But Reddell isn’t convinced the State Services Commission inquiry will be adequate: “I have little confidence in this inquiry. For one, the inquiry is supposed to look into Makhlouf’s handling of last week’s events, but recall that the SSC made themselves an active player in those events when they agreed to a coordinated statement with Treasury on Thursday morning. They are, at least in part, inquiring into themselves.”

He then concludes with a picture of a cosy situation: “the State Services Commissioner is fully part of that same self-protecting establishment –  appointed by them, from among them, and now supposedly reporting independently on actions of another member that he himself was part of as recently as last Thursday morning. This must not be the standard we settle for.”

And, so should the public have confidence that everything is under control? Not according to technology writer, David Court, who can’t believe that politicians and officials have misunderstood and mishandled so much – see: Politicians and technology are a bad mix.

Here’s his main point: “The Treasury and Peters’ should be deeply embarrassed and apologetic. The rest of us should be worried. Having politicians with Luddite qualities is sometimes amusing and bemusing. It’s also dangerous. We have a Government that thought it was hacked. By Google. And reported it to the police. Give me strength. These are the same politicians that will be making decisions on important technology-related matters. Do you have confidence that these ministers will make the right decision on 5G and/or cyber security? Or is it more likely they’ll make an ill-informed, but politically motivated, decision? This week’s embarrassing display suggests the latter.”

Finally, for humour on the hack, see Steve Braunias’ Secret diary of Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf, and Andrew Gunn’s Budget leak more than a train-wreck.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written for, and first published by, German magazine Cicero.de (ref. Attentat in Christchurch – Willkommen in der Hölle). Thanks also to Prof David Robie, Pacific Media Centre AsiaPacificReport.nz for providing the featured image for this article.

OUT OF THE BLUE:

It was 1:39pm, Friday March 15. As was usual for a Friday hundreds of people had turned up to pray at the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton, Christchurch. All was peaceful, women, children, men, people of all ages young and old, both Sunni and Shia, were in contemplative repose free of worry. It was a mild, late summer, 20 degrees celsius day. Earlier, the touring Bangladesh Cricket Team had briefly visited the mosque, but left early to attend a press conference. By 1:39pm, they had returned and were outside exiting a bus, intending to continue with their prayers inside the mosque.

At 1:40pm, ahead of the team, a man entered the mosque walking quickly up the front steps. He was carrying an assault rifle and dressed in combat uniform. He immediately began shooting people who were kneeling in prayer. The shots rang out and the Bangladesh team members realising they were witnesses to an attack, retreated, and fled on foot to nearby Hagley Park.

Back inside the Al Noor Mosque scores of worshipers were being gunned down, some killed instantly, others bleeding to death. The victims included little Mucaad Ibrahim who was three years of age.

Mucaad was known by his loved ones as a wise “old soul” and possessed an “intelligence beyond his years”.

Eye witnesses said that once the killer began shooting people, little Mucaad became separated from his family. In the chaos, his family could not find him. The next day Police confirmed he too had been shot dead by the killer.

The murders continued at the Al Noor Mosque until the killer’s firearms ran out of bullets. Then, he simply walked out of the mosque, got in his car, and drove six kilometres to the Linwood Mosque. There too were people who had gathered for their regular Friday afternoon prayers.

Mr Aziz picked up an EFTPOS (electronic funds transaction) machine from a table inside the mosque. He ran outside. He saw a man he describes as looking like a soldier. He said to the man: “Who are you”. Mr Aziz then saw three people lying on the ground dead from shotgun blasts. He realised the man was the killer. He approached the attacker, threw the EFTPOS machine hitting the killer, who in turn took from his vehicle a second firearm (a military style semi-automatic assault rifle) and fired four to five shots at Abdul Aziz, missing him. Then, in an attempt to lure the killer away from other people, Mr Aziz shouted at the killer from behind a car: “Come, I’m here. Come I’m here!”

Mr Aziz said he didn’t want the killer to go inside the mosque and kill more people. But the killer remained focussed. He walked directly to the entrance, once inside the mosque he continued his killing spree. Survivors speak of the killer wearing “army clothes”, dressed in “SWAT combat clothing”, helmeted, wearing a vest and a balaclava.

Inside the Linwood Mosque, another witness, Shoaib Gani, was kneeling in prayer. He heard a noise like fireworks but he and others weren’t too concerned and continued with their prayers. Then, as he and his fellow worshipers were kneeling speaking verses from the Koran, the man next to him fell forward with blood pouring from his head. He had been shot and killed instantly, Mr Gani said. Then others too began falling to the floor dead.

Mr Gani crawled under a table. He saw the killer and his firearm. “Written on the rifle were the words, ‘Welcome to hell’,” he said.

Victims, who were wounded and bleeding, were pleading with Mr Gani to help them. But he was frozen to a spot under a table knowing that the killer was walking around the mosque killing as many people as he could. Mr Gani believed he too would also soon be dead, so he reached for his cellphone, he called his parent’s back home in India. But no one answered. He tried to call his father’s number, but the phone kept ringing. He saw people around him bleeding to death. Others with fatal head-wounds “their brains were hanging out. I just couldn’t do anything. I didn’t know what to do.” Mr Gani phoned 111 (the New Zealand emergency number) and told the authorities people were dead and injured: “The lady on the phone asked me to stay on the line as long as I could.”

Outside, Abdul Aziz picked up one of the killer’s discarded shotguns. Inside the mosque, the killer’s assault rifle ran out of bullets. The killer then “dropped his firearm” and ran back to his vehicle. He got in the driver’s seat. Mr Aziz then ran toward the car. He threw a discarded shotgun at the killer’s vehicle: “I threw it like an arrow. It shattered his window.” Mr Aziz thinks the killer thought someone had shot at him with a loaded gun. The killer turned. He swore at Mr Aziz. When the window burst it covered the inside of the car with glass. Mr Aziz said the killer “then took off” driving in his car. He then turn right away from the mosque driving through a red traffic light and out into Christchurch suburban streets.

Some minutes later, Police and ambulance officers arrived at Linwood Mosque. Anti-Terrorist armed Police entered the mosque. Inside, Mr Gani said the survivors were ordered to put their hands up above their heads. The mass murder scene was covered in blood. The Police then secured the area. Some victims survived because they were under the bodies of the dead. Police told survivors to gather near a grassed area outside. There, people began weeping for their husbands, wives, parents, children, friends.

THE ARREST:

Seventeen minutes later, two Police officers identified the killer, apparently driving his car. They drove the police car into the killer’s vehicle, ramming it against a curb. Immediately, they disarmed the killer, cuffed him, noticed home made bombs in the vehicle – IEDs (improvised explosive devices). They arrested the man and secured the scene.

The rest of Christchurch was in lock-down, children were kept safe inside their classrooms, hospitals began to prepare for casualties, the city’s streets became eerily quiet, people were locked in to libraries, shops, their homes. Police and armed forces helicopters networked the skies. No one knew if the terrorist attacks were committed by a group of people or a lone gunman.

But back inside and entrances to the two mosques, 50 people were dead – one of the dead was discovered the next day by Police, the body was laying beneath others who had been killed. Scores of others were in hospital fighting for their lives, at least another ten were in a critical condition in intensive care. Pathologists from all over New Zealand and Australia were heading to Christchurch to help with documenting the method of murder of the dead.

Within hours of the killings, Australian media named the alleged killer as an Australian born citizen named Brenton Tarrant, 28 years of age. On Saturday morning The Australian newspaper’s front page read “Australia’s evil export”.

Other media in New Zealand followed with details of the man’s background. Brenton Harrison Tarrant appeared in court the next day charged with one single count of murder. Other charges will follow. His duty lawyer did not seek name suppression nor bail, the lawyer told the judge: “I’m simply seeking remand and a high court next-available-hearing date.” Tarrant stood cuffed, smiling at those in the courtroom, at one point signaling with his fingers a ‘white supremacist’ sign. He will next appear in the Christchurch High Court on April 5.

THE AFTERMATH:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern later told media: “It was absolutely his [the offender’s) intention to continue with his attack.” PM Ardern said: “Police are working to build a picture of this tragic event. A complex and comprehensive investigation is (now) underway.” To balance the requirement of investigation with the customs of Muslim burials, PM Ardern said liaison officers are with the victims’ loved ones to help “in a way that is consistent with Muslim faith while taking into account these unprecedented circumstances and the obligations to the coroner.”

PM Ardern said, survivors of the massacre had indicated that this attack was not “of the New Zealand that they know”.

One day later, Survivor Shoaib Gani (mentioned above) told media he still could not sleep or eat. The sounds and sights were still vivid in his head: “I still can feel myself lying on the floor waiting for the bullets to hit me.” He said, he will travel back to India to visit family, but he will return to Christchurch: “It’s just a few people, you know. You can’t blame the whole of New Zealand for this… It’s a good country, people are peaceful. Everybody has helped me here. One right wing (person) doesn’t mean everyone is bad. So I can come back here and live and hope nothing like this happens in the future.”

In the hours after the attacks, all around New Zealand, in the cities and in small country areas, Police were stationed and were ready in case others were involved and were preparing further crimes.

Beside the Police officers, people, of all races and religions, began laying flowers at the steps to their local mosques. Messages included read: “Salam Alaikum, Peace be unto you”, and, Aroha nui”, “Peace and love”, “You are one of us”. The outpouring of grief swept the South Pacific nation, and as this piece was written, a mood of support, comfort, reassurance and solidarity with those of Muslim faith was in evidence.

In Australia, Sydney’s landmark Opera House was like a beacon in the night; coloured blue, red, and white – the colours of the New Zealand flag embossed with the silver fern (Ponga) an emblem of Aotearoa New Zealand. Australia’s peoples, like in New Zealand, began laying flowers at the steps of its mosques in a gesture of inclusiveness.

In the aftermath, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has committed to ongoing financial assistance to dependents of those who have died or are injured, and assistance, she said, will be ongoing.

Questions are being leveled as to how a person with hate can enter, live, and purchase weapons in New Zealand while expressing hate toward other cultures and harbouring an intent to kill others.

PM Ardern said: “The guns used in this case appear to have been modified. That is a challenge Police have been facing, and that is a challenge that we will look to address in changing our laws… We need to include the fact that modification of guns which can lead them to become essentially the kinds of weapons we have seen used in this terrorist act.”

When asked how she was coping personally with the tragedy, she said: “I am feeling the exact same emotions that every New Zealander is facing. Yes, I have the additional responsibility and weight of expressing the grief of all New Zealanders and I certainly feel that.”

That responsibility includes ensuring New Zealand’s Police, the nation’s intelligence and security services and “the process around watch-lists, including whether or not our border protections are currently in a status that they should be, and, including our gun laws.”

THE BACKSTORY:

Indeed, New Zealand is part of the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence network that includes the USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Global surveillance is coordinated and prioritised among the Five Eyes member states. While significant resource, technology and sophistication is committed to the Five Eyes intelligence agencies, New Zealanders fear that those who find themselves as targets, or within the scope of intelligence officers, are predominantly of the Muslim faith.

In contrast, the accused killer who allegedly committed the horrific Christchurch mosque attacks, has been active both on social media and the dark web expressing, with an intensifying degree, his ideology of hate and intolerance. It does appear of the highest public interest, certainly from an open source intelligence point of view, to ask questions of why New Zealand’s (and indeed the Five Eyes intelligence network’s) surveillance experts did not detect the expressed evil that had radicalised the heart and mind of the perpetrator of this massacre.

It is also fact, that New Zealand is a comparatively safe and peaceful nation. But within its midst are people and groups fermenting on racially-based hate ideas. Whether it be in isolation or among organised groupings, the threat of racially driven terror crimes exists.

The alleged killer, Brenton Tarrant, has lived among those of New Zealand’s southern city Dunedin for at least two years. It appears he was radicalised around 2010 after his father died and he toured Europe. He wrote about becoming “increasingly disgusted” at immigrant communities. In early 2018, Tarrant joined a Dunedin gun club and began practicing his shooting skills and allegedly planned his attacks.

Regarding Christchurch, while it has a history of overt white racist gangs, at this juncture, it does not appear they were directly involved in this series of crimes.

But this leads to many unanswered questions, including:

• Was the killer a lone mass murderer, a sleeper in a cell of one?
• Were those with whom he communicated and engaged with on the web in extreme white racist ideologies aware of his plans?
• Was Christchurch chosen by the killer for logistical reasons?
• Was it because the city is easier to drive around than Dunedin, Wellington or Auckland?
• Was it because Christchurch has at least two mosques within easy driving distance?
• Were the Bangladesh Cricket team in his scope of attacks?
• Was the killer attempting to incite a violent response from Christchurch’s burgeoning Muslim community, or, expecting a response from the Alt-Right, from white racist groups such as the Right Wing Resistance (RWR), the Fourth Reich, and Christchurch’s skinhead community?

THE FUTURE:

Survivors of Friday 15th’s terrorist attack say they have complained of an increase in racism and expressed hate in recent times. They say, their concerns have not been taken seriously. These are the concerns that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has committed to listen to, has committed to represent, and, as the prime advocate for her country’s peoples, to act on to ensure cracks in New Zealand’s border, security and intelligence apparatus are corrected.

And, what of New Zealand’s social culture? How will it be affected? That will be determined by the actions of each individual person, each community, town and city and how as a nation New Zealand redefines “The Kiwi Way”.

Members of New Zealand’s media will also need to act responsibly. It is fair to say some have a reputation for argument that verges on alt-right intolerance, for example, on Twitter only two days after the mass murders, a prominent radio journalist, who is employed by one of New Zealand’s largest networks, tweeted: “28 years on an [sic] we still haven’t stopped madmen getting guns. #ChChMosque… [Replying to @Politikwebsite] And the neo nationalist right are the result of the virtue signaling exclusionary left.”

Perhaps such examples are out of step with New Zealand’s population. But such attitudes do create a dialogue of justification for those who harbour intolerance. However, if the outpouring of love and compassion continues to bind rather than divide, then perhaps New Zealand has received, as they say, ‘a wake-up call’, where racial intolerance and extreme ideologies have no place among peoples of all kinds, Maori and Pakeha, of all religions, political persuasions and creeds.

One thing is certain; to stamp out the evil of hate extremism, New Zealanders will pay a price that will be charged against the Kiwi lifestyle. Personal liberties of freedom, of expression and privacy will certainly be eroded further as this nation of the South Pacific grapples with how to keep its peoples safe. The means of how to achieve relative safety will be hotly debated, but it is a necessary juncture in this nation’s history, a moment when we all must confront and challenge ourselves so that people of innocence, people like little three year old Mucaad Ibrahim, can go about their days in trust, in peace, in joyful purpose and achieve their deserved potential. Anything less is a second killing for the victims of Friday 15, New Zealand’s darkest hour.

The opening gambit is an appeal to advertisers, not readers. It promises to enhance “brand” and “scale” and to deliver “data solutions” combined with “premium content”.

Exciting stuff for a media business in the digital age. But for a news organisation what is missing are key words like “news”, “journalism” and “public interest”.

Those behind the deal, its political architects who scrapped the cross-media ownership laws last year, and its corporate men, Fairfax’s and Nine’s CEOs, proffer a commercial rather than public interest argument for the merger. They contend that for two legacy media companies to survive into the 21st century, this acquisition is vital.

Perhaps so. But Australia’s democratic health relies on more than a A$4 billion media merger that delivers video streaming services like Stan, a lucrative real estate advertising website like Domain, and a high-rating television programme like Love Island.

The news media isn’t just any business. It does more than entertain us and sell us things. Through its journalism, it provides important public interest functions.

Ideally, news should accurately inform Australians. A healthy democracy is predicated on the widest possible participation of an informed citizenry. According to liberal democratic theorists, the news media facilitate informed participation by offering a diverse range of views so that we can make considered choices, especially during election campaigns when we decide who will govern us.

Check on power
Journalists have other roles too, providing a check on the power of governments and the excesses of the market, to expose abuses that hurt ordinary Australians.

This watchdog role is why I am concerned about Nine merging with Fairfax. To be clear, until last week, I was cautiously optimistic about the future of investigative journalism in Australia.

Newspapers like The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Newcastle Herald and the Australian Financial Review have a strong record of using their commercial activities to subsidise expensive investigative journalism to strengthen democratic accountability by exposing wrongdoing. Channel Nine does not.

Since the formation of The Age’s Insight team in 1967, Fairfax investigations have had many important public outcomes after exposing transgressions including: judicial inquiries, criminal charges, high-profile political and bureaucratic sackings, and law reforms. Recent examples include the dogged work of Fairfax and ABC journalists to expose systemic child sex abuse in the Catholic Church and elsewhere, leading to a royal commission and National Redress Scheme for victims.

Another was the exposure of dodgy lending practices that cost thousands of Australians their life savings and homes, which also triggered a royal commission.

The problem with Nine’s proposed takeover of Fairfax (if it goes ahead) is that it is unlikely to be “business as usual” for investigative journalism in the new Nine entity. First, there is a cultural misalignment and, with Nine in charge, theirs is likely to dominate.

With notable exceptions such as some 60 Minutes reporting, Nine is better known for its foot-in-the-door muckraking and chequebook journalism than its investigative journalism. In comparison, seven decades of award-winning investigative journalism data reveal Fairfax mastheads have produced more Walkley award-winning watchdog reporting than any other commercial outlet.

Financial fortunes wane
Second, even as the financial fortunes of Fairfax have waned in the digital age, it has maintained its award-winning investigative journalism through clever adaptations including cross-media collaborations, mainly with the ABC. This has worked well for both outlets, sharing costs and increasing a story’s reach and impact across print, radio, online and television.

How will this partnership be regarded when Fairfax is Nine’s newlywed? Will the ABC be able to go it alone with the same degree of investigative reporting in light of its successive federal government budget cuts?

Third, my latest research (see graph) has shown that in Australia, as in Britain and the United States, investigative stories and their targets have changed this decade to accommodate newsroom cost-cutting.

Investigative story targets in three countries: 2007-2016; n=100. Andrea Carson/Journalism Studies

Investigations are more likely to focus on stories that are cheaper and easier to pursue. This means some areas such as local politics and industrial relations have fallen off the investigative journalist’s radar. Here and abroad, this reflects cost-cutting and a loss of specialist reporters.

Echoing this, The Boston Globe’s Spotlight editor, Walter Robinson, warned:

There are so many important junctures in life where there is no journalistic surveillance going on. There are too many journalistic communities in the United States now where the newspaper doesn’t have the reporter to cover the city council, the school committee, the mayor’s office …

we have about half the number of reporters that we had in the late 1990s. You can’t possibly contend that you are doing the same level or depth of reporting. Too much stuff is just slipping through too many cracks.

Smaller topic breadth
Of concern, Australian award-winning investigations already cover a smaller breadth of topics compared to larger international media markets. The merger of Fairfax mastheads with Channel Nine further consolidates Australia’s newsrooms.

If investigative journalism continues, story targets are likely to be narrow.

Finally, investigative journalism is expensive. It requires time, resources and, because it challenges power, an institutional commitment to fight hefty lawsuits. Fairfax has a history of defending its investigative reporters in the courts, at great expense.

Will Nine show the same commitment to defending its newly adopted watchdog reporters using earnings from its focus on “brand”, “scale” and “data solutions”? For the sake of democratic accountability, I hope so.

Andrea Carson is incoming associate professor at LaTrobe University and has previously worked as a journalist at Fairfax Media at The Age (1997-2001). She is a former lecturer, political science, School of Social and Political Sciences; Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz