New Zealanders like to think of themselves as resourceful, egalitarian, independent and free. Much of that is, it might surprise many of you, a comforting lie.
Far from being independent, more and more New Zealanders are signing up for generational dependence on the state. A goodly slab of what used to be the working-class doesn’t even work any more: cradle-to-grave bennies have seen to that. Egalitarianism in New Zealand is under sustained assault from government, bureaucracy and activists foisting an apartheid “co-governance” agenda.
As for free: New Zealanders are spied on with a Stasi-like thoroughness that would make the Chinese Communist Party red with envy.
Two documents released under OIA lay out the mindset and the cross-agency apparatus the government set up to monitor and record so-called ‘mis-and-disinformation’. They raise serious questions about whether or not the state is respecting citizens’ privacy and right to free speech and whether it’s treating political dissent as ‘disinformation’.
Britain is one of the most surveilled societies in the world. I’m not just talking about the spy cameras that are everywhere in Britain: over six million of them. The British state has also been exposed as spying, tracking and censoring its own citizens, politicians and journalists, over the supposed threat of ‘misinformation’. An alphabet of government agencies are prying with Orwellian thoroughness into everything Britons – perfectly legally – say.
New Zealand is doing the same. Unlike Britain, though, the Stasi in New Zealand are operating almost entirely without public knowledge, let alone oversight.
Two astonishing documents from December 2020/January 2021 were released almost in their entirety on 9 December last year. A revised copy of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s briefing, Strengthening New Zealand’s Resilience to Mis/Disinformation, and the initial working draft of the Strategic Framework for Strengthening New Zealand’s Resilience to Mis/Disinformation. You can read them here.
The documents lay out not just the mindset behind why this Government believes it’s necessary to surveil us, but its general – terrifying – approach to doing so.
The first thing to note is that public differences of opinion – often diametrically divergent – are not only not new, but were long accepted as the lifeblood of a liberal, democratic society. Not any more. States across the West are suddenly living in apparent terror of what their citizens might be saying and thinking. The anti-democratic bent of Western governments went into overdrive during the Covid pandemic: governments and bureaucrats were obsessed with micro-managing every skerrick of information in the public sphere.
No one encapsulated the new era of thought control more than Jacinda Ardern. With the arrogance of a mediaeval pope, she declared that the state is “your single source of truth”. Just to make sure the message didn’t get missed, she reiterated: “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.”
The hypocrisy of this declaration of state infallibility, though, is that very often it’s been governments who’ve been the worst sources of untruth.
Actual disinformation campaigns have been an acknowledged feature of security agencies’ modus operandi – see this 1980s documentary, which describes planting fake news reports as a standard technique for the CIA.
Why are governments and their spooks suddenly jumping on their high horses about “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “malinformation” and so on? Especially when, as the government’s own briefing notes, the bulk of so-called “disinformation” is in fact perfectly legal expression of opinion and political discourse. Far from gibbering about “extremism”, it admits that most of the material the government is spying on is “somewhat socially acceptable”.
So what’s the problem? According to the spies, “Significant harm can be caused by otherwise legal material”.
Harmful to whom? New Zealanders are entitled to ask.
Why are we suddenly hearing these terms ad nauseam? There is nothing new about mis-and-disinformation, just a new obsession by state actors to make us scared about it. What’s the agenda?
The agenda, as the documents show, is breathtakingly Orwellian.
The intention is to utilise and bring into the fold every possible arm of society – different government agencies, NGOs, academia, the private sector, the media, social media and big tech platforms and even everyday people (think of the SIS’s ‘report your neighbours’ booklet) – to monitor ‘mis-and-disinformation’ and influence how you think about it. It turns the “whole of society” into a spying, censoring and communications machine to police and control the flow of information.
According to Greg Simons, a New Zealand ex-pat, an expert on propaganda and crisis communications, teaching at Uppsala University in Sweden, the agenda is “an attempt to create a moral panic through the use of specific and yet very vague language… as a bogeyman to crush any dissenting voices”.
“In another words, any information that does not adhere to the ‘officially approved’ government narrative will be squashed in the name of protecting democracy and the public. The result shall be an attempt at information domain dominance as a means to shape public consensus through the strict conformity of speech and expression.”
The Looking Glass
What do we know about how this Kiwi Stasi state is operating? What they do in the shadows is mind-boggling in its scale and scope. Further posts in this series will try and shine a light into some dark corners of the New Zealand deep state.