There‘s plenty of worrying news around at the moment - alongside crisis claims in the media about an imminent economic recession and a collective national depression. Are the media helping us identify the structural stuff we really need to confront - or over-egging short-term problems that will come right?
Last weekend's Sunday Star Times summarises the current bad news vibe. Photo: RNZ Mediawatch
On The AM Show on Tuesday, roving reporter William Wairua was out and about with Auckland Council’s biodiversity dogs.
Back in the studio, the hosts simpered over the super-cute and hardworking young pups.
But the good vibes from those those cheery pictures didn’t last long as they segued straight into a story about dog thefts on the rise.
There’s been plenty more where that came from in the media lately.
On Newstalk ZB’s Drive show, Heather Du Plessis-Allan claimed life here is “so miserable” right now and if she were the nation’s doctor she’d be handing out anti-depressants to everyone.
She went on to urge the government to lift Covid restrictions “just for a mental break.”
She also declared the pandemic “essentially over” while in the same breath as fretting about being re-infected again herself. (Probably best not to make her the nation’s doctor.)
But she wasn’t the only one in the media zeroing in on our national mid-winter malaise
The Sunday Star Times had the words 'Breaking Point' on the front page, superimposed on a bashed up Buzzy Bee toy that was on its last legs (or wings and wheels, to be precise).
“Life in New Zealand is getting harder, slower, dearer and more stressful,” the paper said, ”with some experts fearing there’s a risk “the whole house gets blown down.”
The Star Times said loneliness and personal distress were on the rise - while educational achievement, school attendance and general life satisfaction were all on the slide.
Housing problems, building shortages, the health system’s current strife, ram raids and the fact we can’t even seem to keep up printing passports these days were all canvassed under the headline: Is Aotearoa broken?
The finance minister told the paper it isn’t, and our economic fundamentals were actually fine - though he would say that - and media-friendly economist Cameron Bagrie said ‘broken’ was too strong, but “our economic foundations are cracking”.
After this, the paper turned to what sociology professor Paul Spoonley called a “social recession”.
Stress, elevated by Covid isolation, he said, had exposed fragilities and deepening inequalities in our communities - in some communities much more than others.
The Star Times said Treasury’s Wellbeing Trends Report found mental health, income adequacy, and trust in institutions - in that order - were the biggest boosts to wellbeing.
The article circled back to Bagrie at the end for this remark;
“We can't just say New Zealand is broken. But … but big cracks are appearing - and not the sorts of things you can ignore.”
But some of these things were structural problems we need to urgently identify and confront, some were short term problems caused by shortages and peak demand.
Two days earlier, readers of national daily The Australian read that “New Zealand needs to be careful not to turn into a failed state”.
Photo:
That was the verdict of the New Zealand Initiative’s Oliver Hartwich.
“That does not mean we should expect civil unrest -- but a period of prolonged and seemingly unstoppable decline across all areas of public life,” he went on to add.
And while New Zealanders are bombarded with worrying news every day, Oliver Hartwich said, the news media here are - with some notable exceptions - “underfunded and not performing the functions of the Fourth Estate properly.”
On his subscription site Politik.co.nz Richard Harman described Hartwich’s article as ”soaked in gloom.”
The same day he noted Kiwibank put out a pretty gloomy economic analysis, but just the day before Politik reported better news that was barley reported elsewhere: a record number of homes - more than 50,000 - were consented in the year to May.
Building them will still be a challenge, but shortly before that, Politik reported Infometrics stats showing a 56 percent lift in network infrastructure spending over the coming decade.
Also under-reported last week was the Reserve Bank Te Pūtea Matua chief economist Paul Conway telling the National Property Conference house prices might be moving back to what he called “roughly sustainable levels”.
“Sustainable” does not mean affordable, as journalist Bernard Hickey pointed out - and he didn't think an end to the “one way bet” that has distorted the economy and investment over decades was actually imminent - but he saw it as a sign of new thinking all the same.
Another problem portrayed as out of our control is rising inflation.
In the Herald on Sunday last weekend, business editor Liam Dann said there was good news here too: signs of global pressures easing, and - for all the talk of inevitable recession - the possibility of a soft landing here.
(Before readers got to that in the business section, the paper's readers also got HDPA’s fact-free reheated radio reckons about doom and gloom and “drawing a line under the pandemic and moving on.”)
Dann said inflation falling along with demand in the economy would force businesses to cut back. Higher unemployment would ease labour shortages and take pressure off wage growth, he said, but that would mean some people losing jobs.
But on the brighter side: “As long as we don't panic, it remains manageable without the socially devastating price of high unemployment that some were forced to pay in the 1990s,” he wrote.
The consequences of that - like intergenerational inequality - were set out in eye-opening piece of reporting by Rebecca Macfie in this week's Listener magazine:
In The shameful truth about poverty in New Zealand, Macfie concluded the last three years have shown many New Zealanders are actually prepared to tolerate high levels of poverty.
That is a ‘structural’ issue the country needs to acknowledge and confront right now - and the media can play a role in picking out what those issues are - rather than wallowing the doom and gloom and wishfully thinking the pandemic is done.
