Pilgering the 2008 Election

John Pilger

TO fully appreciate this posting you need to imagine that you’re watching a documentary by John Pilger. Recall to your mind’s ear the film-maker’s mellifluous vocal delivery: his dramatic rises, his dying falls. Most of all, recall the tone of angry pity with which Pilger animates his narration. The way he uses his voice to signal that what you’re about to see and hear is both serious and sad.

The documentary opens with Pilger standing on a Thorndon hillside. Behind him loom the skyscrapers of Wellington and its stunning harbour.

The story you are about to hear would come as no surprise to a citizen of Chile or Argentina or Bolivia or Venezuela. In the Third World it’s an old story.

But this story didn’t happen in the Third World, it happened here, in this country, New Zealand.

This little nation of four million people, located 2,000 kilometres to the east of Australia, used to be known as "the social laboratory of the world’. For close to a century-and-a-half, New Zealand has enjoyed an enviable reputation as the home of good government and progressive reform. Its political scientists boast that their country has one of the longest histories of uninterrupted democratic rule on the planet.

But this documentary isn’t about social progress or good government, it’s about a meticulously organised and highly successful political campaign, bought and paid for by a handful of unelected men and women, to bring down what most international observers agree was the most progressive social-democratic government in the Western World.

Over the course of the next ninety minutes you will see how the rules governing the funding of election campaigns in New Zealand were cleverly manipulated by a group of wealthy, right-wing religious fanatics to run a covert campaign, valued at more than a million dollars, to help the conservative National Party opposition win the 2005 general election. And how, when the unexpected winner of that election, the New Zealand Labour Party, attempted to reform the electoral finance laws that very nearly allowed the 2005 election to be subverted, the country’s news media ran a relentless crusade to discredit the new legislation - and its sponsors.

You will also see how the Labour Party, over a period of just three years, was forced by New Zealand’s Auditor General to raise a sum equivalent to the cost of three election campaigns, and transfer nearly a million dollars of that money to the State. An unprecedented penalty, whose legal justification was forcefully disputed, at the time, by the Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament.

It’s a story, in the end, about the ultimate inability of elected governments to counter the private, and essentially unaccountable, power of those who control the modern news media. About how money, and the media influence it confers, can turn the rights and freedoms granted to publishers, editors and journalists against the very democratic processes they are supposed to protect.

It’s one of the great ironies of this story that the attempt by a progressive government to limit the influence of money over the electoral process was characterised by those opposed to such limitations as "Democracy under attack!".

I’ve seen and heard headlines like that before. Most particularly in Venezuela, when I was filming The War on Democracy.

In the course of making that documentary, I realised that the coup against the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, had been masterminded not by the Venezuelan armed forces, nor even by Washington, but by the owners and operators of the privately owned, right-wing Venezuelan news media. Indeed, they openly boasted about how they had done it.

What saved President Chavez, was the existence of a single, publicly-owned television station, which was willing to tell the Venezuelan people the truth.

The tragedy of the story you are about to hear is that it has no such happy ending. Not only was there no major media outlet willing to stand up and tell the people of New Zealand the truth about what was happening in their country between 2005 and 2008, but New Zealand’s voters, denied access to that truth, had no means of knowing they were being lied to.

You can imagine the rest. Pilger interviews the Exclusive Brethren, Kevin Brady, Margaret Wilson, Nicky Hager, Don Brash, business leaders, newspaper editors, television and radio producers, dissident journalists, critical academics, Labour and National Party politicians, trade unionists, Winston Peters, Owen Glenn.

It would be an absolutely explosive documentary.

Unfortunately, the chances of such a programme being made and screened in this country are about as slim as John Pilger reading this posting.

Still, you never know, the managers of Jonathan Coleman’s new "Platinum Fund" might be willing to stump-up the cash.

Then again, maybe not.