By Donald Foster (Originally posted on the NZCPR site.)
Luxon, Our Activist Prime Minister In his 15th May, 2024 pre-budget speech, the Prime Minister asserted that “New Zealanders voted for us last year to do three things – rebuild the economy, restore law and order, and deliver better public services”. That may have been his personal perspective on the issue, it may even have been the National Party’s perspective on the issue, but the Coalition Agreement more reliably reflected the electoral issues of concern at point three of the preamble to the agreements between National, Act, and NZ First. These stated: “The Coalition Government’s priorities for this term include (in addition to those picked out by the Prime minister and amongst other issues) ending race based policies (and) defending freedom and democracy, (the latter expanded elsewhere in the Agreement to uphold the principles of liberal democracy, including equal citizenship and parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and property rights), followed by a number of specific steps to that end.” It is to the credit of the prime minister and the coalition partners that the Coalition Agreements were published, and further, that time-related action agendas were publicly issued and updated, but there has been much debate and disillusionment at the choice of priorities. There is little doubt the last government was voted out for a very wide variety of reasons, but among the most troubling were its promotion of racial divisiveness based on updated interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, and its scant regard for issues of freedom and democracy. There was a concern in the electorate, that unless these issues were dealt with urgently and decisively, then the future of this country would not be what our forebears fought and died for in the two world wars, nor indeed what we expected from our political leaders. Because these issues were tearing our society apart, it was important for the new government to act decisively and quickly to show it understood that the damage must be reversed. One of the important aids for a government to “take the public with it” or win the hearts and minds of the people is to communicate its policy, and its reasoning, so that the issues can be widely debated and understood. Traditionally this role was facilitated by the media representing the fourth estate, but that role has been abdicated, and the media continually attacks the government as if the previous government’s ideology was the gold standard and nothing the current government proposes is worthy of support. The parlous state and standards of the media were well identified in a Mediawatch survey published in April 2024 where trust in media was shown to be at all-time lows, and 87% of those surveyed who did not trust the