Media Averted Gaze for Six Years

When Amanda Luxon gets gifted thousands in public money in 2024 to create a reality TV show which will be shown on NZ’s taxpayer-funded TV in prime time, the media will avert their gaze and pretend there is “nothing to see here”: like they did when Clarke Gayford was gifted thousands in taxpayer money to do the same when his partner, Jacinda Ardern, was PM.

You may say, ‘Pigs might fly’.

However, if circumstances were reversed, that is what one would suppose from my hypothetical example, given it appears the only commentary on the blatant nepotism carried out (multiple times) during Ardern’s reign was my outraged opinion piece at the time.

Also when Gayford was gifted a slot in the NZ Herald, to write his tedious New Zealand tiki tour column, robbing a bona fide journalist of an opportunity, there was radio silence from the media.

So why, when National announces they will stop Labour’s EV rebate scheme (essentially giving money to rich people), the only ‘probing’ question the simple-minded media have is:

“Did Amanda Luxon get the rebate for her Tesla purchase?”

Chris Luxon has wisely refused to respond to the media’s constant attacks on his wife, similar to that of Labour and their unions’ election attacks on him and his party whenever they get the chance.

Amanda Luxon is a private citizen, with no access to public money. She bought the car with her own money, and if she availed herself of the rebate which Labour foolishly has in place, she has not broken the law.

So why the fixation by the media on this one question? And isn’t it beginning to sound rather misogynistic? Well, that is what (justified) criticism of Ardern in her absence has been called by some in the media to shut it down.

Isn’t it a fact that the biased media (many of them women) consider conservative women like Judith Collins and Amanda Luxon fair game for attack and reserve the misogynistic label to protect women on the left, particularly the really guilty one; the one who slunk away when things got tough?

There are many other instances of Labour’s nepotism and blatant corruption:

• Nanaia Mahuta’s family secretly working on a taxpayer-funded He Puapua document.
• Pene Henare’s wife and family’s company gifted large advertising contracts.
• John Tamihere’s public funding being used for his political campaigns.

The public outrage over Mahuta’s family arrangement saw a white-washed investigation which cleared her and left us all dissatisfied. Where were the media demanding more accountability?

The most egregious conflict of interest right now is Tamihere’s blatant use of Waipareira Trust public money to fund the Maori party campaign. With the recent well-publicised fuss in the media over the source of $10,000 for some minor party candidate, one has to ask, why are the media (and National, Act and the Greens) almost completely ignoring the hundreds of thousands being used illegally by Tamihere? Where are the questions? He is breaking the very stringent Electoral Commission rules in plain sight.

Or is the Electoral Commission too fixated on checking that workers for this year’s election are conversant with the Treaty and its obligations?

Jesus wept.

The Charities Commission’s toothless Claytons inquiry a while back suggested he try to claw back some of the (ill-gotten) funds.

And we all laughed uproariously.

I understand Herald writer Thomas Coughlan likes detail and enjoys, to quote Hosking, “getting down among the weeds”. We could do with his ‘weeding’ expertise now.

There has been at least one Herald article on this issue, simmering in the background, earlier in 2023, which was online for maybe a day. Anything contentious (which makes the government look bad) is promptly taken down.

With a change of government, we are about to see the dawn of a new age of journalism where reporters will miraculously recover their investigative journalism skills, particularly to drill down into MPs’ private lives and reveal any little glitch for all to see; nothing will be out of bounds.

Remember the Key Government and the inappropriate coverage and nastiness around his family? His children were not out of bounds.

The media have observed the privacy rules around family studiously for Ardern and Hipkins (except when Ardern needed to use her daughter for political purposes, when the media were only too happy to oblige).

Media bias was on show this week when Hipkins (clearly close to the brink), referred to Ryan Bridge, hosting the Deliotte election debate, as ‘The poor man’s Mike Hosking’ and then made a derogatory remark about his (train wreck) interview with Hosking that morning.

I was alerted to this on Mike’s show but searched (almost in vain) for mention of it online. I eventually found that Business Desk’s Patrick Smellie covered it and referred to Hipkins’s attack as “mildly insulting”.

I wonder what Bridge thought.

Can you imagine if Chris Luxon had made a similar attack during this formal business event?

It would have been headline news, every media stand-up would have been dominated with probing questions of Luxon and we would all know about it.

However, we know that will never happen. Luxon has too much class to revert to Hipkins’s style of politics and, after the most corrupt government in our history, National will be scrupulous in how they handle taxpayers’ hard-earned money.