Orthodoxy and Dissidence at Radio New Zealand.

Our Masters’ Voice: Promoting acceptable ideas and suppressing everything that challenges the prevailing orthodoxy may be the winning formula in Putin’s Russia, but it should not be Radio New Zealand’s.

RADIO NEW ZEALAND has appointed a panel of media experts to diagnose the severity of its present crisis. Willy Akel, Linda Clark and Alan Sunderland have been asked to determine exactly how it was that Michael Hall, working in RNZ’s digital department, was able to insert unauthorised material into Reuters wire stories for five years without being either detected or reproved by his superiors.

This seems unlikely to prove a particularly taxing assignment. Hall has confessed, and, as far as we know, he had no confederates. He was trusted by his employers to play by RNZ’s (and Reuters!) rules, and appears to have betrayed that trust. Either that, or he has for five years been interpreting RNZ’s rules in the most creative fashion. The panel must explain why RNZ failed to monitor Hall’s output. It also needs to discover how a man of Hall’s powerful political convictions could enter the RNZ workforce without raising at least one managerial eyebrow?

Conservative New Zealanders will snort derisively at these questions. To their way of thinking the answers are blindingly obvious. RNZ – a.k.a. “Red Radio” – has been hiring people with “powerful political convictions”, that is to say, with blatant left-wing biases, for decades. The wonder is not that Hall “politically corrected” Reuters wire stories, but that he appears to have been the only RNZ journalist with the political gumption to do so!

Except, those same conservatives – as is so often the case – simply do not grasp how dramatically the “Left” has changed, or, to what extent the current “culture” of RNZ has changed with it. At the heart of RNZ’s transformation are generational, professional, and philosophical divergences sharp enough to have turned the Radio New Zealand of 15 years ago inside out.

What turned Radio New Zealand into RNZ? The short answer is “Generation X”. It was ten years ago this year that the Board of Radio New Zealand, led by Jim Bolger’s former press secretary, Richard Griffin, appointed Fairfax Executive Editor, Paul Thompson to replace Peter Cavanagh. A champion of public service broadcasting, Cavanagh had fought a noble rear-guard action against the John Key-led National Government’s relentless financial strangulation of Radio New Zealand.

Thompson moved swiftly against the Baby Boomer managers of Radio New Zealand. He restructured them out, and brought a younger, leaner and meaner generation of broadcasters in. These new brooms had a very different take on the profession of journalism when compared to the broadcasters they were replacing. Not so much speakers of truth to power as strivers who revelled in their proximity to it, the Gen-Xers were not the least bit embarrassed or hesitant about wielding power to advance their own agendas. Where their predecessors had set out in search of “The Truth”, these new broadcasters went after scalps – the more illustrious the better.

It made for a very different kind of public broadcaster. The Baby Boomers had tested themselves against a powerful status quo, harassing its leaders and challenging its values. Institutional power was a beast to be mistrusted and confronted. No rumour involving the government should ever be believed until it has been officially denied. And while it may not be possible for journalism to beat the powers-that-be, no self-respecting journalist would ever dream of joining them. Baby Boom journalists leaned towards the maverick outsider kicking against the pricks. Generation X admired those who had learned how to pick the locks to the House of Power.

This divergence wasn’t just generational and professional, it was philosophical.

The Baby Boomers had hero-worshipped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post journalists most closely identified with exposing the Watergate scandal and bringing down the malignant administration of Richard Nixon. “Woodstein” led many Boomers to the conclusion that not only could the world be changed for the better by virtuous action, but also that journalism – especially investigative journalism – was one of the most effective means of doing so.

Generation X grew up under the influence of a very different duo – Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. “Virtuous action” was a mug’s game. More often than not, those who spoke truth to power ended up having their tongues cut out. Play it safe, play it smart, play to win. What else were the Eighties about?

The status quo has little to fear from cynicism, which meant that, with one or two honourable exceptions (like the editor of The Daily Blog) the status quo which emerged from the economic and social liberalism of the 1980s and 90s had little to fear from Generation X. After all, the triumphant neoliberal order and the global economy it brought into being was Gen-X’s world, and in it the sunny optimism of the 1960s and 70s was as outré as tie-dyed T-shirts and flared jeans.

The journalism of Generation X followed the neoliberal flag – as evidenced by the fourth estate’s general capitulation to the extraordinary deceptions of the War on Terror. Newspapers that had risked Nixon’s wrath by exposing Watergate, eagerly repeated the Bush Administration’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”. The American motion picture industry, which had given the world Easy Rider and Billy Jack, served up the television series “24” – a cold-blooded primer on the mechanics of torture.

Meanwhile, back here in Godzone, as one-by-one the rearguard actions of Boomer journalists and editors like Cavanagh ended in defeat, the principle of going along to get along became ever more deeply entrenched. Careers were not enhanced by challenging the fundamentals of the neoliberal status quo, nor by questioning the social-liberal values that offered the economic brutalities of neoliberalism such excellent political cover. Paul Thompson’s RNZ led the way. The people’s broadcaster became both the purveyor and defender of neoliberal and social-liberal orthodoxy – as swift to denounce Posie Parker as Vladimir Putin. Contracting-out economic commentary to the Aussie banks’ in-house economists, and political commentary to PR firms. It’s journalists appeared to be more comfortable attacking Hate Speech than defending Free Speech.

At least, they were, until Michael Hall tossed an old-fashioned left-wing spanner into RNZ’s works. The special, three-person panel appointed by RNZ’s board-of-directors will have little difficulty removing that spanner. Their most daunting responsibility, and a task not specified in the panel’s terms of reference, will be to acknowledge how dramatically Hall’s behaviour has exposed the poverty of RNZ’s journalism. Promoting acceptable ideas, and suppressing everything that challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, may be the winning formula in Putin’s Russia, but it should not be Radio New Zealand’s.

Think about it. If a journalist in Russian state radio had done what Michael Hall’s been doing for the last 5 years, RNZ would have hailed him as a hero. Which is why Willy Akel, Linda Clark, and Alan Sunderland should think long and hard before presenting our public broadcaster’s very own journalistic dissident as a villain.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 16 June 2023.

Pick A Side.

Slava Ukraini! The Ukrainian narrative, at least as far as the West is concerned, is not, and should not be, complicated. Like World War II, the Russo-Ukrainian War is a conflict of clear moral opposites. A case of Good versus Evil – with Ukraine backed by all those nations who can still distinguish one from the other.

ABOUT THE CAUSES and conduct of the Russo-Ukrainian War much is disputed, but on these brute facts all are agreed. On the 24 February 2022, in violation of the United Nation’s Charter, and in spite of its 1991 pledge to recognise and gurantee its neighbour’s borders, military forces of the Russian Federation invaded the sovereign territory of the Republic of Ukraine.

It is entirely appropriate that a clear majority of the General Assembly of the United Nations has condemned this invasion, and entirely understandable that many countries, including our own, have joined the member states of Nato in imposing sanctions on Russia’s leaders and businesses. Indisputably, Russia is the aggressor in this conflict, and Ukraine the victim. Against all odds, however, the Ukrainian people, under their indomitable president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have resisted the Russian invader. Not only that, they have driven him back.

In a world bereft of heroes, Ukraine has millions of them.

So far, so simple. The Ukrainian narrative, at least as far as the West is concerned, is not, and should not be, complicated. Like World War II, the Russo-Ukrainian War is a conflict of clear moral opposites. A case of Good versus Evil – with Ukraine backed by all those nations who can still distinguish one from the other.

For some people, however (including the now infamous sub-editor at RNZ Digital) the Russo-Ukrainian War is extremely complicated, and its morality far from clear. To what end is the Russian Federation risking so much, and suffering so grievously? What reward does it anticipate for bringing what it sees as its geopolitically treacherous neighbour to heel? For Russia and its supporters, this narrative is far from simple, and its many complexities worthy of a fair hearing. It is not enough for the Western news media to tell us what is happening, they have the much more important obligation to tell us why it is happening.

Their answer to that all-important question may be summarised thusly:

In spite of American and German promises to advance “not one inch” towards Moscow, the Nato powers have been pursuing a policy of Eastward expansion ever since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. All efforts by the Russian Federation to halt Nato’s Eastward push by diplomatic means having been rebuffed, and witnessing the American-co-ordinated overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Moskow president in the so-called “Maidan Revolution” of 2014, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, moved decisively to protect Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority from Kyiv’s new, extreme-nationalist, regime. After eight years of fruitless negotiation, and fearing a Nato-backed Ukrainian attack, Putin launched his pre-emptive “Special Military Operation” – and here we are.

This is the story which RNZ’s Chief Executive, Paul Thompson, dismisses as “Kremlin garbage”. The story which his (now suspended) employee admits to spending the last five years inserting into Reuters reports – allegedly without his employer’s reproof. The story which, Mr Thompson’s epithet notwithstanding, actually contains some small nuggets of truth.

But, those small nuggets do not diminish the single, overwhelming truth of Russia’s culpability for the horrors it has inflicted upon Ukraine. They don’t get Putin and Russia off the hook for their invasion, any more than citing the undoubted unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles gets Hitler and Germany off the hook for their genocidal aggression.

It wasn’t Ukrainian soldiers in mufti who infiltrated neighbouring Russian provinces, inciting Russian citizens to declare themselves independent “peoples republics”, and ratifying their subsequent annexation in bogus referenda. Ukraine’s ageing Soviet-era planes and tanks weren’t conducting military manoeuvres on Russia’s borders for weeks prior to suddenly dealing out fire and death, torture and rapine, as they raced for the capital.

No. The inescapable fact remains that it was the Russian Federation that did all of those things, and, by doing them, not only bestowed ex post facto justification for every criticism and accusation levelled against Russia and its ruthless ruler for the past 23 years, but also brought Putin’s worst geostrategic nightmares to life. What else but the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have persuaded Finland and Sweden to give up their neutral status and apply for Nato membership?

In the end, this dreadful story, playing out on our screens day and night, is as simple as it gets. What’s more, it’s our story, daring us to pick our side, and make our choice between Right and Wrong.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 June 2023.

Rewriting History.

Beyond the First Rough Draft of Ukraine’s Recent History: Reality is multi-faceted, what you see invariably depends on where you stand. That used to be a powerful professional incentive for journalists to report all major news-stories from more than one perspective. Top: The 2014 Maidan protests recalled after the event. Bottom: As they happened.

A TANKIE IN THE NEWSROOM, who would have thought RNZ still harboured such vipers in its ideologically awakened bosom? A pretty well-placed viper, too, one can only assume, since there appears to have been no one over-seeing his or, (less plausibly) her output. An old-timer perhaps, someone clinging to the journalistic principle that reality is multi-faceted, and that what you see almost always depends upon where you stand. A powerful professional incentive – at least it used to be – for journalists to report all major news-stories from more than one perspective.

An excuse for transforming RNZ’s digital newsfeed into one’s own personal Samizdat?* Not at all. Whoever is responsible for treating Reuters reports on the Russo-Ukrainian War like the Ems Telegram† crossed a very clear line and will, undoubtedly, pay a high price for their editorial high-handedness.

And yet, if we strip away the high-emotion with which all communications from Russia and Ukraine are received, the edits of RNZ’s re-writer may be interpreted not only as a cri-de-cœur against the current “one-side-right, one-side-wrong” reporting of this particular news story, but also as a doomed appeal for the reinsertion of critical distance, nuance and balance to the journalistic enterprise.

To hear One News’s journalists dismiss the RNZ re-writer’s claims as “Russian propaganda”, for example, is to gain some appreciation of the oppressive effect of a single, state-determined “line” asserted endlessly by the emoting mannequins “official” news-readers have become. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then New Zealand’s handling of the RNZ story must surely have brought a smile to Vladimir Putin’s lips. No critical distance, nuance or balance in Aotearoa – thank you very much.

Which is not to say that the altered Reuters report was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – it wasn’t. Indeed, the original Reuters version stands out for both its historical accuracy and its masterful compression of the dramatic events that overwhelmed Ukraine in 2014. From those sympathetic to the losers of 2014, however, the Reuters narrative is egregiously sparse.

Yes, it is true to say that “a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan revolution”, but it is also true to say that the pro-Russian president had been democratically elected by the Ukrainian people. A great many Ukrainians – at the time – would have disputed hotly the claim that what happened in Kyiv’s Independence Square (the Maidan) was a “revolution”. Given the pivotal role played by the American Government in the events of 2014, their scepticism is entirely understandable. What happened in the Maidan fell well short of being a coup d’état, but neither was it a revolution – at least, not of the progressive kind. Clearly, RNZ’s re-writer felt the same.

By the same token, describing what happened in Crimea as an act of self-determination, confirmed by the results of a free and fair referendum, is the purest fantasy. In 2014, the Russian Federation seized Crimea from Ukraine, whose borders, it bears repeating endlessly, had been agreed – and guaranteed – by both the United States and the Russian Federation in 1991.

RNZ’s re-writer is on much stronger ground when he asserts that “the new pro-western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine”. Only the most one-eyed Ukraine supporters persist in denying the presence of extreme nationalists and/or fascists in the “revolutionary” government cobbled together following the elected president’s departure. This new government was, indeed, extremely hostile to the ethnic Russian majority of the Donbass region. Legislative measures to suppress Russian language and culture were initiated – but so, too, was legislation to repeal the extremists’ laws, as democracy steadily reasserted itself across those parts of Ukraine not occupied by pro-Russian separatists.

Presumably, RNZ’s re-writer was determined to “correct” the sparse Reuters narrative because he wanted to remind his audience that the Russo-Ukrainian War did not explode suddenly out of a clear blue sky; and that the Russian invasion was the culmination of an historical sequence with plenty of blame attachable to all sides.

To the extent that it is the duty of journalists to offer not merely description but explanation, the RNZ re-writer is correct. Ever since Russian armour rolled across the Ukrainian border on 24 February 2022, coverage of the conflict has been uniformly one-sided. At RNZ, TVNZ, Newshub, Stuff and NZME, distance, nuance and balance have been noticeable by their absence.

The problem which the RNZ re-writer must confront however (apart from the looming consequences of his repeated breaches of RNZ’s rules) is that the actions of Putin and his armed forces have obviated any and all obligation to explain the conflict. Ukraine is a sovereign nation whose borders are recognised not only by the United Nations but also (as noted earlier) by the Russian Federation. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a clear violation of the UN Charter and international law. No matter how persuasive his geopolitical arguments may have been prior to 24 February 2022, what he has done to Ukraine since means that no one in the West now needs to answer them.

That said, this country is not a war with the Russian Federation. New Zealand soldiers are not on the front lines of the conflict. (Well, not officially, anyway.) Our Government has condemned Russia and imposed limited sanctions, but that should not require our mainstream news media to behave as if New Zealand is at war, and any attempt to offer critical distance, nuance and balance to their listeners, viewers and readers tantamount to treason.

History always presents us with multiple sides, and, inevitably, events as large as the Russo-Ukrainian War have multiple causes. It is not the recognition of complexity that is treacherous, but the idea that nothing needs to be explained. Describing the RNZ re-writer’s edits as “false” and dismissing them as “Russian propaganda” is not helpful to the Ukrainians, or to their indisputably just cause. Why? Because if simplistic slogans could lead us to support one side, then they can just as easily lead us to support another.

Learning all we can about the history of the Ukrainian people. Understanding the turbulent currents that have surged through their country since the fall of the Soviet Union. Identifying all the actors involved in the drama that began in the Maidan in 2014 – and the roles which those same actors are playing today. This is the knowledge that will help the friends and allies of Ukraine stay the course until victory is won, peace restored, and the rebuilding of the nation begun.

The RNZ re-writer may, indeed, be a friend of the Kremlin, but inasmuch as he has also been asserting the duties and responsibilities of a democratic news media, then he should also be included among those who shout Slava Ukraini! – Glory to Ukraine!


*Dissident political newsletters passed from hand-to-hand to evade the Soviet censors.

†Diplomatic communication, subtly altered and released to the press by the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Generally acknowledged to be the immediate cause of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 June 2023.

Getting On With Co-Governance – Without Debate.

Who’s Missing From This Picture? The re-birth of the co-governance concept cannot be attributed to the institutions of Pakeha rule, at least, not in the sense that the massive constitutional revisions it entails have been presented to and endorsed by the House of Representatives, and then ratified by the citizens of New Zealand in a democratic referendum. It is, rather, the work of Cabinet Ministers and Judges; of New Zealand’s permanent executive; of the body that slowly emerged to replace the tutelary power and influence of the British state. The force that now calls itself “The Crown”.

CO-GOVERNANCE, and what it means for New Zealand, is predicted to feature prominently in next year’s general election. Passions are already running high on both sides of this issue. All the more reason, one would think, for this country’s public broadcasters to facilitate a reasoned debate between those holding opposing views. Alas, in 2022, the publicly-owned radio network, RNZ, appears to have either forgotten how to conduct reasoned debate, or repudiated the whole idea.

On the morning of Wednesday, 11 May 2022, RNZ Contract Producer Sharon Brettkelly began promoting her latest contribution to “The Detail” series of podcasts. Entitled “Co-Governance: Time To Get On With It?”, Brettkelly’s piece featured just two participants.

These were Chris Finlayson, former National Party Minister for Treaty Settlements, and Traci Houpapa, Chair of the Federation of Māori Authorities, both of whom were, indisputably, well-qualified to speak on the podcast’s subject. Unfortunately, they were also very strong supporters of co-governance. Brettkelly had not thought it necessary to balance her journalism by including the opinions of equally strong and well-qualified opponents of co-governance.

Now, there will be those who object immediately that “balanced reporting” does not require the arguments for and against any given proposition to be included in the same broadcast. For balance to be maintained, it is sufficient that the views of antagonists and protagonists are presented to the audience fairly, and with equal potential impact, within roughly the same timeframe. So long as Brettkelly, or some other RNZ Contract Producer, created a podcast featuring two well-qualified and forceful opponents of co-governance, all would be well.

Sadly, given the current ideological climate in which RNZ’s journalists are required to operate, the chances of such a podcast being made are extremely slim. To broadcast such a production would be considered a breach of RNZ’s obligations under te Tiriti o Waitangi. It would also very likely be denounced by at least some of RNZ employees as a threat to their own and other New Zealanders’ well-being.

After all, we have it on the authority of no less of an expert than Chris Finlayson himself, that only the “Sour Right” and other “losers” oppose co-governance. What possible benefit could there be in providing a publicly-owned platform from which the views of people who “don’t like tangata whenua” and who “dream of a world that never was and never could be”, are spewed forth?

As the title of Brettkelly’s podcast suggests, the question is not whether co-governance represents a fundamental and unmandated break with New Zealand’s constitutional norms; or even if it is a politically feasible objective; but whether or not it is time to just get on with the job. Or, to quote Finlayson, addressing those who might still be entertaining doubts: “Go with the flow”. Clearly, among the people Brettkelly and her ilk deem worthy of a RNZ platform, there is no debate about co-governance. Or, at least, no debate in which representatives of iwi, or the Crown, should allow themselves to become involved.

Listening to Brettkelly’s podcast, it becomes increasingly clear that “The Crown” is a player in the co-governance drama meriting much closer scrutiny.

Most of us, when we hear someone refer to The Crown, rather naively (it turns out) assume the term is being used to describe the Government – the body which we, as citizens of New Zealand, elect to manage the country on our behalf.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

When iwi representatives and Cabinet ministers talk about The Crown they have something else in mind altogether. For these folk, The Crown represents the permanent and supreme executive power. It encompasses all the decisive institutions of the New Zealand state: the Executive Council (a.k.a the Cabinet); the senior echelons of the public service; the armed forces and the Police; the national security apparatus; and – most important of all – the Judiciary.

Why does this matter? Because the Treaty of Waitangi was presented to the representatives of the indigenous people of these islands by a representative of the British Crown. It was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, that was offered to Māori: not by the British people, who, in 1840, had bugger-all say in the treaties negotiated by their betters (and still don’t) but by agents of the British state. Māori took the deal precisely because, at that time, the British state was the most powerful executive authority on Earth.

What undermined the Treaty was the steady devolution of authority (kawanatanga) from the executive power back in London (and from its local representative, the Governor) to the representative institutions of the Pakeha settlers – whose numbers had grown from a couple of thousand to something equal to or greater than the indigenous population.

In the eyes of these settler governments, the Treaty was not an agreement in which they had played any part, and most certainly was not a document they had the slightest intention of honouring. In the early 1860s, they demanded from London – and got – the overwhelming military force they needed to bury the Treaty and, along with it, the very idea of co-governance.

The re-birth of the co-governance concept cannot be attributed to the institutions of Pakeha rule, at least, not in the sense that the massive constitutional revisions it entails have been presented to and endorsed by the House of Representatives, and then ratified by the citizens of New Zealand in a democratic referendum. It is, rather, the work of Cabinet Ministers and Judges; of New Zealand’s permanent executive; of the body that slowly emerged to replace the tutelary power and influence of the British state. The force that now calls itself “The Crown”.

This is what lies behind the tangata whenua’s fear of representative democracy or, as they prefer to call it, “the tyranny of the majority”, and their preference for working with The Crown alone. They understand perfectly what most Pakeha have yet to grasp: that representative democracy was the means of their dispossession. They know that New Zealand can have democracy, or it can have co-governance, but it can’t have both.

Fair enough. But how are the citizens of New Zealand to explain the scorn and disdain in which The Crown so clearly holds them? Is it simply because The Crown knows that the measures required to keep the peace between Māori and Pakeha will never receive the imprimatur of a freely and fairly elected New Zealand Parliament? That only under a constitutional arrangement in which iwi and The Crown between them wield sufficient power to over-rule the will of “The [Pakeha] People” can the instruments of peace be created?

Because iwi and The Crown both know that co-governance will never be forged by free and fair debate, or free and fair elections, but only by “getting on with it”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 12 May 2022.

Radio Waves.

Waving Us In - Or Away? Increasingly reliant on pollsters and PR people, Nine to Noon has quite consciously narrowed the range of political discussion down to the weekly wins and losses of the major parliamentary players. Only very occasionally does its “Political Panel” venture out into the broader realm of ideas. The sort of discussion and debate listeners might have heard if the programme’s producers had reached out to academics and political iconoclasts was not something that RNZ seemed eager to promote.

LAST MONDAY (10/5/21) Neale Jones and Ben Thomas were Kathryn Ryan’s guests on RNZ’s Nine To Noon programme. Ryan’s “Political Panel” is one of the programme’s most listened-to segments – it’s influential. Listening to Jones and Thomas last Monday, however, I was left wondering “influential with whom?”

Political commentary on RNZ has evolved in a very strange way over the past few years. The original intent seemed pretty clear: to secure independent commentary from competent representatives of right-wing and left-wing opinion about the deeds of government, opposition, and other sundry political actors across the week just passed. There can be little doubt that the Political Panel’s most popular right-wing commentator was the volatile – but never boring – Matthew Hooton. The Left, too, put up some formidable champions: Peter Harris from the CTU; the former Alliance MP, Laila Harré.

Critical to the success of these commentators was their willingness to tackle what were often highly sensitive and contentious issues without feeling the need to look over their shoulders. They were as ready – when it was warranted – to put the boot into their own “side” as they were to criticise their more traditional ideological foes.

For the programme’s listeners, this independence of mind constituted a vital ingredient in the Political Panel’s success. The moment commentary becomes predictable it begins to take on the character of spin. Heterodoxy has another important advantage over orthodoxy: its ability to surprise and provoke; a capacity to make those who encounter it think differently about an issue. In other words, it makes for both a better democracy and great radio.

Why, then, has RNZ abandoned this winning formula in favour of a Political Panel comprised, more-or-less exclusively these days, of pollsters and public relations mavens? Now, to be fair to RNZ, it was their star turn, Hooton, who started this particular ball rolling by establishing his own PR company, Exeltium. Not wanting to lose Hooton’s prodigious talent, Nine to Noon decided to offer its listeners a fulsome disclaimer – and hope for the best.

Gradually, however, the nature of RNZ’s political commentary changed. More and more, it became a forum for major players from inside the Wellington beltway. The official pollsters for National and Labour started turning up, followed closely by former ministerial press secretaries and chiefs-of-staff turned PR specialists.

On its face, this seemed like a great idea. After all, if pollsters and well-placed insiders didn’t know what was going on, then who did?

The problem, of course, is that well-placed insiders and party pollsters don’t remain well-placed insiders or party pollsters by blabbing everything they know about the moving and shaking of the movers and shakers to RNZ’s listeners. For the Nine to Noon audience, these keepers of secrets could not be expected (and, presumably, were not expected) to provide anything other than a carefully framed picture of New Zealand politics.

Carefully framed and ideologically neutered. By relying on pollsters and PR people, Nine to Noon was quite consciously narrowing the range of political discussion down to the weekly wins and losses of the major parliamentary players. Only very occasionally does the Political Panel venture out into the broader realm of ideas. The sort of discussion and debate listeners might have heard if the programme’s producers had reached out to academics and political iconoclasts was not something that RNZ seemed eager to promote.

Which brings us back to last Monday’s discussion between Ryan, Jones and Thomas. Unsurprisingly, one of the topics up for discussion was the Leader of the Opposition’s, Judith Collins’, ongoing effort to get the Labour Government to offer up any sort of coherent response to the He Puapua Report.

If ever there was an issue that called out for a broader discussion, it is the He Puapua Report. Under review is nothing less than the future shape of the New Zealand constitution and a radically reconfigured relationship between Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders.

Rather than venture forth into these stormy waters, however, Ryan attempted to re-frame the discussion as a shrewd Opposition manoeuvre to drive a wedge between the Prime Minister and her Maori caucus. Having thus constricted tightly the parameters of the discussion, Ryan passed the speaking-stick to Thomas. It was at this point that things took a decidedly weird turn.

Riffing off his co-commentator, Jones’s, sneering characterisation of National’s interest in He Puapua as some kind of “conspiracy theory”, Thomas upped the ante by claiming that the report’s critics were treating He Puapua as something akin to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This charge represents a major step-up in the effort of what might best be described as the New Zealand “political class” to stifle all further debate on the issues covered in the report.

What Thomas (PR consultant) had done was to move beyond Jones’s (Managing Director of PR firm Capital Government Relations) strategy of marginalising the Government’s critics as tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, into the much darker realm of virulent anti-Semitism and far-Right mythology.

For those who don’t know, the Protocols were published by fanatical Russian anti-Semites in 1903 as a means of inciting murderous pogroms against the Tsar’s Jewish subjects. They concern a supposedly secret Jewish plot to take over the world. Brought out of Russia in the aftermath of World War One and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Protocols served to inflame Adolf Hitler’s already passionate hatred of the Jews. Copies of this ur-conspiracy theory are still on sale in bookshops all over the Middle East.

By invoking the Protocols, Thomas – wittingly or unwittingly – was associating National’s Judith Collins with the worst excesses of the Nazis and their admirers. And, it appears to have worked. In her keynote speech to the Southern Regional Conference of the National Party in Queenstown (16/5/21) the name He Puapua does not appear.

Listening to last Monday’s Political Panel, the similarity between the attitudes struck by Ryan, Jones and Thomas over He Puapua, and those struck by the British political class in relation to the UK-wide debate over Brexit is … well … striking. There is that same lofty tone of condescension; that same propensity to belittle those who refuse to endorse the “official” policy-line; the same impression that those opposing them are ignorant and powerless peasants who may be safely waved away and ignored.

The Political Panel’s airy dismissal of their fellow citizens’ concerns was bad enough in itself, but what made it worse was the fact that it was being broadcast on a network supposedly owned by, and committed to serving, the people of New Zealand – all the people of New Zealand. A state broadcaster rigorously excluding any and all voices dissenting from the official line, is something most New Zealanders would expect to encounter in Moscow or Beijing – not in Wellington.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 May 2021.

What Sort Of Technology Requires Clear Images Of People’s Faces – And Are The Police Still Operating It?

Facing The Worst: It was in May of 2020 that RNZ broke the news that the Police had been secretly trialling the Facial Recognition Technology manufactured by Clearview AI. According to RNZ, this trial had been undertaken without the knowledge of either the new Police Commissioner, Andy Coster, or the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards. Clearview AI is the preferred option for hundreds of police departments in the United States.

IT SEEMS PERFECTLY OBVIOUS to me why the Police are stopping and photographing young Maori and Pasifika New Zealanders. Officers patrolling at street level are, almost certainly, recording and sending clear, full-face images of “potential future suspects” to a database linked to the facial recognition technology (FRT) which elements within the Police have been trialling. Because FRT is notoriously unreliable when it comes to identifying people of colour, it makes sense for the Police to be gathering highly-detailed images that can be scanned and registered, thereby making future identifications easier and more accurate.

It was in May of last year that RNZ journalist Mackenzie Smith broke the news that the Police had been secretly trialling the FRT manufactured by Clearview AI. According to Smith, this trial had been undertaken without the knowledge of either the new Police Commissioner, Andy Coster, or the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards. Clearview AI is the preferred FRT of hundreds of police departments in the United States.

In the face of Smith’s revelations, the man who commissioned the trial, national manager of criminal investigations, Detective Superintendent Tom Fitzgerald, told RNZ that: “Police undertook a short trial of Clearview AI earlier this year to assess whether it offered any value to police investigations. This was a very limited trial to assess investigative value. The trial has now ceased and the value to investigations has been assessed as very limited and the technology at this stage will not be used by New Zealand Police.”

But had the trial ceased? According to Smith’s report: “Prior to the statement from Fitzgerald, police spokespeople told RNZ on two separate occasions in the past week – on 7 and 11 May – that the trial was still underway. A spokesperson later said these statements were incorrect.”

The plot thickened considerably when RNZ revealed that the Silicon Valley billionaire (and New Zealand citizen) Peter Thiel, whose Palantir electronic eavesdropping technology is an important weapon in the Five Eyes global surveillance arsenal, had been involved in the setting-up of Clearview AI. An important aspect of the company’s marketing strategy was its FRT’s supposed efficacy in identifying terrorist threats.

It is tempting to speculate that the NZ Police’s interest in Clearview AI had been prompted by the Christchurch Mosque Attacks of 15 March 2019. Following the tragedy, the public was highly critical of the Police, the Security Intelligence Service and the GCSB for their collective failure to identify the terrorist and prevent him from carrying out his murderous mission. The fact that the trial of Clearview AI had begun in January 2020 is certainly suggestive of a project that had its genesis several months earlier.

If this was, indeed, the initial motivation for the Clearview AI trial, then the Police’s surreptitious action is tinged with considerable irony. Smith, himself, had provided a link in his online story to a Huffington Post article excoriating Clearview AI as a refuge for far-right activists with views not too far removed from those of the Christchurch gunman. According to the HuffPost’s contributor, Luke O’Brien:

“Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the [New York] Times. With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s. Its mobile app can match names to faces with a tap of a touchscreen. The technology is already being integrated into augmented reality glasses so people can identify almost anyone they look at.”

Small wonder, then, that Smith’s revelations prompted some pretty blunt speaking from the then Justice Minister, Andrew Little (who is still the Minister Responsible for the SIS and the GCSB).

“I don't know how it came to be that a person thought that this was a good idea”, Little told RNZ. “It clearly wasn’t endorsed, from the senior police hierarchy, and it clearly didn’t get the endorsement from the [Police] Minister nor indeed from the wider cabinet ... that is a matter of concern.”

Whether that blunt ministerial intervention was enough to stop the ongoing trialling of FRT is open to question. In December of 2020, RNZ (whose reporting of these issues has been truly outstanding) broke a story about Police officers stopping and photographing young people on the streets of Wairarapa towns. The question raised then was the same as the question being raised now: “Why?”

If, as the high-tech crime unit bosses had insisted back in 2020, Clearview AI “hadn’t worked”, and the whole FRT project had, consequently, been shelved, where were the images recorded by beat officers being sent?

They could hardly have been logged into the official Police database – this is reserved for people who have been arrested, photographed and fingerprinted. Information obtained from people who have been neither arrested nor charged suddenly showing up in official Police files would have immediately set off alarm bells.

Then – as now – the presumption was that the recorded facial images were being sent somewhere else.

Following Smith’s stories, Police Commissioner Coster had ordered a “stocktake” of where exactly the Police were at in relation to FRT: “Clearly, technology is moving really quickly”, Coster told RNZ, “and it has good and appropriate application in law enforcement. The trick is for us to make sure that we are doing that within the bounds of [the] Privacy Act.”

Well, yes, that is the “trick” isn’t it? – assuming, of course, that following the rules is your first priority. But is it really? Given that the stopping and photographing of young people – especially young Maori and Pasifika – is still going on, and that the Police Officers responsible are using a special app for the purpose, we have reasonable grounds to wonder.

The Daily Blog editor, Martyn Bradbury, has assembled an impressive list of the agencies responsible for preserving New Zealand’s national security. Among these are a number of special units operating within the NZ Police. Amassing data for the purposes of avoiding another terrorist attack is only one of the objectives of these secretive and, clearly, not-always-under-control intelligence and surveillance units. There are the gangs to monitor; the suppliers of methamphetamine and other dangerous drugs to identify; as well, of course, as any number of animal rights activists, eco-warriors and radical Maori nationalists to keep an eye on. It would be surprising, to say the least, if those running these shadowy outfits remain entirely indifferent to the contribution FRT could make to Police operations.

Maybe Clearview AI didn’t work, and maybe it did. Maybe that unauthorised FRT trial was shut down last year, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the collection of young people’s facial details is entirely innocent, and maybe it’s a bloody outrage. But, that’s always the problem when it comes to the activities of the Secret State, isn’t it?

You just don’t know.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 11 March 2021.

The Strange (And Sad) Demise of Radio New Zealand.

A Friend In Need: I have grown up, and grown old, within earshot of New Zealand’s public broadcaster. Through times of peace and plenty, through days of tumult and recrimination, it has been a constant and reliable presence. The calm and authoritative voices of Radio New Zealand kept their fellow citizens up to speed: the nearest approximation of the truth they could hope to hear. Trustworthy. Indispensable. No more.

IT WAS THERE in the darkness, more reassuring than a loaded gun, my old Philips portable radio. Three o’clock in the morning on Spaxington Landing, 500 miles from home, with no one beside me. Lonely? Not at all. Through that old radio came the reassuring voices of National Radio and the timeless music of the Concert Programme. The public broadcaster as friend and comforter: informative, uplifting, entertaining and – just often enough – challenging.

If asked to choose between a good book and a good radio station, I’d be stumped. A book can transport you magically through time and space – but it can’t play your favourite song. Nor can it bring you the news.

I have grown up, and grown old, within earshot of New Zealand’s public broadcaster. Through times of peace and plenty, through days of tumult and recrimination, it has been a constant and reliable presence. The calm and authoritative voices of Radio New Zealand kept their fellow citizens up to speed: the nearest approximation of the truth they could hope to hear. Trustworthy. Indispensable.

No more.

About the best you can say for the RNZ network today is that it’s better than all the others. When you consider the quality of all the others, however, that’s not saying very much. Moreover, when the clear objective of the public broadcaster’s management is to make its “product” as much like all the others as possible, then the days of RNZ’s journalistic and cultural superiority would appear to be numbered.

What we’re witnessing is a work of destruction in progress. Like the proverbial oil tanker, however, a public broadcaster of RNZ’s quality takes a great deal of energy and a surprising amount of time to turn around. There are traditions that have to be denigrated and dispensed with; experienced professionals who have to be eased out; a multitude of distinctive voices that has to be reduced to a single, overpowering chorus. Turns out you can’t wreck a world-renowned radio network overnight – it takes a while.

Those responsible for the steady deterioration of RNZ will, naturally, object that they have no such intentions. They will point to the network’s ageing audience; to its narrow social base; and to the younger generation’s general unwillingness to tune their dials to anything as stodgy and old-fashioned as “boomer radio”. They will demand to know what’s likely to happen two or three decades hence, when RNZ’s current audience of over-55s begins to die out in large numbers. A public broadcaster incapable of attracting and holding Generations X, Y and Z, is, surely, a public broadcaster without a future.

All of which is true. The argument is not about the need to attract the loyalty of a new generation of listeners, but how that might best be done. Should RNZ build its footpaths where the younger generations already walk? Or, should it construct a road that leads them somewhere new – somewhere they’ve never been before?

RNZ’s management answered that question quite definitively with its proposal to effectively kill off RNZ Concert and replace it with a youth radio network modelled on the black radio stations of New York. Think BfM meets OMC – but without the culturally eccentric ethnic charm. No, Helen Clark may have rescued RNZ Concert, but RNZ’s bosses’ direction of travel remains the same: down, down, down towards the fashionably dumb; not up, up, up towards the intelligently creative. The network’s barkers are already rehearsing their lines: “Come on in and join us, kids! You’ll encounter nothing here that you haven’t heard before. Relax! Enjoy!”

How to explain such wilful cultural vandalism? What drives RNZ’s Generation X bosses to tear down the public broadcaster’s proud tower with such venomous spite?

The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that they are the tragic heirs of Rogernomics. The kids who were educated at school and university to despise the New Zealand that pre-dated the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1993 – most especially its faith in the superiority of public service over private enterprise. What more compelling symbol of that faith could there be than the public radio network? What target more deserving of the rage and resentment of those who never received the public goods Baby Boomers took for granted than New Zealand’s post-war social-democratic flagship – RNZ?

It was through the speaker of my trusty Philips portable radio, way back in 1975, that I heard the first “Morning Report”, the programme which instantly set the news agenda for the rest of the day – for the whole country. Broadcasters like Joe Coté and Geoff Robinson, effortless conveyers of warmth and authority, were a joy to listen to. They, and those who came after them, set the journalistic bar very high. Forty-five years on from that first broadcast, the present hosts of “Morning Report” struggle, and regularly fail, to clear it.

More generally, RNZ’s “product” reflects the network’s reckless abandonment of the middle way. The sensible notion that, as a public broadcaster, RNZ should do its best to reflect the public, has been set aside, and in its place a regime of extreme cultural didacticism has arisen. National Radio is no longer a station where the broadest possible range of New Zealanders’ ideas and opinions is broadcast for their fellow citizens to hear and judge. The views of those who remain unconvinced by the new orthodoxies of identity politics have been rigorously filtered out, and those espousing them “de-platformed” with extreme prejudice.

A friend of mine has coined a phrase for this ideological cleansing of the public airways: he calls it “the Mulliganisation of Radio New Zealand”. The reference is to the afternoon offerings of that quintessential Gen-Xer, Jessie Mulligan: a broadcaster who proves, five days out of every seven, that a little knowledge, and a lot of ideology, are very dangerous things indeed!

Fittingly, Mulligan’s afternoon stint is followed by Wallace Chapman’s “The Panel”. This show (with which it is only fair I acknowledge a long association) was formerly hosted by Mulligan’s highly professional predecessor, Jim Mora. Justly renowned for the “robust” debates between its left-wing and right-wing guests, “The Panel” gave RNZ’s listeners a ringside seat to the political, economic and cultural arguments in which the whole nation was collectively embroiled. No more. Chapman, like Mulligan, specialises in turning down the heat and dimming the lights. Breathlessly inoffensive, punctiliously politically correct, “The Panel” has made the penitential journey from seditious to soporific – and kept on going.

The great tragedy of RNZ is that it has squandered the opportunity to interrogate intelligently the hopes and aspirations, the triumphs and challenges, of the generation that followed my own. Not every New Zealander born between 1966 and 1986 subscribes to the extreme “wokeism” that is currently masquerading as the default ideology of RNZ’s listeners. Most of them would, however, be glad to hear its contentious propositions debated. Such as the wisdom, or not, of passing laws against “hate speech”. Or, of introducing a radically Maori nationalist version of New Zealand history into the nation’s classrooms.

Some listeners would even welcome, in addition to RNZ’s programmes about rural New Zealand, and its regular updates on the antics of the markets, a strong and constant commitment to covering the issues arising out of everyday working-class life in this country. An RNZ that acknowledged New Zealand (not “Aotearoa”) as a house of many rooms, many windows, and many mirrors. A multicultural society with a great many more than one ideological story to tell.

An RNZ which refuses to acknowledge the full diversity of belief and aspiration in New Zealand runs a terrible risk. When the mood of the nation inevitably shifts, the worst possible position in which the public broadcaster could find itself is so far out on an ideological limb that its enemies feel completely safe in sawing off the branch altogether. An RNZ so bereft of friends and allies that no effective defence is any longer possible.

There is a very good reason why the public broadcaster should do everything within its power to be the citizens’ friend and comforter. It’s so those same citizens will always have a reason to be the friends and comforters of public broadcasting – when its enemies come a-calling.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 19 February 2021.

If Only We Had A Minister Of Broadcasting Worthy Of The Title.

Worryingly Uninterested: Given Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi’s evident uninterest in the classic Reithian principles of public broadcasting – i.e. to educate, elevate and entertain the people – any review of his motivations for rolling-up TVNZ and RNZ into a single, state-owned broadcasting entity, leaves one fearing the worst.

MORE OR LESS OFFICIALLY, this government is committed to merging TVNZ and RNZ into a single, monolithic, publicly-owned broadcasting entity. The temptation to support this idea enthusiastically is strong. For a Minister of Broadcasting to even contemplate such a dramatic revision of the public broadcasting status-quo surely implies a deep understanding of how poorly the current entities are performing, while signalling a firm intention to offer TVNZ’s and RNZ’s audiences something better. You would, however, be well advised to curb your enthusiasm. The chances of this policy proving successful are so low they make KiwiBuild look like a safe bet.

Consider the policy’s provenance: the Office of the Minister of Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi. This is the man who, having been briefed on RNZ management’s proposal, endorsed by RNZ’s board, to effectively destroy RNZ Concert – in favour of a “Yoof” channel – failed to identify any significant problems with the idea. That failure, along with the public outcry and political embarrassment it occasioned, should have seen him stripped of the broadcasting portfolio. Unfortunately, so uninterested is the Labour Cabinet in public broadcasting – and the media in general – that Faafoi continues to hold the warrant.

Given the Minister’s evident uninterest in the classic Reithian principles of public broadcasting – i.e. to educate, elevate and entertain the people – any review of Faafoi’s motivations for rolling-up TVNZ and RNZ into a single, state-owned broadcasting entity, leaves one fearing the worst.

The first motivation that springs to mind is straightforward, old-fashioned, cost-cutting. Rather than fund RNZ properly (as Faafoi’s predecessor, Clare Curran, promised to do more than four years ago) the current minister might simply be seeking the approbation of the Finance Minister by freeing-up an extra $15 million for some eye-catching and vote-winning alternative. (Something to do with Rugby, perhaps?)

Another motivation could be a strong desire to get rid of the governance and management personnel who caused him such acute political embarrassment. Any merging of RNZ and TVNZ would, almost certainly, be to the disadvantage of the smaller and weaker radio network. Perhaps Faafoi is anticipating that the big television elephants will make short work of the tiny radio mice? As a former TVNZ journalist, he is likely to identify much more strongly with the populist instincts of his former employers, than he is with what remains of the public service ethos at RNZ. Killing two birds with a single stone always elicits hearty cheers from career politicians.

Then again, it might be some sort of confused, ham-fisted attempt by elements within the Ministry of Heritage and Culture (MHC) to stop the rot in both state broadcasters and drag them, kicking and screaming, into some semblance of awareness of their obligations to New Zealand’s democratic political system, and to the cultural needs of the citizens they are supposed to serve.

Unfortunately, that is the least likely explanation for the proposed merger. After multiple changes at the upper echelons of the MHC there is simply not the critical mass of tough and talented public servants needed to drive through such a visionary (not to mention ideologically suspect) project.

To be reasonably confident of this (or any) government pulling off a successful and progressive merger of TVNZ and RNZ, the public would need to have been properly prepared by means of a full-scale public inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of both entities. Those leading the inquiry would need to be genuinely independent, as well as fully conversant with the way public broadcasters are funded, managed and protected in other Western countries. Most obviously, it would study the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC, but it would also review the public broadcasting arrangements in Western Europe and North America.

The problem with this “solution” is, of course, that only a government already cognisant of the vital role effective public broadcasters can play in lifting the cultural and political discourse of a nation could contemplate such an inquiry. And, as we have already established, this is not such a government.

If it was, and if it had a Minister of Broadcasting and Communications worthy of his title, then New Zealanders might expect to see, hear and/or read about a minister who was not afraid to raise issues pertinent to the quality of public broadcasting in New Zealand.

Such a minister might ask why the important role of political commentator on RNZ’s Nine to Noon show is apparently now restricted to public relations personnel and pollsters with strong ties to the two major political parties, rather than to individuals demonstrably at arm’s length from these institutions, such as university academics, trade unionists and independent journalists and commentators. This was, after all, the previous practice – why the change?

That same minister might also wonder aloud why so much commentary on economic matters is provided by economists employed by the major trading banks, rather than, once again, by qualified individuals without quite so much skin in the game?

Or, why so many of our leading state broadcasters are more interested in the sound of their own voices, than in the voices of the unfortunate people they invite on air to interrogate and interrupt?

Questions might be raised as to why so much of the prime-time schedule is devoted to reality TV shows? Why there is so little political satire commissioned and broadcast on state television? Why the rural and business sectors are so well-served by our public broadcasters, while the lives of industrial and service sector workers are considered unworthy of such regular and dedicated journalistic scrutiny? Why we have a programme called Country Calendar, but not one called Working Life? Why sport flourishes while the arts struggle to be heard?

A government purporting to be “progressive” would not only ask these questions, it would question why they needed to be asked. Its Cabinet would be filled with people for whom the life of the mind was more important than likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Such a government would be filled with politicians who are as interested in reading books as they are in balancing them.

Most of all, it would have a Broadcasting Minister who made it his, or her, business to gather together the brightest, the bravest and the most creative souls this country can offer, and then provide them with the resources needed to broadcast back to New Zealanders their own compelling, revelatory, uplifting and unique reflections.

That is the sort of public broadcasting policy New Zealand needs: exactly the sort of broadcasting policy it is not going to get.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 November 2020.

Integrating Seamlessly With The Lowest Common Denominator.

Putting Us In Our Place: RNZ management seems to glory in “disrupting” the expectations of its core audience. Those expectations, based on the “inform, educate, entertain” formula laid down by the first Director General of the BBC, John Reith, in the 1920s, and adopted without demur by New Zealand’s public broadcasting services ever since, are clearly out of favour with RNZ’s new breed of cultural commissars.

EVERYONE HAS HAD  a good laugh at RNZ’s “Music Strategy” featuring “The Ten New Zealanders”. The idiocy of modern marketing is always good for a chuckle or two, and these crude stereotypes have certainly provoked a lot more than that. Less amusing, however, is the sheer vapidity of an in-house culture willing to lay such inanity before its governing body. That the RNZ Board of Governors accepted such a presentation, rather than throwing it back in the faces of its supposedly professional authors, is way beyond unfunny – it’s just bloody sad.

Reading the material, one is shocked by the authors’ disdain for making any kind of case more sophisticated than. “This is what we want, can we have it please?”

Take, for example, RNZ’s supposed “goal” of expanding the public broadcaster’s reach to encompass half the New Zealand population by 2022. This sort of “planning” is nothing short of Stalinist in its towering ambition. It seems inconceivable that there was no one in RNZ who, when presented with their bosses’ “Two Year Plan”, didn’t object that the achievement of such a goal would require the setting aside of all professional broadcasting standards. If such objections were made, however, then it is equally clear that the answer from above was “So?”

Professionalism is not highly valued in these presentations. Rather, it is not-so-subtly suggested that such considerations might actually be part of the problem with RNZ. Certainly, there is a fairly obvious prejudice against the high-culture featured on RNZ Concert. Such programming seems to be regarded as evidence of Pakeha elitism at work. In the material presented to the board, this is framed as being, if not a “bad thing”, then most certainly as “something to be avoided”.

Permeating the whole “Music Strategy” is a level of anti-intellectualism that, once again, would not be out of place at a Soviet-era exhibition of “socialist-realist” art. Just as the Communist party of the Soviet Union commissioned the production of endless paeans to the heroic qualities of Soviet workers and peasants, RNZ’s “strategists” make plain their urgent desire to cram the public broadcaster’s schedule with the heroic cultural production of Aotearoa’s shamelessly neglected “youth”.

Indeed, it is clear from the material released by RNZ Management, after multiple Official Information Act requests, that what was being contemplated in the rolling-out of its “Music Strategy” was something between an old-fashioned Soviet purge and an old-fashioned Bolshevik coup. The quiet and deeply knowledgeable professionals at RNZ Concert headquarters in Wellington were to receive the career equivalent of a bullet in the back of the head, while the Auckland studios of RNZ were to be taken over by the woke graduates of the nation’s “communication studies” courses – along with the cream of the student radio stations RNZ’s strategists are clearly intending to replace with “RNZ Music”.

In their own words, RNZ Music (Version 2.0) is “an entirely new brand for young NZ (all 18–35). RNZ Music v 2.0 utilises traditional broadcast and new digital technologies to generate and share content. Content that is curated by influencer talent that RNZ will source from within the diverse target audience. This will foster a sense of strong national identity and will promote NZ culture to a young Aotearoa.”

If that isn’t a clear enough statement of intent, then try the following description of the “talent” the new entity is looking to recruit:

• The new team will be Gen Z and Millennials.

• They will have social clout within the new audience

• They live the life and reflect the audience’s lifestyle back upon itself

RNZ’s strategists even offered up an example of “Best Practice” who can serve as a role model for their talent. Ebro Darden, of Hot 97 (New York) Beats 1 Radio, points the way forward for a public broadcaster whose staff will no longer be “just radio announcers” (like those awful cardigan-wearing old reactionaries at RNZ Concert!) but “musicians, comedians and social media content creators.” They will use their “influence within the community to spread the message far and wide to RNZ’s new social audience”. Naturally, RNZ content will integrate “seamlessly within their personal feeds.”

There’s plenty of examples of Ebro Darden’s “best practice” on YouTube. If RNZ’s management is serious about adopting Hot 97 (New York) as a template, then they should lay in a good supply of flak-jackets – they will need them!

But, maybe that’s the idea. RNZ management seems to glory in “disrupting” the expectations of its core audience. Those expectations, based on the “inform, educate, entertain” formula laid down by the first Director General of the BBC, John Reith, in the 1920s, and adopted without demur by New Zealand’s public broadcasting services ever since, are clearly out of favour with RNZ’s new breed of cultural commissars.

Fuelling their contempt is an ageism so intense that, if women, LGBTQI+, or people of colour were its targets, then the jobs of RNZ’s bosses would be forfeit. They appear to hate their most loyal listeners with a passion as odd and inexplicable as it is self-defeating. How else to explain the unmistakeable decline in RNZ’s professionalism? As if the exercise of sound editorial judgement and a strict adherence to the taxpayers’ expectations of fairness and balance are yet more manifestations of white colonialist privilege to be swept away.

The banality on display in “The Ten New Zealanders” section of RNZ’s “Music Strategy” is emblematic of the organisation’s fundamental misunderstanding of the public broadcaster’s role. RNZ’s job is not to swallow up the entire radio audience by pandering to the lowest common denominator and surrendering the professional broadcasting standards developed over decades to a crass format designed to “integrate seamlessly” with the personal feeds of 18-25 year-olds.

The purpose of a public broadcaster is to set the bar so high that its private sector competitors are dissuaded from letting it sink too low. It is about letting people find that one place on the dial where commercial considerations are absent; preconceptions are challenged; and the imaginations of people from all cultures and classes are given wings. Like the public libraries they so perfectly complement, public broadcasters are refuges for the mind; places in the heart; tonics for the soul.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 March 2020.

Changing The Climate – One RNZ Broadcast At A Time.

Wise Words: “To retain its taxpayer-guaranteed revenue, RNZ must also retain its most precious commodity: public respect and support. That can be imperilled by poorly thought out judgements, including assuming that it should set the political climate.” - Pamela Stirling, Editor, NZ Listener.

THE LISTENER LONG AGO ceased to be a cultural talisman for progressive New Zealanders. Ever since the apparently indestructible Pamela Stirling took charge and transformed the magazine she’d once denounced as “the house journal of the Alliance” into the house journal of the National Party. Recently, however, a couple of sentences from “The sound and the fury”, the Listener editorial team’s assessment of the RNZ Concert debacle (22 February 2020) struck me as unusually perceptive.

“To retain its taxpayer-guaranteed revenue, RNZ must also retain its most precious commodity: public respect and support. That can be imperilled by poorly thought out judgements, including assuming that it should set the political climate.”

That climate-setting quip should have prompted a double-take from RNZ’s bosses. Its clear intention was to alert them (gently) to the fact that some of its key producers’ and editors’ more recent judgements have raised a few important eyebrows – and not in a good way. There is a growing feeling among those whose education was vouchsafed to them in the years before our universities became customer-driven businesses, that RNZ has taken up an ideological position at some distance beyond either its listeners’, or the general public’s, comfort zones.

A telling example of RNZ’s determination to set the political climate was broadcast on the public broadcaster’s Checkpoint programme of Wednesday, 26 February 2020, in which RNZ reporter, Nita Blake-Persen, secured prime placement for her story “NZ Super costs up as NZ retirees on $100k passes 30,000”.

It is difficult to assign any other motive for producing this sort of story than a desire to fan the flames of intergenerational warfare. Singling out high income-earners over 65 (whose annual contribution to the IRD, based on a minimum salary of $100,000 is a bracing $23,920!) was certainly inflammatory. Ms Blake-Persen’s analysis also hints strongly that the abandonment of the universalist principles underpinning NZ Superannuation may have to be accepted as unavoidable collateral damage in the aforesaid war between the generations.

More disconcerting, is what appears to be a lack of sensible editorial oversight of Ms Blake-Persen’s story. Having read her copy, did Checkpoint’s editors, Pip Keane and Catherine Walbridge, not warn Ms Blake-Persen to calculate the total tax contribution of the 31,048 New Zealand superannuitants earning more than $100,000, and then compare that figure to the $608 million paid out to them by way of NZ Superannuation? A pretty sensible precaution, I would have thought, given that if the 31,048 older Kiwis so provocatively singled-out by Ms Blake-Persen proved to be net contributors to the state’s coffers, then her whole story falls flat on its face.

Which is exactly what we discover when we subtract NZ Super payments totalling $608,000,000 from Income Tax payments of $717,600,000 (31,048 x $23,920). Far from being greedy Boomer leeches bleeding their hapless GenX offspring dry, these workers are contributing a net $134,668,160 annually to the public purse!

All of which raises some disconcerting questions about RNZ’s overall ideological agenda, and on whose behalf it is being run? Did Ms Blake-Persen’s highly tendentious story make it on to the airwaves simply because nobody thought to check it? Or, is it evidence of a broader RNZ agenda to shame and blame the older generation for having the temerity to be born a couple of decades before its younger reporters and presenters? It would be tempting to dismiss this suggestion as Boomer paranoia had the RNZ Board and its CEO not demonstrated so unequivocally their readiness to sacrifice older listeners for a “younger demographic” in relation to RNZ Concert.

One of the economists quoted in Ms Blake-Persen’s story is Shamubeel Eaqub. According to this participant in the management consultancy firm Sense.Partners:

“The reality is that we don’t want to penalise people for working into old age and neither do we want to penalise people for accumulating wealth, but we have to be consistent in our understanding that actually when we look out to the next 20 to 30 years, our system of taxation and our systems of supporting old age and superannuitants probably isn’t sustainable.”

Oh, what a multitude of sins can be concealed beneath a little qualifier like “probably”! Even Ms Blake-Persen felt obliged (maybe there was a smidgen of editorial input after all?) to mention the apple-cart-upsetting finding of the Interim Retirement Commissioner, Peter Cordtz, that “the current cost [of NZ Superannuation] was sustainable for the next 30 years”. You pays your money and you makes your choice, apparently: the management consultant who has a problem with our current tax and pension systems; or, the guy who told us the former is more than equal to supporting the latter.

It will be interesting, BTW, to see whether the newly appointed Retirement Commissioner, Jane Wrightson, upholds Cordtz’s finding on the sustainability of NZ Superannuation. It is to be hoped that his pronouncements weren’t inspired by the, sadly, not unreasonable fear, that the new boss would soon be touting the same “we can’t afford it” nonsense as the old boss.

In the meantime we can only sit back and admire Ms Blake-Persen’s propaganda skills. Imagine the outrage among that “younger demographic” when they discover that a body of overpaid Boomers, equal in number to the entire city of Blenheim, is living high on the hog while they sweat away in the salt mines of Neoliberalism! Imagine their fear and loathing when presented with such doom-laden factoids as: “Last year, NZ Super cost $14.5 billion and that cost is increasing by more than $1b each year. By 2024 it's predicted to cost the country nearly $20b a year.” (A figure, BTW, that places us well below the current pension costs of many European states when measured as a percentage of GDP.) Or that – Quelle horreur! – “Inland Revenue figures showed 2500 people were getting Super payments while on incomes of more than $300,000”.

Just imagine it! $300K a year!

Once again, however, there is no mention of the Income Tax paid annually on that sum to the IRD: a trifling $89,920! Which is more than four times the $21,380 paid annually to an individual New Zealander aged 65+ and living alone.

What a pity Ms Blake-Persen didn’t round out her story by seeking comment from an old-fashioned democratic-socialist who has campaigned for years to see those earning $300K p.a. socked with a much more progressive rate of income tax. He or she could have explained how steepening the progressivity of New Zealand’s Income Tax would once again make possible all the things the members of Ms Blake-Persen’s generation missed out on.

Then we could all have agreed that it’s not the year you were born in that counts, but the responsibility of every generation to so organise society that young and old, alike, are able to receive their fair share of its bounty. That would be a political climate worth setting – and definitely preferable to the ideological climate RNZ’s bosses seem hell-bent on heating-up.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 28 February 2020.

The Strange Case of RNZ Concert.

What Were They Thinking? RNZ's CEO Paul Thompson (left) and Jim Mather, Chairman of the RNZ Board of Governors, attempt to justify the debacle arising out of their attempt to downgrade RNZ Concert to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Select Committee at Parliament on Thursday, 13 February 2020.

WHAT IS RNZ trying to do? Across New Zealand, this is the question mystifying both its listeners and non-listeners. The follow-up question is no less perplexing: Why is it doing it now?

It is tempting to answer to both questions by observing that RNZ is doing its very best to annoy the Government.

First off, RNZ’s CEO, Paul Thompson, and its Board of Governors have launched a full scale assault on RNZ Concert, a radio station beloved by its 176,000 listeners. (That audience, by the way, represents 4 percent of New Zealanders over the age of 10 years – a metric most commercial radio stations would kill for!) No matter, Concert’s highly experienced staff are to be made redundant and the station transformed into a purveyor of pre-programmed elevator music.

To say that RNZ Concert’s listeners are outraged is to understate the case by several orders of magnitude. Alienating so many people so needlessly would be a bad idea regardless of who those people were. But, to do so when they include so many of “the Good and the Great” – people with the ear of the Prime Minister – moves this imbroglio way beyond the scope of a bad idea. Not to put too fine a point upon it, this is the sort of idea that gets people sacked!

Which brings us to the second question: Why is RNZ doing this now? Why announce a fundamental restructuring of the state’s radio network a mere 48 hours before the Minister of Broadcasting was set to announce an official feasibility study into the merger of RNZ and TVNZ? If ever there was a time to politely suggest to your CEO that it might be prudent to taihoa – at least until the future lie of the land becomes clearer – then this was it!

Is Paul Thompson really such a thrill-seeker as to set these changes in motion on his own initiative? Frankly, that seems unlikely. His plans for RNZ Concert, along with those for appropriating its FM frequency for a new radio station aimed at 18-35 year-olds, were almost certainly approved by RNZ’s Board of Governors before being conveyed to RNZ Concert’s stunned staff and an appalled New Zealand public.

But, if that’s true, then we are led to the highly disturbing conclusion that RNZ’s Board of Governors knowingly set itself on a collision course with Jacinda Ardern’s government. That, heedless of her Labour Party’s rock-solid commitment to RNZ Concert, the Board was willing to gut it in broad daylight, and embark upon a highly risky (and, presumably, highly expensive) quest for a whole new demographic of listeners.

What sort of board rolls those sort of dice?

The answer appears to be, a board stacked with a combination of determined bi-culturalists and risk-taking entrepreneurs. A board possessing only two individuals who could reliably be characterised as broadcasters. A board collectively inclined to make RNZ’s listenership less white, less old, and less middle-class. A board which, looking at itself, came to the not unreasonable conclusion that a browner, younger, poorer RNZ audience was precisely the objective which this government had appointed it to achieve.

If so, then the events of the past 10 days constitute a wonderful example of: “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it!”

Except, to be fair to the Government, it’s unlikely that they intended their carefully selected board to build a new RNZ audience on the ruins of the old one! As Jacinda Ardern has made very clear over the past week, what she and her Broadcasting Minister, Kris Faafoi, are expecting is a solution based on “both/and” – not “either/or”.

It is also fair to speculate that this government was not anticipating any radical changes to RNZ’s organisational structure, or audience profile, before the shape and scope of the proposed new state broadcasting entity had been determined.

Perhaps, in the end, that’s what the RNZ Board and its CEO were doing. Perhaps they were seizing what could very easily be their final opportunity to reshape and repurpose RNZ before it is swallowed up by something much bigger and uglier in the public broadcasting space.

If that is the explanation, then the RNZ Board should resign. Living institutions, especially those dedicated to the public good, like RNZ, should be encouraged to grow and develop – not hacked to pieces.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 February 2020.

 POST-SCRIPT: Well, common-sense (or should that be the wrath of a government caught off-guard?) has prevailed, and a “both/and” solution accepted as the best outcome for the RNZ Concert debacle. The questions raised in this essay, however, remain unanswered. It is also important to note that the CEO, Paul Thompson, hasn’t entirely backed away from his plans for RNZ Concert. Neither has the RNZ Board of Governors backed away from their CEO. They have bowed to the force majeure of public opinion and their shareholder ministers – that is all. The bitch that bore this awful idea is still in heat. – C.T.

Both RNZ Concert and Youth Radio – Not Either/Or.

Under Attack: By sacking not only RNZ Concert’s presenters, but also its producers and librarians, and reducing the station to an automated purveyor of classical music in-between parliamentary broadcasts, RNZ’s CEO, Paul Thompson, wasn’t simply announcing an operational shake-up, he was declaring war on one of the most important guardians of New Zealand’s cultural traditions.

MARTYN BRADBURY believes in radio. He’s been an advocate of an FM frequency dedicated to 18-35-year-old New Zealanders since at least the 1990s. That he should welcome RNZ’s announcement that a new, state-funded, youth radio station has been green-lighted is only to be expected. Equally to be anticipated, however, is the outcry from listeners and supporters of RNZ Concert. What else did RNZ’s Paul Thompson expect when he rejected the ‘both/and’ approach in favour of ‘either/or’?

By sacking not only RNZ Concert’s presenters, but also its producers and librarians, and reducing the station to an automated purveyor of classical music in-between parliamentary broadcasts, RNZ’s CEO, Paul Thompson, wasn’t simply announcing an operational shake-up, he was declaring war on one of the most important guardians of New Zealand’s cultural traditions.

There can be no doubt that he knew what he was doing. The ice-cold way in which he and his co-conspirator, RNZ’s Music Content Director, Willy Macalister, are said to have delivered the news to the stunned staff of RNZ Concert, strongly suggests that they were all-too-aware of the serious consequences of their decision. That they would come under instantaneous and heavy fire from the artistic community and its political defenders must have been anticipated. Which suggests strongly that crossing swords with the likes of Helen Clark, Chris Finlayson, Sir Michael Cullen, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Sam Neil had already been accepted as the necessary cost of doing business.

But, accepted by whom? The RNZ Board? The Minister of Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi? The Minister of Arts & Heritage – and Prime Minister – Jacinda Ardern? Were all of these people really on-board with Thompson’s and Macalister’s decision? Had they all been fully informed of RNZ’s senior managers’ intention to gut RNZ Concert? Were they all as keyed-up as the leading protagonists for the inevitable backlash? Were all of them truly willing accessories-before-the-fact to what Sir Michael Cullen described as  “cultural vandalism”?

It would seem not.

On this morning’s edition of RNZ’s Morning Report, the Prime Minister coolly set forth her understanding of what had taken place. It seems that her Broadcasting Minister, upon being informed of Thompson and Macalister’s plans, reacted unenthusiastically. All-too-aware of the likely consequences of establishing a youth-oriented station at RNZ Concert’s expense, he cautioned RNZ’s CEO against proceeding too hastily. He asked Thompson for time to come up with a ‘both/and’ solution – specifically, by sorting out an additional FM frequency. In her interview with Morning Report co-host Corin Dann (which Dann appeared to be doing his best to frame in terms of intergenerational warfare and cultural elitism) the Prime Minister made it icily clear that Thompson, by opting not to delay his announcement, had undermined Faafoi’s efforts to come up with an acceptable compromise.

Thompson must, surely, understand that, by setting forth the sequence of events in the way she did, the Prime Minister was telling him that he was now on his own. The Government had offered to help him craft a solution and he had denied them the time needed to make it happen. Is that really where Thompson intended to place himself? At odds with RNZ Concert’s listeners? At odds with the New Zealand artistic community? At odds with present and former Ministers of Arts & Heritage? (Jacinda made it very clear to RNZ’s listeners this morning that she, too, is looking for a ‘both/and’ resolution to this problem.) Does he really think that his position is strengthened by causing a former prime minister to get in the ear of a present prime minister? Did he not hear the implicit threat in Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s comment that he and his Cabinet colleagues would be investigating the matter further? Was he simply not aware that the Labour Party 2017 manifesto includes a rock-solid commitment to the preservation of RNZ Concert?

It certainly makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Why RNZ’s CEO would choose this precise moment to unleash such a shitstorm upon his own head? After all, the RNZ Concert announcement was made just 48 hours before the Broadcasting Minister formally announced his plans for a possible merger of RNZ and TVNZ into a single state-owned broadcasting entity. Pending the outcome of the necessarily lengthy feasibility study Faafoi has ordered, it would surely have made more sense to hold off on a decision as sensitive and consequential as gutting RNZ Concert?

Was Thompson fearful that in any future merger his position would disappear? (A virtual certainty now!) Was he hoping the proposed 18-35 youth station would serve as a lasting personal legacy, and the destruction of the Baby Boomer elite’s RNZ Concert (a feat which others have attempted, and failed, to accomplish) his greatest managerial triumph? It is to be hoped not.

Because how much more impressive it would have been for Thompson and Macalister to have set in motion a steady process of renovation and reconstruction in RNZ Concert, while simultaneously investigating the best way to attract a new and younger listenership to RNZ. The promoters of New Zealand popular music have been struggling for the best part of 30 years to expand the state broadcaster’s cultural horizons and thereby fulfil more generously the aims and objectives of its charter. Preserving both the invaluable contribution of RNZ Concert to New Zealand’s classical musical traditions, and developing a new and vibrant platform for this country’s young cultural producers: now that would have been a legacy worth having.

Indeed, the way the politics of this debacle are unfolding, something like the above will be its ultimate legacy. It just won’t be Paul Thompson’s or Willy Macalister’s legacy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 February 2020.