Winston Peters’ attention-seeking comments this week about the ‘bribery’ of the media by the former government would be sad, if they weren’t so … sad.
Sad for his new friend Christopher Luxon for putting him, the new Government and the first Cabinet meeting in the shade. (What image dominated the 6pm news – the freshly minted, smiling and upbeat Luxon? No. On Newshub it was the worn and sullen face of Peters.) He diverted the public’s attention right through until Wednesday and the launch of the 100 days programme.
It was sad also for Peters, that on his first day back after three more years out in the wilderness, that was all he had – a taunt about public funding that has been fully transparent at every stage of its three-year support for public interest journalism.
It’s sad, because Peters has been making threats to sort out, go after, or make accountable the media for many years. And each time in Government, nothing. Not a legislative crackdown, not a muzzling, not a show trial, not a seizure of a printing press. Just one failed lawsuit in 2017/18 to force media to divulge sources.
This election, he speculated out loud about his party taking the broadcasting portfolio in a future government and coming after interviewer Jack Tame and his TVNZ masters.
NZ First rightly didn’t win the media portfolio. It gained just a junior parliamentary under-secretary role to threaten the media with and no obvious media, broadcasting or communications policy concession.
Some rightly argue that the media ought not to pay attention to Peters’ gaslighting. And there’s a certain truth to that. He’s wrong, ignore him, move on.
But there are political aspects that need attention. Just as a new Government is showing its face to the public, and seeking momentum for an extensive programme of reversals and policy reveals, some of the focus gets shifted away. Attacking the media also carries the risk of inciting those who live now in their own worlds of anti-journalism.
It was also an ominous signal of possible dysfunction to come within a coalition.
Peters’ performance this week is sad because it’s all so hollow.
The so-called $55 million for the Public Interest Journalism Fund was seized upon by those wanting to find fault with media coverage of Labour. But in reality it was no different from the millions of dollars of pre-existing Crown funding for current affairs through NZ on Air – money that had been allocated for years and decades; money that flowed through the years this century that Peters found himself warming a Cabinet seat.
The temporary media funding was a tiny rounding error in comparison with Peters’ party’s actual $3 billion (with a ‘b’) slush fund for provincial growth projects that was doled out between 2017 and 2020.
And unlike the opaque system of donations to New Zealand First (its fundraising foundation is still awaiting the verdict of the Court of Appeal over the funneling of political donations), every dollar of the media fund was publicly declared.
A clause in the contracts that said media recipient organisations acknowledge the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, (a clause that has proved to be so confronting to the fund’s critics) was neither surprising nor compromising. It is like accepting fresh air is a good thing.
Those critics just haven’t been paying attention.
It is similar to Treaty and diversity clauses in public contracts of central and local government dealing with suppliers or appointing tradies and others on Crown-funded projects.
As for it being a bribe from the Labour Government: That would have to have been a spectacularly bad investment by the bribing lefties if $55m bought them 28 percent of the vote and wholesale rejection by the electorate.
Scrutiny of the outgoing government was appropriately intense and critical when it needed to be, across almost every news platform, to the disdain of its most partisan supporters.
Where is the evidence of the news media corporately, or individual journalists, having shown bias towards the Labour Government that had created the independent Crown fund for public journalism? Where is one credible allegation of Labour politicians or staff threatening to pull PIJF funding if something was written or criticised?
Where’s one, single, sensible instance of supposed bias, of quid pro quo? Where is a credible allegation of news media setting journalistic judgment aside where it came to issues to do with the Treaty?
There are none. And before a chorus of people who did their own research rise up to say the news media blindly accepted the Labour Government’s approach to the Covid-19 response, that argument ignores the fact the PIJF funding started in 2021 and the pandemic and response started in 2020.
Almost all news media a) reported the scientific reality of the virus, counter public health measures and vaccines and b) challenged the Labour government and its health bureaucrats strongly over everything from supplies of PPE, to delays in obtaining and issuing vaccines, failures in reaching communities affected, the border closure hotels and detentions, exclusions of vital professions in immigration policy. The list was long and had to be.
And none of that changed in 2021 or in the years since the fund began. Full stop.
That PIJF fund is almost over. It’s given out its last money. Many projects will be about to wind up.
Peters’ personal need to draw attention to himself would be frowned upon, in a younger person, as solipsism.
His behaviour brings to mind the old quote, attributed to Alice Roosevelt about her father President Theodore Roosevelt, and more recently applied to President Bill Clinton, that he has “to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”
New Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, like leaders before him, has no choice really but to concede that Peters can say what he likes. But Luxon and his Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ dismissive ‘that’s just Winston being Winston’ explanation perhaps indicates the performances are actually seen-through now as irrelevant pantomime.
In his old days, his prime, Peters’ dark allegations of wrongdoing had a bit of mystery, a bit of ‘je ne sais quoi’ about them – but the conspiracies have just been getting weaker and sadder.
How it started: The Cook Strait ferry running aground; the Winebox. How it’s ending: his claim of a media-public service-political conspiracy over a long overpayment of his national superannuation; the He Puapua report being secretly withheld from him when in government last time; Bill English confiding he was about to be rolled at coalition talks in 2017.
Two months ago, former Prime Minister English called out the last of those claims as a ‘fabrication’.
This week’s attempts to get some attention didn’t even get to that level. They were, to use a Peters’ phrase, bulldust.
A version of this column first appeared in our 8 Things newsletter to Newsroom Pro subscribers last week.
The institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. Skilled at social manipulation, the job interview is the perfect place for psychopaths to apply their talents. Foremost on their agenda during the assessment phase is deciding your ability or value, followed by figuring out the inner workings of your personality. Your face, words, and body language are your autobiography, printed in large type.
And the would be Puppetmaster Peters will continue to talk tiko testing Luxon’s intestinal fortitude and needs culminating in the ‘scorpion and frog’ fable.
Minister for Racing, sport of kings, where team playing means, only one member of the team.
Luxon may have tried to shrug it off as just “Winston being Winston”, but he appears to think similarly: “Yesterday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon refused to condemn Peters’ claims and said while they weren’t the “words” he’d use he also disagreed with the fund.” https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/labour-to-unveil-opposition-line-up-as-it-ramps-up-attacks-on-national-led-government/TQ6XLSQCOJGS7EX4RGUIQQBDVU/
And, Judith Collins had sown seeds of doubt back in 2021, suggesting that the fund could be “buying compliance”.
Ideally NZ should have a permanent independent journalism fund, if our media are to remain free from corporate and other vested interests.
We seem to be at the point where “disinformation has begun to affect the scope of public policy.” – Peter Thompson, a Media Studies Prof at Vic University. He notes, “The weaponised dissemination of political disinformation – whether deliberately or through ignorance – is surely the real threat to democracy.” https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/503620/is-winston-peters-right-to-call-state-funded-journalism-bribery-or-is-there-a-bigger-threat-to-democracy
Equally daft, and straight from the ‘conspiracies-are-us’ X-Files of our Deputy PM, is the requirement for “a national interest test to stop us being dictated to by the United Nations and agencies like the WHO”.
Comments by Helen Clark:
“The international health regulations need strengthening to improve protection against #pandemic threats.
“It’s incomprehensible that any #NZ Govt would seek to block reforms.”
By Dr Verrall:
“As I have said on many of the issues, the Coalition formed its agreement behind closed doors – so we can’t say why they did that. However, I’m deeply concerned that I see that sort of rubbish about the WHO and international health regulations on the internet and, all of a sudden, it’s in a Coalition document.” https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2023/12/helen-clark-calls-government-s-world-health-organization-policy-cringeworthy.html
By Michael Baker:
“I think people should look at what changes are proposed and then hopefully there’ll be opportunities for all of us to voice our opinions publicly.
“Because really, the world needs more coordination rather than less, because we are all in it together. And countries cannot insulate themselves from pandemic threats.” https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2023/12/public-health-expert-michael-baker-baffled-by-government-s-world-health-organization-policy.html
The United Nations and the World Health Organization have both been trying to deal with the real world which means fundamental change. This country is not ignorant of the need for fundamental change. Quite the contrary, the media have been reasonably good at covering those. RNZ is being attacked because they have been the most consistently honest in covering climate change. It’s the terror of the knowledge of the need for this ‘fundamental’ that is the ‘who we are’ today in 2023.
While Peters will make Luxon nervous in revealing the weakness of this new government’s leadership in dealing with the real world, the shallowness of the new government in regards to climate change and pandemics has been its biggest electoral appeal so Luxon and his ’empty-headed desperadoes’ will be willing to deal with Peters. But a wild card danger to Luxon is that this is probably the last chance for old man Peters to become Prime Minister (beyond “Deputy”).
Dr Verrall is onto it. This government has defined itself as if (actually is) appearing from the rabbit hole.