Graham Adams: Media struggles for answers after election

Perhaps nothing has better highlighted the desolation of “progressive left” journalists after Saturday’s election results than a clip from Newshub Nation’s panel on Sunday.

NBR senior journalist Dita de Boni appeared emotional as she told Newshub’s television audience that big money had effectively determined the weekend’s election result.

Responding to the suggestion by the programme’s host, Rebecca Wright, that Luxon had resolutely “mauled the ball across the line” to victory, de Boni said: “I find it outrageous than anyone would suggest that [Luxon’s] own efforts got him across the line. He was bankrolled by the richest people in New Zealand. The social media game behind him was amazing because that is bankrolled by foreign money.

“He actually lost debates. He is not a people person. He got across the line because he represents everything that people with a lot of money would like to see as the leader of New Zealand.”

TV presenter Mihingarangi Forbes backed her fellow panellist about social media. “You’re right. There was a lot of money behind that campaign.”

In response, the Free Speech Union mischievously tweeted: “Free speech is even for conspiracy theorists. That’s why Mihingarangi Forbes and Dita de Boni must love our work! They must also be strong opponents of the DIA’s proposals to regulate misinformation like we are (because if they aren’t, they run the chance of being its first victims).”

Unfortunately for the dispirited panellists and the notion that money automatically buys success, the results of the referendum for The Voice across the Tasman proved otherwise. Opposition leader Peter Dutton has claimed that “The Yes campaign — thanks to the unions and thanks to big business bosses — had support totalling somewhere between $50 million and $100 million.”

Companies such as Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, and BHP chipped in with $A2 million each. Qantas painted the Yes logo on planes and provided its campaign leaders with free travel.

Yet, last Saturday, the Yes campaign was crushed with 60 per cent of voters rejecting the proposal to grant Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders a permanent advisory voice to Parliament. It was defeated in every state as well as nationally.

Of course, National’s huge war-chest may, indeed, have been used very effectively to bolster its vote during its campaign but we’ll never know exactly how much advantage it gave. Certainly, Act’s substantial haul of donations didn’t appear to have significantly boosted its prospects. On the provisional results released on Saturday evening, Act’s proportion of the vote rose by less than 1.5 percentage points from its 2020 result, despite an overall swing to the right. And its tally was far below its earlier polling that reached into the teens.

It’s pretty clear that money can’t reliably buy love from voters — although it can undoubtedly influence policy once a government takes power.

But, no matter how much money National and Act had at their disposal, much of the electorate had already fallen out of love with Labour long before this year’s campaign swung into action. By late 2022, Jacinda Ardern had obviously seen the writing on the wall and prepared to sidle away from danger and the humiliation of losing heavily in 2023.

In the wake of her resignation, the mainstream media blundered on, talking up “Chippy from the Hutt” as Labour’s new-found saviour, as if he hadn’t been an integral and highly influential member of Ardern’s inner circle.

In fact, for more than a year, polls asking whether participants thought the country was going in the right or wrong direction showed a significant majority who believed the latter. It has consistently been the case from mid-2022 right until the results of the latest Roy Morgan poll popped up on Friday.

That poll showed 57.5 per cent of electors thought New Zealand was “heading in the wrong direction” compared to 31 per cent who said New Zealand was “heading in the right direction”. Such relentlessly negative sentiment meant the chances of a Labour-led victory were always slim to vanishing.

The NZ Herald’s Simon Wilson, a senior writer and prominent voice for left politics, had an even more inventive analysis for Labour’s drubbing than Dita de Boni’s.

Wilson wrote: “This wasn’t a vote against the left. The Greens and Te Pāti Māori both had their best election results ever, increasing their numbers and, between them, on election night, turfing the Labour candidates out of five electorates.”

The fact that the left’s total of seats in Parliament — shared between Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori — cratered from 77 in 2020 to a provisional 52 this week apparently doesn’t mean the left were given a spanking at all.

Wilson’s assertion only makes sense, of course, if Labour is not seen as part of the true left. Perhaps that was the point of his following assertion: “It was a vote against the timidity of Labour, a party that has no right to be timid, because it is supposed to stand for change…” In particular, it had “shied away from tax and benefit reform”.

Ultimately, a host of problems beset the Labour government apart from its alleged timidity in some policy areas — not least its perverse belief that throwing money at problems like mental health was sufficient in itself. Soaring crime rates, education failures and a crumbling health system were also the focus of media attention but one area never was. Co-governance and race-based policy generally is the elephant that lingers in the nation’s legacy newsrooms.

In an otherwise insightful article mid-week that analysed Labour’s fall from grace, NZ Herald senior journalist Derek Cheng devoted one short paragraph to the topic, repeating Labour’s own facile claim that it was unpopular mainly because its ministers had failed to fully inform the public about it.

The fact that a substantial section of voters know enough about co-governance to make them deeply suspicious of it — if not down-right hostile — seems to be something the mainstream media either can’t see or perhaps are determined not to see.

Last week, just four days before the election, Wilson argued that voters weren’t much concerned about co-governance.

“Survey results from CoreData, released late last month, revealed more than half of us are now worried about almost everything you can think of: the economy, cost of living, crime, climate change, healthcare, education, trust and integrity, the calibre of our political leaders and more. But not co-governance.

“Only 7 per cent of respondents said co-governance worried them, while 37 per cent ‘completely’ support it and 51 per cent ‘somewhat’ support it.

“And yet Seymour, Peters and others continue to beat that drum as loudly as they can.”

However, if those figures are indeed correct — or even anywhere near correct — advocates of co-governance should welcome Act’s proposal for a referendum to redefine the Treaty principles with open arms. Wouldn’t they confidently expect a clear majority of New Zealanders to reject a redefinition because they enthusiastically endorse the currently dominant interpretation of the Treaty as an equal partnership between iwi and the Crown — which, of course, underpins co-governance? And, presumably — as a lively national debate progressed in advance of the ballot — wouldn’t they be confident that the more the public understood what co-governance entailed, the more they would like it?

The drum beaten so loudly by the right would be silenced.

The opposite, of course, is true. The hostility of the mainstream media to a referendum is mostly because they fear a majority of voters would roundly reject the view of the Treaty as a partnership that they have relentlessly pushed for years.

How the suggestion for a referendum is handled will be the media’s next big test. It will be a measure of whether it will be business as usual in newsrooms — with prominence given to claims of racism, divisiveness and violence if a referendum is held — or a more thoughtful approach that will centre on giving expression to all sides of the debate.

So far, the signs are not promising.

Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.