The possibility of a generational clash of the finance ministers got the media going. Photo: The Press
"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
The Taxpayers' Union released packaged fudge from the 'Nicola Fudge Co.', branded with an image of Willis with the slogan, 'A treat today - A tax tomorrow'. Photo: RNZ
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.
Vivian Schiller, Executive Director of Aspen Digital. Photo: Aspen Institute
"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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