So far, we’ve established that, firstly, the New Zealand government has, with breathtaking speed and stealth, established an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” which is not only spying on Kiwis with breathtaking thoroughness, but weaponising the entirety of New Zealand’s civil society as tentacles of state propaganda.
We’ve seen that the MiniTrue starts at the PM’s office, slithers through seven more ministries – including Education – and works its way out from the Beehive into the legacy media.
That’s just the start. When they say “the whole of society”, they really, really mean it. Not just government and media, but academia and NGOs, are being recruited as veritable Stasi agents.
The funding for this work is spread across the agencies in the inter-agency group, and is indicated to have been an area of contention at times. However, the draft framework reveals that MBIE funded disinformation research undertaken by Te Punaha Matatini to help inform the covid-19 communications strategy. It also allocated additional funding to an NGO, the name of which was redacted.
It further elaborates that:
“MBIE provided funding to Auckland University for research into New Zealand’s epidemic model, including a data project by Te Punaha Matatini on social media based covid-19 related disinformation.”
This must surely be the infamous The Disinformation Project, the funding for which has remained officially obscured, although not seriously debated. The project is clearly a government directed activity, as this brief makes clear.
Secrecy is the operative principle. At the same time as funding is kept obscured, groups outside government are deliberately co-opted, with the aim of keeping the government’s fingerprints off its own spying activities. As the documents say:
“These independent narratives are especially welcome and helpful as they are less likely to be associated with conspiracy theories about state control than if they came from a government agency.”
In other words, if the public knew what the government was up to, there’d be hell to pay. So, recruit and fund catspaws.
The documents also confirm what we’ve been saying all along: the PJIF is all about buying the media off and turning them into government propaganda mouthpieces.
These documents reveal, as noted above, that a) the establishment of a new public media entity; and b) investing in public interest journalism were part of this disinformation strategy. The government has not exactly been transparent about this objective, and despite waffly language about strengthening independent media, both of these moves clearly makes media more dependent on government – not less. Orwellian doublespeak indeed […]
[T]his revelation makes it much less of a coincidence that media have been completely ‘on-narrative’ from day one of the covid situation, and certainly goes some way to explaining why they have never broken ranks.
Still, few people have harboured any delusions that the legacy media are anything but cheap whores ever-eager to turn a trick on the taxpayer dime.
Even better for the government if they can set up a network of fronts posing as supposedly non-government organisations and independent academics.
We know that The Disinformation Project intended to run private workshops last year – grooming sessions – with journalists on the topic, cancelled only because of unwanted independent media attention about how dystopian it all was […]
Another major arm of the strategy’s media component was scoping a review of media content regulation to assist on the issue of disinformation – basically looking for ways to tighten up on what people can and can’t say.
Enter the academics. In 2021 the Department of Internal Affairs paid two Victoria University academics to research what governments in other part of the world were doing to control what their citizens could say.
The ultimate destination of the review is new regulation that would echo the UK’s Online Safety Bill and Canada’s newly passed online censorship Bill.
The Looking Glass
As already reported, an astonishing array of British government and military departments are being turned on its own people.
But how is NZ’s MiniTrue working, in practice? The next instalment will look at some case studies of Stasi spying – including on The BFD itself.