Barrie Davis: Oh, the Humanity!

We are presently witnessing the closure of some mainstream media companies in New Zealand and it is anticipated there will be more. Several pundits in politics and the media are concerned for the effect their loss will have on democracy in this country. Yet, the mainstream media are known to be biased, overwhelmingly to the Left. The propaganda they published on behalf of the Labour government was instrumental in putting our country in the poor position it is now.

The Government paid them $55 million to “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner” which they willingly accepted and are now bound to do until 2026. The Treaty is one page which can be read in five minutes. It does not mention principles or partnership, let alone specify them: Those words are just not there. Even Maori leaders say there are no principles in the Treaty.

Iwi leader Helmut Modlik recently wrote (here), “Neither the signed Te Tiriti, nor its unsigned English version, explicitly mention any principles. They are a fiction, derived from the treaty text(s) by the judiciary in the late 20th century …” Mr Tuheitia, who some call ‘kingii’, said much the same thing at Waitangi this year (here at 2:05): “There’s no principles. The Treaty is written. That’s it. … What I want is the Treaty to be engrossed in the law so they can’t change nothing. To understand the Treaty, don’t look at the courts to understand the Treaty, look to the marae.”

To say the Treaty is a partnership is a shameful lie that we are being conditioned to believe by constant repetition in the media.

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

THE TREATY IS A PARTNERSHIP

The previous Government surreptitiously avoided democratic process to introduce co-governance and the present Government has denied us a democratic referendum to be rid of it. Instead, the new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, inexplicably stated that the Treaty is a partnership (here and here at 8:39). Democracy and not the Treaty of Waitangi should lie at the centre of our constitution. Our constitution has been fundamentally changed without a democratic mandate and the mainstream media has been instrumental in bringing that about, as evidenced by the ironically named Public Interest Journalism Fund. I fail to see how lying could possibly be in the public interest.

Gone are the days when Sinead Boucher could boast, the job of the news media “is to hold the powerful to account, well, we are the powerful.” The propagandist mainstream media is no longer fit for purpose and is being made redundant. As a passing shot they are bombarding us with stories of self pity; but given the damage they have done, I am ambivalent: “Don’t go away unhappy – just go away”.

In The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (2022), Zac Gershberg (a professor of journalism) and Sean Illing (a Vox journalist) say (p. 1):

“This book makes an unconventional claim about democracy. In almost every major work on the subject, democracy is reduced to a body of institutions and practices. We are told, time and again, that the touchstone of any democratic society is the universal right to vote and a government that enshrines the law. This description isn’t wrong so much as narrow; it identifies the core features of democracy, but it doesn’t capture the constitutive condition of this type of society. Moreover, it’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more of an open communicative culture. Democracies can be liberal or illiberal, populist or consensus based, but those are potential outcomes that emerge from this open culture. And the direction any democracy takes largely depends on its tools of communication and the passions they promote. This is more than an academic distinction. To see democracy as a culture of free expression is to foreground its susceptibility to endless revolution, even danger.

“We call this the paradox of democracy: a free and open communication environment that, because of its openness, invites exploitation and subversion from within. This tension sits at the core of every democracy, and it can’t be resolved or circumnavigated. To put it another way, the essential democratic freedom – the freedom of expression – is both ingrained in and potentially harmful to democracy.”

That is what has happened in New Zealand; our democracy has been subverted from within with the help of the mainstream media. For example, in “The sad business of race-baiting” (The Post, 10 October 2023, here), four days before the 2023 election and leaving no time for debate, Philip Matthews wrote:

This was supposed to be an election about the cost of living, but rather than the two major parties arguing about the economy, the real ideological warfare has been raging over views of the Treaty of Waitangi. It has been between minor parties, with ACT and NZ First on one side and Te Pāti Māori and the Greens on the other.

To be clear, that is a Stuff journalist telling us which issue we were supposed to vote on for the 14 October 2023 election. The article is dated 10 October, so Stuff knew before the election that Treaty issues are important enough to us to have polarized the nation. I gave the details on Breaking Views (here), but the salient point is Stuff denied us a Treaty debate until after the election. Stuff then published a flurry of pro-Labour / anti-National and pro-Maori / anti-European rhetoric which included, “Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere added that if Māori were backed into a corner it would spark a civil disobedience movement that would shut down the country’s major cities”.

Newshub had another go at telling us what to think in “Most voters don't 'get up and really worry about' race debate - Sir John Key,” 27 February 2024 (here), when Key slipped the co-governance card to the bottom of the deck:

Asked by AM host Melissa Chan-Green whether he'd been giving advice to current Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Sir John responded: “Not really, he doesn't need advice.”

But Sir John said the pair do catch up regularly.

“We're mates, we see each other a bit.”

He said he'd always reiterated to Luxon there were “only four issues people vote on: the economy, law and order, health, and education”.

“I know race has been a big part of this ... whole campaign and the Coalition partners are pushing that issue and there's lots of interest in it but, actually, I don't think that many voters get up and really worry about that.”

The writer also took the opportunity to give some research findings:

According to the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor (here), released in October and carried out before the election, race relations and racism was the most important issue facing New Zealand for 5 percent of those surveyed.

However, ‘Races relations / racism’ is not the issue. What is at stake is the retention of democracy in our constitution. The threat is the compromise to our democracy due to Maori co-governance. But that could be any interest group and the voters would be equally concerned that their voting power is being halved. ‘Races relations / racism’ is not the primary issue. Voters are concerned that their democratic right to vote is being diminished if not expunged by a complicit Parliament and that is what polarized the nation.

Already the Waitangi Tribunal has somehow morphed into effectively a Maori Upper House; one third of our House of Representatives is Maoris who are one sixth of our population; and we have Treaty principles written all through our legislation. To show how wrong this is, you need only turn it around and ask: What would be the response if there were exclusive seats on the Greater London Council for indigenous British people? The salient difference with New Zealand government is the colour of the indigenous skin. Our free and democratic society, which we have shared with the Maoris, has in turn been usurped by the Maoris.

Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing explain (p. 11):

“To understand how we got here, let us restate the paradox: democracies exist through an open communication environment, but this condition of freedom invites political actors to exploit novel media technologies and draw from demagogic rhetorical styles. Democracies are thus constantly undermined by their constitutive conditions of communication. There is no way out of this dilemma: either a society is free or it isn’t. If it isn’t free, it’s not a democracy. And if it is, that means everything, rhetorically, ought to be permitted.”

That does not mean we must submit to any piece of rhetoric that is proposed. Gershberg and Illing further say:

“There’s no rule or law specifying that the freedom of open communication must rely on accurate information and righteous causes. A democracy permits every available means of persuasion, and people determine for themselves what facts they consider accurate and what causes they consider just.” (p. 250)

First, with the change of Government, let us not merely swing the pendulum: I expect we will find that the Right is as problematic as the Left, as Fascism is to Marxism. They are opposite sides of the same irrational coin that needs to be factored out of the political equation. We need to transcend that double bind.

“In a consumer world rife with choices, everyone must be their own intellectual self-defense mechanism. There is no way around this in a democratic society; ultimate responsibility falls to the people. Public opinion is perpetually vulnerable to hysteria and mass manipulation – from opportunistic politicians, from attention merchants, from corporate media.” (p. 254)

While the democratic system must allow all speech, we should not be so generous. Just because you may say it does not entail I will accept it. That means we need to be astute judges of what is correct in all its details and of what is morally right and fair. That in turn means we need to be reliably informed of the facts of issues if we are to judge them properly, so we need to identify standards for the quality of the information that we will individually accept. It also means that we should not simply adopt the judgments of others, so journalists may divest themselves of the burden of writing opinion pieces. We have a civil responsibility to do the thinking for ourselves if we are to vote effectively. We need to be political denizens and we need to be rational.

“It’s true that we’ve never been this free, but it’s equally true that we’ve never been this monitored, this manipulated, this overloaded with information. The importance of discernment, of rejecting bad-faith appeals and recognizing corruption and propaganda, has never been so urgent.” (p. 255)

Out of the ashes of the Ardern - Boucher - Key pyre let there rise a rational era of logical evidence-based thinking and debate. I understand that is what David Seymour is saying. Let us put our faith in democracy, freedom of expression and pure reason, and insist upon it from others. Consider all views rationally and ruthlessly. Call a spade a spade. Say what you reasonably believe to be the case, but accept also the responsibility of saying why you hold that belief. Let us have the debate on that basis.

Let the others knock themselves out with their asinine fighting talk; that’s just what you do when you don’t have an argument. Also, any opinion pieces in the media must be by subject matter experts and not journalists; otherwise just give us the facts as best you can and we’ll come to our own conclusions.

Above all, let us be rational creatures. Rational philosophy and science got us this far, let it also resolve the problems of the future.

Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.