Simon Bridges Leads National Down Into The Dark.

Going Down? Once truth and propaganda become fused in the minds of one’s followers, debate and discussion become redundant. If one’s opponents are all outrageous liars, then engaging with them in any way is pointless. Rather than waste its time, a political party should, instead, target all its messages at those who have yet to grasp the full mendacity of the other side. Tell these “persuadables” the truth – your truth – before the other parties tell them theirs.

AND SO IT BEGINS, the National Party’s simultaneous descent and ascent. Downwards, into the dark territory of “whatever it takes”. Upwards, into the glare of electoral victory. It’s happening because the party’s present leader has convinced himself that it is only the first movement which makes possible the second.

Simon Bridges will, however, discover that conducting this double movement exacts a heavy toll. The National Party prime ministers we remember fondly: Sir Keith Holyoake, Jim Bolger, Sir John Key; all got to the top by taking a different route. National’s prime-ministerial villains: Sid Holland and Rob Muldoon; both chose the low road to power.

By the time Bridges gets to switch on the lights on the Beehive’s ninth floor, “whatever it takes” will have wrought its inevitable changes. The face that stares at him from the mirror of the prime-ministerial bathroom will be as unfamiliar as it is frightening.

Bridges’ journey into the heart of darkness began in Australia. His induction to the black political arts that secured the Australian Liberal leader, Scott Morrison’s, surprise election victory, is evident in the stinging social media campaign the National Opposition launched soon after his return.

The campaign’s effectiveness, like the Brexit, Trump and Morrison precedents from which it borrows so heavily, has nothing to do with the presentation of positive policy. It does not seek to inform but to inflame. It bypasses both the heart and the head and goes straight for the gut. It arouses not hope but hate. Its goal is not unity but division. And it’s working.

Emboldened by this success, Bridges has descended the next few steps of the dark staircase at a canter. Rather than seize upon the opportunity provided by the stand-off at Ihumatao to advance the Treaty relationship – as Jim Bolger and Doug Graham took advantage of the Maori Renaissance in the early 1990s – Bridges has taken his inspiration from Don Brash.

In the face of the protesters resistance, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been advised to “send them home”. Bridges knows that dismantling the Ihumatao campsite and moving its inhabitants on will be achieved only by the application of force majeure: concerted and forceful police and/or military action. He also knows that the use of state violence at Ihumatao will necessitate its further and escalating use in the large-scale protest action that is bound to follow. He does not care. Why should he, when his political objective is to keep the electorate divided, angry and on-edge?

As if Bridges’ turning away from a brokered solution at Ihumatao isn’t bad enough, he has taken advantage of the serious failings at Statistics New Zealand to descend even further down the dark staircase.

On this morning’s (14/8/19) Morning Report, Bridges deliberately sowed seeds of doubt about the reliability of whole swathes of state-provided data. How could we trust electoral boundaries drawn up on the basis of statistical information that may be false? How can we have any faith in the economic and fiscal reports released by the Government?

This is an especially dangerous game to play. From calling into question the reliability of official information it is but a short step to advancing the Trumpian claim that the public is being assailed by “fake news”, or, worse still, that the election is being rigged.

This is no small matter. Once truth and propaganda become fused in the minds of one’s followers, debate and discussion become redundant. If one’s opponents are all outrageous liars, then engaging with them in any way is pointless. Rather than waste its time, a political party should, instead, target all its messages at those who have yet to grasp the full mendacity of the other side. Tell these “persuadables” the truth – your truth – before the other parties tell them theirs.

A key factor in any National victory arrived at via the low road is shaping up to be the Sustainable NZ Party. The party’s founder, Vernon Tava, may be perfectly sincere in his quest for a less polarising expression of ecological wisdom – as may the 500-plus people he has already signed-up to secure his new party’s official registration. Sadly, the genuineness or otherwise of Tava and his moderate environmentalists is irrelevant to Bridges and his fellow-travellers in the dark.

All that Bridges and his strategists are hoping for is that Sustainable NZ will lure away just enough support from the Greens to cause them to fall below the 5 percent MMP threshold. All it will take is for a few thousand Green voters – many of them, perhaps, alarmed by some of the claims being made about Green Party MPs on social media – to defect to the Sustainable NZ Party, and Labour could find itself with insufficient parliamentary backing to continue in government. That neither the Greens, nor Sustainable NZ, will be in Parliament to fight for the environment is likely to be regarded by Bridges and his team as one of the more satisfying outcomes of the strategy.

A government elected as a result of such egregious bad faith is unlikely to be one of sweetness and light. If to bad faith we are required to add conscious lying, fake news, and the deliberate incitement of anger and division, then that government can only end up being bitter and dark.

“Whatever it takes” is really just another way of saying “the end justifies the means”. But, if history has taught us anything it is that the means we use, determine the ends we achieve. Bring National to power by dark methods, Simon Bridges, and you will soon find yourself and your government unable to accomplish anything but dark deeds.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 August 2019.

Commentary Is Free – But Facts Are Sacred.

Toeing The Party Line: On the subject of Venezuela, at least, right-wing commentators seem content to pack as much “fake news” around their ideological prejudices as possible, confident that their position on the crisis, by conforming to the official position of the USA and its allies, is most unlikely to blow back upon them in any kind of “career-limiting” way.

POLITICAL COMMENTATORS tell us a great deal about themselves when they turn their gaze away from home, and towards events unfolding overseas. Domestic politics inevitably presents a rather muddied picture. There is so much happening: so many players – all with competing agendas – that achieving clarity is extremely difficult. With events overseas, however, there is much less in the way of clutter. The issues seem so clear, and the players so compelling, that the temptation to apply only the brightest primary colours to one’s analytical canvas is very hard to resist. Muted palettes are best reserved for the politics of one’s own homeland.

The commentary currently being offered up to New Zealand readers on the crisis playing-out in Venezuela strongly confirms these observations. And nowhere is the tendency to apply the brightest colours with the broadest brushstrokes more in evidence than in the commentaries of Liam Hehir.

Hehir is a conservative writer: vehemently and unrelentingly hostile to all things socialist. Hardly surprising, then, that Venezuela and its United Socialist Party government extract from him the most unequivocal political judgements.

As far as Hehir is concerned, the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is a “dictator”, and the election which returned him to power was corruptly “rigged”. What a contrast with the self-proclaimed “Interim President” of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Described by Hehir as “social-democratic”, this telegenic young man is said to have acted heroically and in complete accordance with his country’s constitution. Hehir is equally certain that the United States has played no dishonourable part in these events. Its only sin: placing itself at the side of the heroic Señor Guaido and the oppressed Venezuelan masses.

Unfortunately for Hehir, none of the above is true.

President Maduro was re-elected in an election certified by international observers as both free and fair. This is hardly surprising, since Venezuela has one of the most tamper-proof electoral systems in the world. That Maduro’s right-wing opponents, young Mr Guaido among them, opted to boycott the last presidential election in no way invalidates the process. Rather, it confirms the opposition parties’ profound political demoralisation, after seeing their candidates soundly defeated in every presidential election since 1999.

Nor is it even remotely true to say that Guaido acted in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution. Article 233, the constitutional provision cited by Hehir and the American government (from which Hehir appears to source all his information) was written to cover the situation in which the President Elect either resigns, is incapacitated, or dies prior to being sworn into office, and there is no formally acknowledged Vice-President available to take his/her place. These are the only circumstances in which the National Assembly is empowered to appoint an Interim President.

Given that Venezuela’s president was officially declared elected and formally sworn into office – along with his vice-president – on 10 January 2019, there is absolutely no legal justification for Guaido’s actions. This is confirmed by Alfred de Zayas, an American lawyer, writer, historian, expert in the field of human rights and international law and retired high-ranking United Nations official, who tweeted on 6 February: “Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution is inapplicable and cannot be twisted into legitimizing Guaido’s self-proclamation as interim President. A coup is a coup.”

Nor is it even remotely true that Guaido is some sort of benign social-democrat poised to resurrect his country’s mixed, if currently broken, economy. The real Juan Guaido is a far-right activist who has engaged in violent protests against the Venezuelan Government for the past five years. The party he belongs to, Popular Will, scorns the democratic process – preferring direct and highly aggressive action in the streets. Notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) its insurrectionary praxis, Popular Will enjoys the fulsome support of the US national security apparatus. (That Popular Will was permitted  to affiliate itself to the “Socialist International”, of whose youth wing our very own Jacinda Ardern was once the president, speaks volumes about the authenticity of the SI’s allegiance to social-democracy – let alone socialism!)

All of this information (and much, much more) is readily available on the Internet. That Hehir has consistently declined to adequately test his bald right-wing assertions about Venezuela; that he relies, instead, on the propaganda pouring out of the United States government and its news media “assets”; tells us a great deal about his approach to political journalism.

On the subject of Venezuela, at least, he seems content to pack as much “fake news” around his ideological prejudices as possible, confident that his position on the crisis, by conforming to the official position of the USA and its allies, is most unlikely to blow back upon him in any kind of “career-limiting” way.

It is, of course, much more difficult to get away with this sort of “journalism” domestically. New Zealand is just too small for Hehir’s lurid misrepresentations of Venezuelan politics to be replicated in his commentaries on Kiwi current affairs.

A truly sobering question remains, however: If political conditions in this country ever deteriorated to the point where journalists were not only permitted, but encouraged, to pack fake news around their own and their publishers’ prejudices, would Liam Hehir’s commitment to telling the truth about what is happening in New Zealand be as strong as his commitment to telling the truth about what is happening in Venezuela?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 February 2019.

Piling-On The Pressure.

An Unfortunate Perception: Can liberal democracy survive if the news media abandons evidence-based judgement and simply piles-on “as one” against a prime minister and her government? And what if it isn’t just the timing that’s consistent, but the message as well? What then? How is the public to avoid the impression that the news media is rooting for one side and not the other?

WERE YOU AWARE of the Easter “pile-on”? The media assault on Jacinda Ardern’s credibility when, according to Herald journalist, Fran O’Sullivan: “the commentariat … basically rose as one and questioned her prime ministerial abilities”.

Nothing remarkable in that, you might object, in a liberal democracy it is entirely right and proper for the news media to judge the performance of presidents and prime ministers. Yes, but shouldn’t such judgements be based on a sober and objective assessment of the leader’s actual performance? Isn’t that one of the critical (if unspoken) assumptions underpinning the whole notion of media freedom?

Can liberal democracy survive if the news media abandons evidence-based judgement and simply piles-on “as one” against a prime minister and her government? And what if it isn’t just the timing that’s consistent, but the message as well? What then? How is the public to avoid the impression that the news media is rooting for one side and not the other?

This is more than idle speculation. We have only to look at the United States to see what happens when a significant number of voters simply stop believing anything reported by media organisations which have not already identified themselves as co-partisans in the political struggle. Any negative story emerging from the other side’s “lying media” can be branded “fake news” and dismissed as further proof of its uncompromising mendacity.

When President Trump tweets his outrage at “the lying New York Times”, liberal New Yorkers may puff out their chests with pride. The eyes of mid-western conservatives, however, will narrow with suspicion and their hatred of the “coastal elites” intensify.

In a political environment as polarised as this, the openness and tolerance which liberal democracy needs to function withers and dies. It is impossible to engage in any kind of fruitful political discourse when every participant believes every other participant is lying.

The media picture in New Zealand is further complicated by the absence of newspapers and radio stations which loudly and proudly advertise their partisan allegiances. Kiwis do not have the option of subscribing to the equivalent of the UK’s Guardian or Daily Telegraph. There is no MSNBC for liberals to watch; no Fox News for Kiwi conservatives.

That being the case, the New Zealand news media has always strived to balance right-wing opinion with the perspectives of left-leaning commentators. This is not just a matter of fairness, it is vital to the maintenance of trust. Readers, listeners and viewers need to feel that somewhere in the mix of voices there is someone who speaks their language.

Even more important than ensuring a diversity of opinion, however, is the news media’s responsibility to separate fact from fiction and apply a critical eye to the news it reports.

With all these factors in mind, let us turn again to Ms O’Sullivan’s “Easter pile-on”.

The two news stories which generated so much common outrage in the “commentariat” were Jacinda Ardern’s and Winston Peters’ response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the UK city of Salisbury; and the Prime Minister’s handling of Broadcasting Minister Clare Curran’s coffee-date with RNZ’s head of news and content, Carol Hirschfeld.

In the Skripal case, the reportage and commentary (often filed by the same journalists and in the same story!) appeared to have been scripted by the UK Government. The only course of action which the commentariat was prepared to recognise as prime-ministerial is the one where Jacinda Ardern follows along behind the Russophobic UK Prime Minister, Teresa May, like a dutiful “Five Eyes” poodle.

The very notion that the NZ Government might withhold its judgement until it possessed hard evidence of the perpetrators’ culpability was laughed out of court. Laughter, indeed, featured heavily in just about all of these commentaries – as in “New Zealand has become an international laughing-stock”. As if an independently-minded New Zealand prime minister was simply too risible a notion to be taken seriously.

How quickly New Zealand’s political commentators have forgotten David Lange and the fourth Labour Government’s nuclear-free legislation. And how loath they are to recall the UK’s refusal to condemn the French perpetrators of state terrorism on NZ soil. That so many Kiwi journalists were willing to be guided by the same people who gave the world the “sexed-up dossier” on Saddam’s WMDs; the same country responsible for illegally invading Iraq; spoke very poorly of their ability to evaluate critically the news they were reporting.

The state of NZ journalism was the unspoken theme running through the breathless reportage and commentary of the Curran-Hirschfeld coffee-klatch. Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to call it the State and NZ journalism. Because, at the heart of so many of the piler-ons’ commentaries lies a deep and abiding disinclination to view public service journalism through anything other than an aggressively anti-state lens.

That Ms Curran may have enlisted the support of Ms Hirschfeld in her quest to reinvigorate public broadcasting was presented in the most sinister terms. That the RNZ Board may have been engaged in resisting the Government’s broadcasting policy was not considered sinister at all – quite the reverse.

Prime Minister Ardern was castigated for not reining-in a minister who was clearly determined to extend the reach of “Red Radio”. As an accusation it played beautifully into the commentariat’s subtextual insinuation that this government isn’t just unacceptably socialist, but that its policies are being delivered with a Stalinist inflection. Why else would the PM refuse to condemn the actions of the obviously guilty Russian state and its ex-KGB president?

A commentariat prepared to rise “as one” in its delivery of these rebukes risks alienating all but the most unreconstructed cold warriors and knee-jerk National supporters. Those less disposed to follow the lead of our “Five Eyes Partners” in the Skripal case, along with those who regard the reinvigoration of public service journalism as a very good idea, will feel both affronted and aggrieved by the “Easter pile-in”.

Genuine media freedom, embodied in a diversity of political voices, can only strengthen the public’s trust in journalism. That’s because the truth is always a composite picture – never a single frame.

When the commentariat “piles-in” with a single voice, it is not to our left-wing government that we should look for evidence of Stalinism.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 5 April 2018.

Unreliable Sources.

Alarmist Images: As part of the Australian Government's effort to undermine Jacinda Ardern's outreach to Manus Island refugees, Australian Intelligence (oxymoron?) sources claim to have recorded a "spike" in people smugglers' attempts to land asylum seekers on Australian shores. These claims have been illustrated with images of boat-people headed for "Newsland". Few of those absorbing these images will realise they are 7 years old!

IS IT REAL NEWS, or fake news? In the end, it all comes down to sources. The people and the institutions we most trust, are the people and the institutions we most believe.

For those who lived through the Second World War, the words “London calling! London calling!”, which prefaced the BBC World Service’s news broadcasts, signalled accuracy, reliability and dignity in a world awash with bombastic propaganda.

President Donald Trump’s followers place their faith in the “fair and balanced” reporting of Fox News. His opponents rely on the Washington Post, whose intrepid reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, covered the Watergate break-in and contributed to the fall of President Richard Nixon.

Why were Woodward and Bernstein so sure of their ground? Because their most valuable anonymous source – “Deep Throat” – was none other than Mark Felt, the Associate-Director of the FBI! Good sources make for good stories. The rule is as old as journalism.

What, then, should we make of the latest stories, sourced to “Australian Intelligence”, of a “spike” in the number of “boat people” intercepted en route to Australia and, allegedly, New Zealand? Are such reports to be taken seriously? And should the National Party Opposition really be using them as a stick against Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the Manus Island refugee crisis? Just how good a look is it to rely upon leaks from a foreign government, in order to have a crack at your own?

The first thing to observe about these “intelligence” leaks is that they shouldn’t be happening. Just recall the repeated, blank-faced refusals of Helen Clark and John Key to share even the tiniest scraps of “operational” intelligence with the New Zealand news media. Even when the details of New Zealand’s involvement in special forces operations overseas were published in foreign newspapers, the politicians remained tight-lipped. As for the directors of our own intelligence agencies: the SIS and the GCSB; their mouths appear to have been sewn shut!

Which can only mean that “Australian Intelligence” is leaking information to the Australian and New Zealand news media under instruction and on purpose. Which immediately raises the question: What can that purpose be?

Before we attempt to answer that question, however, there are one or two other things to note about these Australian Intelligence-sourced stories. The most important of these is a disturbing lack of detail. Apart from the improbably precise figure of 164 intercepted asylum seekers, New Zealanders have been given precious little in the way of incontrovertible evidence.

The Royal Australian Navy and its Coast Guard are equipped with multiple video cameras to record any and every interception in Australian waters. If a small flotilla of “boat people” had indeed put to sea, inspired by Jacinda Ardern’s international displays of compassion, then it would be a straightforward matter to release the video recordings of its interception to the news media. What better way to make the Aussie Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s case, than to record an asylum seeker naming New Zealand’s prime minister as the reason she and her children are risking their lives in a leaky boat?

What we have been shown, instead, is a seven-year-old photograph showing Sri Lankan refugees displaying a sign which reads: “We like to go to NEWSLAND.” Interesting, but hardly relevant to the situation in 2018!

This promiscuous mixing of dated imagery, emotive language, and uncorroborated assertion is almost always evidence of an unreliable source. Which raises, once again, the question of whether or not there is any method to the Australians’ madness? Why is the Turnbull Government persisting in its attacks on New Zealand’s new prime minister?

The most probable cause of this spike in Australian pique is the deteriorating situation on Manus Island. There, the already deplorable conditions into which hundreds of male asylum-seekers were pitched, following the forcible closure of the New Guinea government-owned (but Australian government-controlled) detention centre, have continued to deteriorate.

The Turnbull Government’s latest leaks would, therefore, appear to be pre-emptive in intent. If Manus erupts in riotous violence, attracting global scrutiny and condemnation, as well as a reiteration of New Zealand’s willingness to take at least 150 of the refugees trapped on the island, then the Liberal-National Government has primed its trans-Tasman soulmates in the National Party to step forward and entertain Kiwi voters with “Australian Intelligence’s” grim fairy tales.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 January 2018.

John Key Bound For The IMF. Real News Or Fake News?

Whaddya Reckon? With everything that's going on in politics at the moment, you might think that the NZ Herald's deputy-political editor would be extremely cautious about rushing into print with a year-old story, based on nothing more than speculation, posted on an obscure Napier website, that turned out to be completely wrong. No such luck.

 

IS JOHN KEY really in the running for Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Well, yes, according to the NZ Herald’s Deputy-Political Editor, Claire Trevett, he is. Upon closer examination, however, Trevett’s story looks a lot more like fake news than real news.

 

Let’s take a look at her source – a speculative opinion piece posted on the Manufacturers Success Connection (MSC) website under the dateline Monday, 21 December 2015 08:38. That’s right – 2015 – just short of one year ago.

 

A year ago the Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, was embroiled in yet another of the financial-cum-political scandals that have wracked the French Republic over recent years.

 

The anonymous author of the MSC NewsWire story is clearly of the view that since Lagarde had just been told by the French courts that she must stand trial for her role in the so-called “Tapie Affair”, she will soon be standing down from her job at the IMF.

 

The writer further speculates that since there is a “move to place a non-European official at the helm of the IMF”, a “door of opportunity has unexpectedly opened to enable New Zealand prime minister, John Key, to maintain his upward trajectory in the form of becoming managing director of the International Monetary Fund.”

 

Except that the “door of opportunity” was closed, and has remained firmly shut.

 

Christine Lagarde is still the Managing Director of the IMF. Her Board of Directors were in no mood to lose the services of their high-flying employee. Citing the legal doctrine of the presumption of innocence, they were happy to keep Madame Lagarde exactly where she was.

 

The other problem with the MSC NewsWire story is that if there ever was a “move” to place a non-European in the Managing Director’s chair, then it did not get very far. Nor was such a “move” remotely likely to succeed. Ever since the appointment of the first IMF Managing Director, the Belgian Camille Gutt, in 1946, the position has been filled exclusively by Europeans. There has been one each from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain; two from Sweden; and five from France. The chances of John Key sashaying his way down the that particular catwalk are pretty close to nil.

 

The more important question, however, is how did Claire Trevett ever come into possession of a speculative news release issued by a very obscure website – Manufacturers Success Connection – just shy of one year ago? The MSC NewsWire was set up by Napier entrepreneur, Max Farndale, in 2012, and while it’s a lively and a perfectly respectable website, it is not really on a par with Reuters or Associated Press!

 

It would only be speculation, of course, but, in the current political environment, isn’t it highly likely that the dissemination of a story such as this, to a person occupying a critical media post (such as deputy-political editor of the country’s largest newspaper) is going to be the work of the out-going prime minister’s political opponents?

 

All the more reason, you would think, to be extremely cautious about rushing into print with a year-old story, based on nothing more than speculation, posted on an obscure Napier website, that turned out to be completely wrong.

 

The sort of fake news item that you might expect to find on Breitbart News? Certainly. But on the NZ Herald website?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 7 December 2016.