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.
“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.
9 comments:
It's true - there was a lot of money behind the campaign... $55m comes to mind!
Frank, you missed the larger amount spent on government advertising without any attempt to get a bulk discount.
The left wing media do not get it. Blame Labour for their performance. As a swing voter, I did.
The best clip was from Tova as she tried to convince herself that no one in NZ would have seen this result coming. Dispite the polls.
The only question asked at this election is two or three in the coalition.
Frank, add in the $50M donated to the MSM during COVID.
Then attempt to calculate all the premium advertising dollars they were paid to push 3 Waters, special COVID indoctrination messages to Maori etc !
The MSM have been creaming it from Labour for years, it's little wonder that they were never going to bite the hand that has been feeding them cake for 6 years.
Are the PIJF contracts finished ?
Now will the new government please reveal the secret terms of the funding ?
On 15 September the Post reported that a new The Post/Freshwater Strategy poll showed 48% of respondents want the chance to vote in a referendum on Māori co-governance, while 17% disagreed. More than a third (34%) opted to stay neutral.
The question posed was: “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: there should be a referendum on Māori co-governance, to end the confusion and let every New Zealander have a say.”
On 12 October the Herald reported that an Act Party proposal to enshrine what it says are the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in legislation had strong support from the public, with 60 % of voters saying they would back the proposal if put to them in a referendum, according to a Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll.
Just 18 % opposed the idea, with the remaining 22 % saying they were unsure.
Sure National had a huge war chest but then Mihirangi Forbes and her many intransigent fellow pro maori campaigners on the staff had the full might of RNZ at their disposal.
It seems likely the msm stuck doggedly to a leftward line in part to induce National to spend their huge fund as counter.
In a referendum not many were agin co governance. but that is because the full connotations were not widely made known. A few hundred thousand dollars supporting Batchelor's message, publicising of the operation of the Tupuna Maunga Authoity etc, would have altered outlooks.
Labour may not have been positive in pursuit of taxes for the industrious, but their maori caucus made very sure they were positive in supporting matters pro maori. The ability to confidentially vote against the latter without incurring cancellation won the election for honesty, democracy, and long term stability.
This is the moment when neutral transparent media should come together to have any real chance of toppling stuff and recreating a more balanced view of news for Nz ers; merge Nzcpr, the platform, realitycheckradio and any others. Set up a commercial model for adverisers and away you go. Divided not as strong. Together more clout , more perspectives and a real alternative to stuff and herald
Time to cut funding of these so called news outlets; advertising to. Let them survive in the free market.
Totally agree cut the funding and millions in government advertising, they ( these so called journalists will soon be flipping burgers)
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