When Jacinda Ardern was elected to the office of Prime Minister in 2017, she promised that her government would be the most open and transparent New Zealand has seen.
Ardern said the start of the Parliamentary term was a “new beginning” and in her first formal speech to Parliament she pledged: “This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”
Since her pledge to strengthen transparency and foster a more open and democratic society, her government has employed a large number of communications specialists and under their watch has maintained an iron grip on the control of information disseminated to the public.
It has now become much harder than ever to get information from this government as people now have to deal with an army of communication specialists whose job seems to consist entirely of putting the governments spin onto anything that is released to try to ensure the government and Jacinda look good.
Under Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government, the number of communications specialists has risen significantly. Each minister has at least two press secretaries. (Ardern has four).
When Labour was first elected, the Ministry for the Environment had 10 Public Relations staff. It now has 18. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade has more than doubled its Public Relations staff – up to 25. MBIE blew out from 48 Public Relations staff to 64.
But it is the New Zealand Transport Agency that beats the rest: employing a staggering 72 Public Relations staff, up from 26 over five years.
At every level, the Government manipulates the flow of information with press conferences and announcements, which are often meaningless or repetitive and prevent sustained or detailed questioning.
And the prime minister’s office makes sure its audience is captured with her being a regular feature in the media particularly Television. This regular exposure gives the public an impression of a prime minister that has captivated the world with her ‘authentic’ communication style, intimate social media postings, daily Covid briefings and proactive releases of Cabinet papers.
This is actually a well set up vision which in truth is far removed from reality; where her government only openly releases information that it chooses to share and which is structured to make them look as if they are on top of the situation when in fact often they are really victims of their own inexperience in government and incompetence in managing the country’s economics.
The most open and transparent government that she promised appears to be pretty much non-existent in my opinion. This is partly because of the numbers of public relations staff that now seem to work to deflect and avoid, or answer questions from the electorate, in the most oblique manner possible.
And it is partly because of the very tight media reigns held by Jacinda Ardern. She has been praised by many for her communication style, but in fact I believe it is a well-crafted image that is far from the reality where her government manipulates the flow of information for their own purposes.
Perhaps the most alarming trend is the almost complete refusal of government departments and agencies to allow the public to speak directly to staff.
Instead it seems now days that, all questions go through the communications unit, and almost always via email. That means we have no opportunity to ask for clarification or follow-ups or even to get answers in plain English. We often just get insufficient answers written by bureaucrats that are designed to confuse the issues rather than to enlighten the public.
There is no opportunity to get staff to put their words in a more digestible form and mostly no opportunity to ask them to explain the background to a decision. The whole point of this communications strategy is to ensure that first and foremost, the government looks good and that the message is adequately controlled to make them look good.
This obfuscation and obstruction is bad for our society.
It’s in everyone’s interest to understand the issues of the day and the strategies in place to manage them. We need to be able to ask questions to get them to explain things we don’t understand.
It’s called the public service because they are working for the public, aka us and the government need to remember this as well. We should be able to ask reasonable questions and expect a reasonable answer that explains what we need to know.
It is also the job of the media to act as the public’s watchdog and to ask the hard questions and hold the government to account on our behalf but that now seems to be a task that has been changed to one where the media has become another propaganda arm of the current government.
As a result of the Covid pandemic the government decided to set up what they called the Public Interest Journalism Fund. It was set up on the basis that it would offer financial support to the media organisations to counter the effects of the pandemic and if that was all it was I would support the fund 100%.
But in actual fact with the requirements for the media to access the financial support relying on their promotion of the government’s race based socialist agenda; I believe this fund is nothing more than the use of public funds to distribute government propaganda (or in other words corruption of the media) and as such I could never support it.
It is part of the job of the Media to hold the government to account on behalf of the general public; they should be able to ask reasonable questions and get a straight answer and deliver it to us.
But unfortunately since Jacinda Ardern’s pledge to strengthen transparency and foster a more open and democratic society, it has now become much harder than ever to get information from this government.
Most Open and Transparent Government we’ve seen!
Not on this government’s watch, that’s for sure.
Andy Loader