In New Zealand this week

■ The online news service BusinessDesk reported the result of the first round of funding handouts under the $55 million Pravda Project, officially known as the Public Interest Journalism Fund. They include:

     More than $2.4 million to NZME, Maori Television, Newshub, Pacific Media Network and 11 “support partners” to train and develop 25 cadet Maori, Pasifika and “diverse” journalists. The latter category will presumably include those who identify as transgender or non-binary and other aggrieved minorities that we haven’t got names for yet.

$300,000 to Stuff to produce a “cultural competency” course (could there be a more ideologically loaded phrase?) for journalists which will later be shared across the industry “to fundamentally shift representation in NZ media”.

    $207,000 to woke-friendly digital platform The Spinoff for a podcast series “to explore Maori issues".

$433,000 for Paakiwaha, a bilingual current affairs show to be produced by UMA Broadcasting for waateanews.com. UMA, which was established in 1999 by Manukau Urban Maori Authority and Te Whanau a Waipareira Charitable Trust, operates Auckland Maori station Radio Waatea.

 $440,000 to NZME, which owns the New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB, to produce a weekly bilingual section in the Rotorua Weekender newspaper on local iwi issues.

The allocations were announced by Raewyn Rasch, head of journalism for state funding agency NZ on Air, which is administering the Pravda Project for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. Rasch, who identifies as Ngai Tahu, is a former general manager of Maori and Pacific programmes at TVNZ and more recently was involved in promoting higher education for Maori@Massey.

BusinessDesk reports that NZ on Air received 123 applications for the first funding round and recommended 34 for approval. Forty percent of the money will go to Maori journalism projects.

The biggest single allocation is to RNZ, which already receives roughly $48 million a year from taxpayers and will get an extra $806,000 for its podcast The Detail.

As for those other allocations, I predict most of our money will end up being spent on advocacy journalism. As with the $3.5 million Three Waters propaganda campaign, taxpayers will be paying for their own indoctrination.

The line that once separated journalism from activism is being erased, and it’s happening with the eager co-operation of the mainstream journalism organisations that are lining up to take the state’s tainted money. We are witnessing the slow death of neutral, independent and credible journalism.

Last month, The Dominion Post published a letter from me in which I challenged an article by Stuff editor-in-chief Patrick Crewdson headlined Why government money won’t corrupt our journalism, in which Crewdson insisted Stuff’s editorial integrity wouldn’t be compromised by accepting government funding.

I wrote: “ … what he doesn’t mention is that before applying for money from the fund, media organisations must commit to a set of requirements that include, among other things, actively promoting the Maori language and ‘the principles of Partnership, Participation and Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi’.

“In other words, media organisations that seek money from the fund are signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.

“Despite what Crewdson says, sceptics will take some convincing that the fund isn’t an expensive, taxpayer-funded indoctrination exercise.”

I’d be happy to be proved wrong, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

■ New Zealand is experiencing an epidemic of gun crime. Yesterday, a man was shot and wounded by police in Auckland as he held a gun to the head of a motorist in what appeared to be an attempted car hijacking following a chase. This followed the fatal shooting on Wednesday night of a man who confronted police with a firearm in Hamilton during a standoff in which at least 10 shots were reportedly heard.

Last weekend, also in Hamilton, a police officer was shot in the arm and shoulder during a routine traffic stop. An accomplice stole the officer’s car.

Meanwhile, the country has heard some of the chilling detail surrounding the fatal shooting of Constable Matthew Hunt in Auckland last June. Eli Epiha has admitted murdering Constable Hunt with a military-style semi-automatic rifle but bizarrely insists he didn’t intend to kill Hunt’s partner, Constable David Goldfinch, despite shooting him four times. A witness said Epiha, who fired 14 shots, looked so calm that he might have been window-shopping at a mall.

But perhaps the most brazen shooting incident of all occurred in April at Auckland’s 5-star Sofitel Hotel at 9am, when a gun was fired in what police described as an escalation of a dispute between the Head Hunters and Mongols gangs. Days earlier, the Head Hunters’ pad in Mt Wellington had been peppered with an estimated 30 bullets.

Two points stand out here. One is the rising power of criminal gangs, boosted by the arrival of Section 501 deportees from Australia. Small wonder that Phil Goff, following the Hotel Sofitel incident, warned that Auckland couldn’t risk becoming like “gangland America”.

Personally, I would have thought Mexico was a more appropriate analogy. When people start shooting at each other in a plush hotel frequented by wealthy business people and high-end tourists, Auckland starts to look like Tijuana or Juarez.

The other striking thing about the increasingly routine use of guns by criminals is that it’s happening despite changes to gun laws in 2020 that the then Police Minister, Stuart Nash, assured us would prevent firearms falling into the wrong hands.

This should surprise no one. The supposed tightening of the gun laws following the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres was a piece of pure political theatre. While law-abiding gun-owners who never represented a threat to anyone dutifully handed over previously legal guns that were now deemed high-risk, criminal gangs continued to do what they’ve always done – ignored the law.

All this was entirely predictable. The new gun laws no more reduced the circulation of illegal weapons than the so-called anti-smacking law of 2007 magically eliminated the violent abuse of children. Matthew Hunt, if he were still alive, could testify to that.

The Hotel Sofitel shooting points to another alarming trend: an attitude among gang members that they can get away with just about anything. The same sense of impunity is evident in the way gangs use the excuse of a funeral to take over public highways in a show of strength, effectively defying the police to stop them.

When people are allowed to behave with obvious contempt for the law (as Hone Harawira and his supporters also did with their illegal, opportunistic road blocks during the Covid-19 lockdown), the legal mechanisms that ensure a civilised society start to break down.

But don’t expect the police hierarchy to stand its ground – not under a commissioner who appears to have been appointed for his willingness to fall into line with the agenda of an increasingly radical left-wing government.

Police Headquarters has signalled its favourable disposition toward criminal gangs by supporting the allocation of $2.75 million to a supposed drug rehab programme run by the Mongrel Mob – the same outfit that profits from the ruinous methamphetamine racket.

But there’s hope. To its credit, the Police Association has condemned the handout. Association president Chris Cahill said one of his members had described it as the most successful money-laundering scheme he’d ever heard of. “Police take $2 million of dirty money – as they recently did from the Notorious Chapter of the Mongrel Mob in Operation Dusk in Hawke’s Bay – and the government returns $2.75 million in clean money to people so closely linked with the same gang.”

Cahill didn’t bother to disguise his disgust. Rank-and-file cops – the people putting their lives on the line at the front end – can hardly be blamed for feeling betrayed when their bosses undermine them.

■ Farmers and tradies are turning out today for the “Howl of a Protest” against a government that seems, at best, indifferent to the people who keep the economy functioning and, at worst, is perversely hostile to them.

Nationwide protest rallies are a sign of mounting resistance to policies and ideological projects, some of them kept safely under wraps until after last year’s election, that attack productive sectors of the economy and seek to centralise power at the expense of local democracy and accountability.

As the sheer scale of Labour’s transformational agenda becomes more apparent, so a counter-revolution is slowly gathering momentum. This is nowhere more apparent than in the provinces.

The government might yet get away with its extreme hate-speech proposals and its brazen bid for control over the media. As alarming as they are, these are not necessarily issues that excite fervent popular opposition. But punitive taxes on utes, imperious land grabs under the pretext of environmental protection and grandiose cycling bridges for the privileged urban middle class are something everyone can understand. Meanwhile, the government is encountering unexpectedly stiff resistance over its planned seizure of local water assets, which may yet prove to have been a step too far.

All that’s missing from the picture is an opposition capable of exploiting public unease over Labour’s radicalism. At some stage, Judith Collins and David Seymour will have to start talking to each other.

■ The leaked draft script of the planned Hollywood movie They Are Us has provoked uproar. Objections centre on the likelihood of the March 19 Christchurch massacres being graphically depicted with little regard for the feelings of survivors and those bereaved by the killings, none of whom appear to have been consulted.

Again, no one should be surprised. Hollywood is doing what Hollywood does: taking a real-life event and fictionalising aspects of it for maximum dramatic impact, and to hell with irrelevant niceties such as the truth.

Remember Argo, the Oscar-winning 2012 movie starring (and directed by) Ben Affleck, which purported to tell the true story of how several fugitive American diplomats were smuggled out of Tehran following the 1979 Iranian Revolution? It wilfully misrepresented events by claiming the New Zealand embassy in Tehran refused to help the Americans when the reverse was true.

So if you’re naïve enough to expect They Are Us to be faithful to actual events, you probably also believe Titanic was a documentary. We shouldn’t try to stop Hollywood making the film, because it’s a free world; but if the movie goes ahead we can show our disapproval by boycotting it.

Otago's academics know what's best for us, so let's put them in charge

The thought often occurs to me that New Zealand could save itself a whole lot of money and political argy-bargy by simply handing over the governance of the country to the academics of Otago University.

They know exactly what needs to be done. They never tire of telling us. Barely a week passes without one of their number pointing how simple it would be, using regulatory tools, to create a Utopia here in our remote corner of the Pacific.

If only we listened to their advice, New Zealand would be a fairer, safer, healthier and more equal society. (Not freer, though, because freedom can get in the way of Utopian visions and must be strictly controlled by people who know what’s best for us.)

For starters, if we listened to the Otago academics, we wouldn’t be a nation of drunks and fatties. Marketers of alcohol and unhealthy food would be made to stand in the naughty corner. But alas, we’re all at the mercy of greedy, manipulative capitalists and politicians who are too cowardly, or possibly venal, to do the right thing.  

We’ve been reminded of this – yet again – over the past few days by the indefatigable Professor Doug Sellman and a bright-eyed colleague named Simon Adamson, who appears to have taken over from Sellman as director of Otago University’s National Addiction Centre. Their message is that the government, by refusing to act on the mental health inquiry’s recommendations for tighter alcohol controls, is pandering to liquor industry lobbyists. "You gotta follow the money and ask who's benefiting from the status quo," Adamson told Newshub.

Health minister David Clark brusquely dismissed the claim, saying he refused to dignify it with a response. Well, of course he’d say that; he’s obviously in the pocket of the liquor barons and their shadowy propagandists. What else could you expect?

Another tireless moral crusader is Professor Kevin Clements, who is described on the Otago University website as the founding director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. (One of the things universities do very well, along with generous sabbaticals, mutual back-scratching through academic exchanges and endless rounds of taxpayer-funded international conferences, is the creation of  grandly titled institutes for the pursuit of ideological hobby-horses.)

One of Clements’ shticks is gun control, so it was no surprise when he popped up at the weekend in a radio report about the government’s gun buyback programme. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that New Zealanders own twice as many firearms per capita as Australians and six times as many as Britons, “so on a per capita basis New Zealand is a fairly overgunned society” – the clear implication being that we’re dangerously addicted to firearms and for our own safety, we need much stricter controls.

But hang on a minute. Surely the crucial consideration is not how many guns New Zealanders own, but how often they are used to kill people or commit other criminal acts. That’s what matters.

Here the statistics are interesting. Wikipedia, which publishes what appear to be reputable figures on gun ownership and related crime, confirms that New Zealand has a high rate of gun ownership, as you’d expect in a country with a substantial rural population and a large hunting community.

But while we own 30 firearms per 100 people, which is high by world standards, our rate of firearm-related deaths (including suicides) is low: 1.07 per 100,000.

The figures make it clear there is little or no co-relation between gun ownership and deaths caused by firearms, other than, perhaps, in the US, where there are 120 firearms per 100 people and 19.5 gun-related fatalities per 100,000. 

Australia has 14 guns per 100 people – half as many as New Zealand, as Clements said; yet its firearms-related death rate, at 1.04, is only microscopically lower than ours. Other comparisons can be made with Norway (31 guns per 100 people, 1.75 deaths per 100,000), Switzerland (24 guns per 100, 3.01 deaths per 100,000) and Canada (25 guns per 100, 2.05 deaths per 100,000). In other words, despite Clement’s alarmist pronouncement, New Zealand measures up very favourably.

On the other hand, Venezuela has a much lower rate of reported gun ownership than New Zealand (18 per 100 people) yet a death rate even higher than that of the US, at 26.48 per 100,000. And then there’s El Salvador, often described as the world’s most dangerous country: 12 guns per 100 people, 44.45 deaths per 100,000.

Even allowing for the possibility that statistics from some of these countries may not be totally reliable, it’s clear that firearm ownership figures on their own, such as those cited by Clements, are virtually meaningless. I wonder, does it ever occur to credulous journalists, most of whom have university degrees so have presumably been taught critical thinking, to challenge supposed experts over the simplistic and misleading use of statistics?

Evidently not. They have been ideologically programmed not to challenge the left-wing orthodoxy that prevails in universities, where indoctrination and conformist group-think have supplanted intellectual inquiry and academic rigour.  

To return to my opening thought, just think how much simpler life would be if academics were given the power to rule us. The great appeal of their regulatory prescriptions for society is that they don’t have to be weighed against public opinion or put to the test in the real world. Neither are academics bothered by inconvenient notions such as the right of individuals to make their own choices about how they live, all of which can make parliamentary democracy untidy and quarrelsome.

Academics aren’t constrained by accountability either, because they don’t have to answer to anyone. Unlike politicians, they don’t have to worry about incurring the resentment of the people who pay their salaries and risk being tossed out of office.

Perhaps most appealing of all, if academics governed us there would be none of the acrimony which characterises parliamentary rule, since they all appear to agree with each other.