I should have known better, but we all slip every now and then. In this case, it wasn’t my New Year’s resolution to lose a few kilos and eat healthy foods but rather, despite my vow to avoid, I watched mainstream media (MSM)! Yes, I should have known better and even wrote a ‘Letter to the Editor’ to the NZ Herald a couple of years ago related to the reasons why I shouldn’t watch the MSM.
Not America
The motives of most people joining the justice march for George Floyd are laudable and the execution peaceful. And therein we can identify an important difference between New Zealand and an America where, for the same cause and objectives, great injustices are committed, looting, destruction, injury, and loss of life.
Within the NZ marches there were also signs advocating civil disobedience and some of the speakers use aggressive rhetoric. But we are not America.
Sometimes, particularly as our newsfeeds are syndicated from the US, we could believe that we are part of a system struggling with broken political realities and social issues. But we are not America.
Unlike the USA, New Zealanders have stayed the course towards reconciliation. Racism has been on a consistent decline. We do not want to undo the work of decades due to words of animosity spoken unwisely, calls for haste or a deliberate hijacking of valid concerns by those of another agenda. Our police are better trained and less prone to excess. Our community spirit is obviously very different. We are not America.
Do we want to adopt American style politics that generate hysteria and civil disobedience? Or remain on a peaceful course towards reconciliation? We can see the effects of the former choice.
This letter was published on June 4th, 2020, in the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests both overseas and in New Zealand. BLM protests occurred on June 1st; 2020. They did not follow the Covid guidelines of the time.
Prior to that letter and the protest I had written a different ‘Letter to the Editor’ to the NZ Herald citing statistics for African American crime in the United States at the time. I knew there was not a case for “BLM” in the US but rather it was a narrative – the same narrative being pushed in New Zealand despite, once again, there not being a case for BLM here in New Zealand. I had written on this topic believing it to be in the public interest to have the real BLM facts and statistics known, but it was never published, so I took the alternate route of expressing that we were not like America in either character or politics and we should divorce ourselves from their narrative in order to consolidate the gains we have made. As I expected, and possibly because I deliberately injected a “Kiwi” flavour into the matter, that letter was published because it didn’t push back too hard against ‘the narrative’. ‘Marshmallow opposition’ allowed.
The letter was also written with a sense of irony because, of course, we are like the US! We parrot their talking points, their political polarisations, their attitudes and, yes, their narratives, even though NZ is fundamentally different from the US. For example, the slavery we had in NZ, was a gentler, kinder, and fairer slavery than that of the US… (and no one got eaten).
We have ridiculous academics pontificating about “colonialism” while our whole culture is being ‘overwritten’ by American cultural hegemony. For those in governance and the MSM this supplies a continuing narrative that is also channelled by our current leadership and academia. It informs what our students are taught, what we read in our papers and see on our screens. There is no need for a “conspiracy” when they all subscribe to the same doctrine, follow the same dogma, are fashioned to think the same way, and inevitably promote an NPC view.
To illustrate I shall use petrol prices as the narrative example.
Since 2020 energy costs in the US have been increasing.5
The reasons why are quite simple: supply and demand. The US was a net exporter of energy (oil and gas) in 2019 and then Joe Biden put a stop on oil and gas exploration and development by Executive Order – one of 77 he quickly implemented as soon as he got into office – and America has demonstrably suffered since, especially in terms of energy costs.
The Labour Government did a similar thing when they came into office – closing future oil and gas exploration and development in New Zealand. This move will cost the government billions of dollars in revenue and has hurt the Taranaki (and some other provinces’) economy.
In both cases the actions were ideologically motivated rather than rational – a matter I will deal with in a future column. Suffice it to say, “Yes we need to save the planet, but natural gas provides a ‘bridging technology’ and energy source to achieve our carbon zero objectives”. Natural gas has a higher BTU value (British Thermal Units) than oil or coal relative to its carbon footprint… and so now we burn 2 million tonnes of Indonesian brown coal each year to make up an electricity supply shortage rather than use natural gas to generate electricity… go figure.
As in the US, energy costs in NZ have gone up over the past couple of years.
Who would have guessed that when the largest economy in the world is no longer energy independent that international energy costs would increase? Probably every first-year economics student.
The MSM in ‘the US state narrative’ is that “gas” price increases have occurred due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – and I don’t deny that the war has had an effect – but we can see from the graphs above that prices were already going up, probably due to the implementation of ideologically driven policies. Putin has simply made things worse. Now we have TV One News parroting the US news service, blaming prices at NZ petrol pumps on ‘Putin Bad’.
No, the foundations for these price increases were laid over 18 months ago!
If push comes to shove I could be somewhat forgiving because a lot of factors are at play, not only the ones I have mentioned; however, to quote the Mayor of New Plymouth:
“The key thing for us is that we want to see a plan,” he said.
Whether it is education, energy security, cash management, or Covid – a whole plethora of issues – we never seem to first “see a plan”. Rather we get ambushed with policies that people can’t remember voting for. And these policies seem to be following an overseas lead, mostly from the US. Our (?) MSM, rather than investigating, reporting, and critiquing, seem to be, rather, a propaganda arm of the government that takes their leads from overseas, particularly, American media.
So I have watched the MSM news, and I am none the wiser – and I think, what is the NZ taxpayer supporting? An ‘overseas and ideological narrative’? An arm of state propaganda or a source of reliable information? But claims of misinformation and disinformation seem all the ‘rage of concern’ these days: another narrative our MSM bleats about… and we blindly follow.
We deserve better.