Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

“Are you worried about this Taxpayers’ Union campaign that’s going to be launched against Nicola Willis?” Heather du Plessis-Allan asked the prime minister on Newstalk ZB last Monday.

“I haven’t seen it. But I would find it very unusual that a Taxpayers’ Union would want to advocate for a Labour-led government with a radical economic agenda,” Christopher Luxon replied.

No one had seen the campaign she spoke about, but commentators had surfaced it in the media.

“One insider calls it the biggest and toughest campaign ever launched against an ostensibly friendly target by the union, founded 12 years ago by lawyer Jordan Williams and National Party pollster David Farrar and chaired by former finance minister Ruth Richardson,” Matthew Hooton had written in his weekly New Zealand Herald column the previous Friday.

The Taxpayers’ Union professed to be politically independent, but felt compelled to condemn Willis for borrowing and spending more than the previous government, Hooton said.

That prompted the Herald‘s head of business Fran O’Sullivan to ask the next day: Who is bankrolling the push to dump Nicola Willis as finance minister?

“Big campaigns take cold hard cash. While the Taxpayers’ Union says it sports 200,000 on its newsletter list, it’s not transparent over its major donors. This detracts from its authenticity.”

O’Sullivan also said Taxpayers’ Union executive director Williams asked to put ads attacking government spending in the New Zealand Herald’s ‘Mood of the Boardroom’ publication in October.

Back in September, under the headline Inside the Attack Campaign Testing Nicola Willis’s Standing the national affairs editor of The Post, Andrea Vance, said the Taxpayers’ Union put out 11 media statements and more than 60 social media posts in the previous month which criticised her handling of the economy.

Williams told The Post it was just holding Willis to account for promises of fiscal discipline she had made.

“The critique is sharpened by the voice delivering it. The think tank’s chair is former National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson, remembered for her radical 1991 ‘Mother of all Budgets,” Vance wrote.

That was three months ago – and last Tuesday, Willis had a response ready for Richardson.

“Instead of lurking in the shadows with secretly funded ads in the paper, come and debate me right here in Parliament,” she told reporters.

“I’m ready anytime, anywhere,” she said, challenging media outlets to host that tussle.

Richardson told RNZ on Tuesday she wasn’t interested in a fiscal face-off, but the Taxpayers’ Union subsequently said she would debate “the sorry state of our fiscal position” next week.

The union immediately claimed a “campaign victory” on social media – and then bickering began over which media would host what it dubbed #motherofalldebates – and what Newstalk ZB’s du Plessis-Allan called “the finance girl on finance girl debate”.

“Hopefully it doesn’t fall over because I’m getting my popcorn ready now,” she told listeners.

The fudge starts flying

Last Thursday the Taxpayers’ Union finally launched its Willis campaign, complete with AI video, adverts and free fudge.

“The organisation has released packaged fudge from the imaginary Nicola Fudge Company. It’s branded with an image of Ms. Willis with the slogan: ‘a treat today, a tax tomorrow’,” RNZ reported.

The Taxpayers’ Union sent the pun-filled fudge boxes to the nation’s newsrooms to make sure they knew all about it.

Nadine Higgins tried to get the outgoing NZ Herald writer Simon Wilson to eat some on the Herald Now show on Friday. He declined – on the very reasonable grounds he wouldn’t be able to answer her questions on TV with his mouth full.

Right v left

Wilson reckoned the Taxpayers’ Union succeeded in creating a debate limited to right-wing prescriptions offering differing degrees of austerity.

It was Predator vs Alien according to Gordon Campbell at scoop.co.nz.

“Only Richardson could make Willis look relatively benign on tax, debt and spending policy. That – as the [Public Service Associatin] has suggested – may have been the original concept all along,” he wrote.

“If you think we’re being treated poorly under current management, take a look at this cobwebbed relic of the early 1990s, and be grateful for small mercies.”

‘Is Nicola Willis losing the right?‘ The Spinoff asked on Thursday, while the Herald‘s senior political correspondent Audrey Young said Nicola Willis was “getting it from both sides.”

“The left [is] painting her as austere as Ruth Richardson and the right [is] painting her as profligate as Grant Robertson,” she said.

Willis herself told RNZ it was a case of “clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right”.

“Stuck in the middle with you”, is the next line in the old song, but the opposition complained this was a sideshow with just one side – the right.

Polarisation playing out

It’s often said that “left versus right” isn’t that relevant in our politics any more. But at times it seems our media are still stuck on it. And in these polarised times – on the concept of far-left and far-right as well.

Last week the New Zealand Listener had a long look at “the global rise of radical conservatism” and its influence on our news and politics.

In a two part special report, the magazine’s politics writer Danyl McLauchlan looked at the populist politics on the rise worldwide. And journalist Peter Bale pondered the impact on politics and commentary here.

Bale included sceptical views of the media from Brian Tamaki and Christian nationalist William McGimpsey, among others. And he noted the “speed at which memes and themes from the US – especially the Trump-inspired MAGA movement – get picked up and repurposed for domestic consumption”.

This week two meetings pondered the impact of some of this on our news and our journalism.

One was the annual Journalism Education Association of New Zealand (JEANZ) gathering at Massey University.

Associate Professor Sean Phelan spoke of “reactionary watchdogism” in a session on “Journalism and the Far Right”.

“I think there’s a general wariness of calling this stuff ‘far right’ in New Zealand. People invoke terms like ‘polarisation’ … somehow reshaping our public life, but not attributed to any particular agents. I think a lot of this stuff needs to be called out as part of a far-right political project that’s increasingly transnational.”

An obsession with “wokeness” had normalised some far-right rhetoric in New Zealand, he said – and it was “rather naive to think this was just rhetorical stuff”.

Another Massey University communications professor, Mohan Dutta, said right-wing media outlets were part of an ideological project with economic backing and colonial roots.

Investigative journalist Nicky Hager urged other journalists not to isolate or ignore people who might have fallen under far-right influence at events such as anti-vaccine and Covid protests.

Journalists should try to bring people back into coverage of public life, he said.

Newsroom’s Marc Daalder told the conference it was becoming more complicated for journalists to make news judgements.

“Some aspects of these extremist views have made their way into sort of more mainstream politics – which makes it more complicated to cover that in a way that is responsible and holds power to account – but while also trying to protect ourselves against bad-faith accusations of bias.”

Phelan also said he believed right-wing media outlets had helped shift “the sensible centre of liberal democracy – and also the sensible centre of journalism”.

View from the US

Some of these themes were also aired this week in Queenstown at an event bluntly titled: “Will we ever Trust the News Again?.”

This was run by the New Zealand arm of the US-based Aspen Institute, a non-profit think tank that says we need to “tackle big issues across political, social, economic and religious divides.”

Running that show was Vivian Schiller, the director of Aspen Digital which says it promotes “responsible stewardship of technology and media”.

Schiller has huge experience in both. She was the chief executive of the US public broadcaster NPR, general manager of the New York Times website and the chief digital officer of NBC News.

She was also head of CNN’s documentary division and the head of news at Twitter when the app was influential and widely used by newsrooms a decade ago.

She was also a director of the Scott Trust, the not-for-profit entity that owns The Guardian.

“Survey after survey shows that around the world we don’t trust the media now. Younger generations trust the media less and less,” Schiller told Mediawatch.

“If you are a right-leaning person, you’re probably going to have mistrust of publishers or outlets that lean left and vice-versa. Because of human nature, we immediately jump to who we don’t trust, rather than who we do.”

This week’s Aspen Institute seminars attracted business leaders, policymakers and communications professionals.

“There was surprisingly little variance with what I hear in the US – the same levels of scepticism and mistrust about what feel like shaky sources, and the same desire to have reliable sources.”

“Obviously the dynamics in the US and New Zealand are different but where they are the same, sadly, is that societies are becoming more and more polarised … because of information ecosystems that cause higher levels of mistrust and division.”

“This particular group … had a good instinct of what’s trustworthy and what’s not. Their concerns were that people might fall prey to bad-faith media and exacerbate divisions in society.”

“There’s many things about the media in New Zealand that are better than the US. There seems to be more engagement in local news and more local news outlets.

The size of the country means that you don’t have the deep divide in the US between national news and local news. So I think that helps with community cohesion.”

Have media failed to adapt to a rightward shift in politics?

“That came up in the seminar. It’s not so much that ‘the right’ is not being covered, but mainstream media … have struggled to adapt to a different kind of politician.

“In the US … you have high-ranking officials who proclaim flat-out mistruths from their perch of leadership. In other words – lies.

“The news media have struggled with that word, but it’s more and more important to call out that – and fact-check critical issues up top. That has contributed to mistrust.

“But mistrust cuts both ways. Those on the right in the US blame mainstream media for not giving credence to right-wing views over the years. And I think there’s some truth to that.”

In 2011, Schiller quit as the chief executive at NPR after conservative activists posing as campaigners covertly recorded a fundraising staffer saying some outrageous and racist things.

“Unfortunately it was a harbinger of the world we live in today,” Schiller told Mediawatch.

The Aspen Institute is funded by a mix of major philanthropic foundations and corporations including Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While it claims to have an influence, Schiller insists it is not a lobbyist.

But do lobby groups – that now create a lot of content for news media and their own media channels – have more influence than ever on the issues the media cover?

“I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon. And it is the job of journalists to talk to a wide range of sources and to not just reprint a press release or position paper by a lobbying group.

“But any good news organisation wants to hear a range of views and [lobby groups] are a source of perspectives … for journalists to consider among many other sources.

“In the US, a lot of news organisations are based in urban areas on the coasts – or Chicago. That can make it difficult to understand the perspectives of people in rural areas. I think it is a fair complaint from some on the right that some of their concerns and issues were not fully covered by some news organisations.

“I think there has been sort of a reckoning – and a lot of analysis at news organisations to try to make sure that that doesn’t happen again.

Asked about the prospect of a Taxpayers Union campaign prompting the finance minister into a set-piece media debate about government spending, Schiller said: “I don’t know enough New Zealand to opine. But this is not exclusive to New Zealand. Sunlight and transparency is the best way to get issues in front of the voters. The remedy to bad information is good information – and more information.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Labour leader Chris Hipkins is promising voters will see a different Labour in 2026 to the party they turned their backs on in 2023.

The last election saw Labour’s six years in government come to an end, and Hipkins returning to the opposition benches just 10 months after becoming prime minister.

Speaking to RNZ for an end of year sit-down interview, Hipkins was keen to cast some distance between the government he led to defeat, and the party he will take to the next election.

“The country’s moved on. The challenges facing the country are different, and so the solutions have got to be different too.”

Settling on a tax

Hipkins said 2025 had been a big year for Labour, and releasing its tax policy had been one of the highlights.

The party finally ended speculation over what kind of tax it would pursue, opting for a capital gains tax over a wealth tax, targeted at investment and commercial property.

The revenue would be ringfenced and go towards three free doctors visits a year for everyone. A Future Fund, free cervical screening, and a GP loan scheme have also rolled off the policy pipeline.

Asked whether Labour had given any consideration to using the tax revenue to go into the general pot or pay down debt, Hipkins said one of the biggest fiscal challenges any incoming government would face after the next election was the escalating cost of healthcare.

“Our national obsession with buying up rental houses isn’t actually helping us to grow the economy, and that needs to change. So targeting a capital gains tax at that area in order to encourage more investment in the productive economy was our first priority,” he said.

“The second thing is, what are we using that money for? We’ve got a crisis in our health system. We’ve got to do more to keep people healthy.”

Paying for those promises relies on there actually being capital gains to tax. Hipkins said economic forecasts suggested house prices would return back to their long-run average.

A different Labour?

Labour’s challenge is to convince voters it is a different Labour to the one they voted out, and Hipkins believed the public was seeing that.

“The Labour Party has been through quite a period of renewal. But also what we’re offering New Zealanders is quite different now. We’re in a very different situation now to the one that we were in two years ago when we went into the 2023 election, and the answers that we offer New Zealanders need to be different as well, and they are.”

A message to the party at this year’s conference was it cannot “say yes” to everything.

That meant, Hipkins said, that any promises Labour would make at the election were ones it knew it could keep.

“We’ve had a series of governments now who have encouraged people to be aspirational for New Zealand and have promised things that have been completely unrealistic. I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore. I think people will lose faith in a whole democratic system if we see politicians continuing to do that, I’m not going to fall into that trap.”

Depending on your pollster of choice, Labour is marginally in front of National or marginally behind. Likewise, Hipkins is either just in front of Christopher Luxon as preferred Prime Minister, or just behind.

All of that is to say it is tight. It means the major parties’ fortunes are looking increasingly reliant on their potential partners, and Hipkins has a problem in the shape of Te Pāti Māori.

The party has never gone into government with Labour, and yet they continue to be grouped together, especially by the coalition.

Te Pāti Māori’s ongoing scandals and internal turmoil have led Hipkins to declare it is a “shambles” and not ready for government, and he wants Labour to win all seven Māori electorates to ensure Te Pāti Māori is not part of the conversation post-election.

The nature of MMP means parties usually need friends, but Hipkins is not resiling from his intention to eliminate Te Pāti Māori.

“Every election is different. There have been a whole variety of different outcomes in MMP elections. Parties have come and gone, and that will continue to be the case.”

He also will not entirely rule out New Zealand First, repeating Labour would signal who it will and will not work with ahead of the election, but with no commitment around a date.

“There’s a lot of water to flow under the bridge. My goal is pretty simple. If you want a change of government, if you want to see good, solid, positive leadership for the country, then vote Labour.”

Some big names have left since the election. Kelvin Davis, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little and David Parker have gone. The likes of Barbara Edmonds, Kieran McAnulty and Willow-Jean Prime have been promoted to the front bench.

“It’s actually a very different Labour lineup now. So if you look at our senior team, our front bench lineup, there’s only, I think, three MPs left there who were there before the election,” Hipkins said.

Despite the same person at the top of the list, Hipkins said it was a “very nice problem to have” that many people were putting their names forward to stand.

“Growing our support means we bring in a whole lot of new talent, and I’m really excited about that. I offer some stability, some continuity, some experience, and you know, I’ve had that brief experience of being prime minister, so I know what to expect.”

A cost-of-living election

Signs point to the economy being rosier by the time of the election.

Business confidence is up, and ASB recently predicted the economy would turn around in 2026.

Hipkins was not concerned that Labour’s attack line on the economy could be running out of runway.

“New Zealanders deserve an economic recovery that benefits all New Zealanders. This government are only focused on benefitting those at the top. New Zealanders need to see a recovery that they all feel, and they’re not feeling that from this government,” he said.

“They don’t think this government cares about them. They don’t think this government’s focused on working New Zealanders who go out there and flog their guts out every day to create a better future for the country. That’s what my focus is.”

The coalition has prosecuted Labour for the “mess” it inherited.

Hipkins conceded that 7.5 percent inflation in 2023 was hurting New Zealand families, and that was reflected in the way they voted. But he said other countries had bounced back quicker since then.

“Why is it that New Zealand has been such an outlier here? It’s because of the decisions of this government, not the previous government. They want to blame everyone for problems that they have created.”

Labour has promised it would repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill, and restore pay equity (although on that point, the party will not say how it will pay for the restoration, which saved the government $1.8 billion a year).

But there have been other cases where Hipkins has said Labour would not repeal legislation it has opposed, saying the public had no appetite for another repeal-and-replace merry-go-round.

That was also partly because Hipkins did not see the point spending the first years of a new term unwinding legislation, adding he was in favour of a four-year term.

An Auckland-focused campaign

Hipkins has previously conceded Labour was not “listening” to Auckland, as its vote plummeted in the Super City.

Previously safe seats like New Lynn and Mt Roskill flipped blue, while turnout in South Auckland strongholds was low.

Since then, Hipkins has spent a lot of his time in Auckland, and is convinced Auckland is now listening in return.

“It’s been a long, slow rebuild for us in Auckland, the first 18 months or so of this Parliamentary term. It was slow going, but we have seen, particularly in the last half of this year, a real increase in our support in Auckland and some energy really building behind our campaign,” he said.

“Momentum matters in campaigns, and we didn’t have the right momentum in the last campaign. That was pretty clear. You know, trending in the polling sort of started going down from July onwards, which meant that we got to that critical turnout period, and the momentum wasn’t with us.

“This is very different now. The momentum is building for Labour. We’ve got a good groundswell of support rebuilding. We’re going to run a very big and very aggressive turnout strategy at the next election.”

Hipkins said he would be spending a lot of time in Auckland on the campaign to ensure that turnout, and had also reflected on his own style of campaigning.

In contrast to the give-everything-a-go Luxon campaign, Hipkins sometimes struggled on the road, relying on a “good to see you”, a handshake and moving on.

Five-and-a-half days laid up with Covid-19 did not help. He exited isolation into the final stretch with renewed vigour, but by then it was too late.

Hipkins said now that he had “had a go” at a campaign, he would be doing things differently.

“I was balancing a lot of things during the last campaign, including the fact that I’d basically only just become prime minister and was trying to lead the country through some really difficult circumstances.

“This time around, I’ve had the opportunity to go through a campaign. I know what to expect. It will be quite different for me. We’ll be doing different things.”

New Zealand has not had an election where the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were the same person as the election before since 1993.

Just as then, the roles were flipped, with former Prime Minister Mike Moore going up against the man that ousted him in 1990, Jim Bolger.

And, just like Moore, Hipkins had not served a full term before being beaten.

“I was campaigning to re-elect a government that I hadn’t been the leader of for most of the time we’d been in government. This time around, I’ll be setting out quite a different vision for the country, quite a different set of priorities. And so it would be my opportunity to stamp my own mark on the campaign and on the next government.”

As for what the public could expect from a full term of a Chris Hipkins-led government, he said Labour would be better prepared.

“Becoming prime minister in the tail end of a parliamentary term is really hard, because you’ve got to both figure out the direction you want to take things in and reset everything that’s already happening.

“Campaigning in my own right for a new government will be quite different to that, because I’ll be able to set out: these are my priorities, this is where I want to lead the country, this is what I want my government to be about.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand