This page is about Spin, the deliberate withholding of information, and other misleading hype and propaganda about New Zealand.

This can range from myths perpetuated by  ‘100% pure’ slogans, to ‘least corrupt country in the world’ statements, to significant restriction on the type and nature of information that is released to the public. Click on the links to read the full story at source:

Peter Lyons: Nothing but spin coming from our Government (NZHerald.co.nz Sept 2015: normally a pro-National newspaper) unsurprisingly, readers’ comments to this article were opened and closed within 24 hours.

After the global financial crisis hit, the Prime Minister called a summit in 2009 of important people to brainstorm ideas to buoy our economy and create jobs in difficult times. A big bold idea that he suggested was a national cycle trail. It would provide a financial stimulus to the nation and spread the benefits throughout the country. It would create jobs in the regions and boost tourism to our shores. It was a great idea. It quickly dissolved into local regions being left to do their own thing. To be fair, the National Cycle Trail did directly create jobs. In 2011 staff were cut from 7 to 3. It was marvellous spin. The spin really hasn’t stopped.

When our exchange rate was high, Mr English described this as a vote of confidence by the rest of the world in the soundness of our government’s financial management. When the kiwi dollar almost gained parity with the Aussie some pundits, including the noted economist Mike Hoskings, highlighted this as evidence we were overtaking our neighbours in economic prosperity. Now the kiwi is dropping against other currencies. This is apparently the long-awaited rebalancing. It is allowing exporters who struggled with the high exchange rate to finally prosper. Mr English recently pointed out in a Q and A program that a lower exchange rate will be a big help to exporters… We are living in an age of spin. The Roman leaders gave their people bread and circuses. Sadly we no longer get the bread.

Here’s one of the comments that was left in reply to the above article. Many New Zealanders considered the $4 million paid to the Saudi businessman to be corrupt, yet New Zealand perpetuates the myth that it is a country free from corruption.

Banaari: Yes, fair comment. But you forgot to mention the tremendously successful “agrihub” in Saudi Arabia which is a showcase in the region for New Zealand’s agricultural expertise. Except the New Zealand breeding ewes died in a sandstorm, apparently, and we had to pay a Saudi businessman a $4 million dollar grant for his intellectual property, apparently.

Now back to flag design doodling and Rugby World Cup all night beersies…

On the other hand, there have been countless privacy breaches, the most recent (Oct 2015) being the release of private medical information for 24,000 New Zealanders. Their highly confidential personal details were sent in a spreadsheet to almost 1,000 pharmacists, in an email that was intended for internal viewing only source:

A number of Government agencies have admitted privacy breaches over the last three years. In 2013, a major breach by the Earthquake Commission saw details of more than 80,000 claimants sent to the wrong email address.

The EQC also sent a claimant an email with an attached spreadsheet with 2200 names, stopped cheque details and claim amounts worth about $23 million.

Also in 2013, the Ministry of Education owned up to a staff member attached the wrong letter to an email, Immigration New Zealand sent two emails with client email addresses to more than 200 advisers, lawyers and individuals, the Ministry for the Environment sent about 150 people each other’s private email address and a Hawkes Bay District Health Board worker mistakenly released a patient’s confidential medical file to the media.

Other links:

•  Principal Family Court Judge, Peter Boshier, has questioned police statistics which show recorded family violence offences reversed an upwards trend to drop by 3.1 per cent to 52,408 in 2010-11. He asked if the statistics “tell a true story”.  He observed that there had been “no let-up” in cases before courts, despite police recording a drop in offences of 10.2 per cent in Auckland and 8.9 per cent in Counties Manukau. “I would have to say … the sheer volume of cases coming into our family violence courts means that in some respects we are struggling.” (November 2011) source 

• “GISBORNE police have decided to restrict the information on crime they provide to media in a move to “make the community feel safer” a police media statement said “Our daily feed of information to the media does not provide the right recipe for the community in terms of important information they need to know. A lot of that has to do with how the public views the city or community they live in.”

• New Zealand often makes much of its ‘nuclear free’ stance but in reality nuclear material (Yellowcake, used in nuclear manufacture) has been transiting through ports in Nelson, Napier, Tauranga and Auckland once a week. Most Kiwis are unaware of this contradiction and ministers ‘only found out about it’ in May 2010. The shipments came to light because the Environmental Risk Management Authority had changed its procedures and was now assessing them.

• New Zealand is often described as the most peaceful country in the world, however it is still legal to deploy NZ troops overseas on illegal missions. The Non-Aggression and Lawful Use of Force Bill was defeated in parliament on its first reading in June 2009. If successful the bill would have introduced legislation that “required NZ leaders, when requested by another country for armed assistance in foreign military operations, to seek a finding from the New Zealand Attorney-General whether the operation was in conformity with the United Nations Charter. [The UN Charter prohibits initiation of armed action for any reason other than immediate self-defence] before deciding on such a request. A special prosecutor’s office would have been created to investigate and possibly pursue charges that such a decision violated the United Nations Charter.” Scoop Sept 2009

• New Zealand is a target for arms traders. The Oxfam report Brokers Without Borders “holds New Zealand up as an example of how illicit arms brokers continue to use international networks of companies to exploit regulatory gaps, when detailing an incident last December when a 35-tonne cache of conventional weapons, which left North Korea bound for Iran, was seized by authorities in Thailand…All of a sudden New Zealand, the country ranked as the world’s most peaceful nation in 2009, was linked to one of the biggest international arms trafficking cases that year,” the report says.”

• Catherine Woulfe, a journalist, fought for over a year to get the Teachers Council  to release information under the Official Information Act about the number of self confessed and convicted criminals who were teaching children in New Zealand. Ultimately she resorted to the Ombudsman to get the requested information released. To read the story the Teachers Council did not want told see “Criminals in our classrooms” in the Sunday Star Times.

• Ministers are ignoring the Official Information Act, according to a No Right Turn press release. “Only one Minister, Chris Finlayson, met (the standard). Most fell far below it, with four making timely responses in only 50% of cases. The worst-performing Minister was Gerry Brownlee, who answered only 39.7% of requests within the statutory timelines set by the Act. Overall, across all Ministers, only 71% of requests were answered on time.  One Minister, Paula Bennett, refused to cooperate with the survey, saying that she did not consider release of accurate tracking data to be in the public interest. Her refusal is currently the subject of a complaint to the Ombudsmen…The difference between Ministerial offices and government departments is significant,” said Idiot/Savant. “It shows that the problem is political. Ministers just don’t want to answer.” Source

• The Dominion Post newspaper reported that Economic Development Minister Gerry Brownlee said the wage gap between NZ and Australia had reduced since his party came into office. The paper obtained figures to  compare the average weekly earnings in November 2008 and February and found that they told a different story. New Zealand’s had risen by 5.2 per % compared to 6.17 % for Australia.  The paper calculated that the gap widened from $540 a week in December 2008 to $580 in March 2010.

• “Nelson liquidator Pat Norris (allegedly)has a previous dishonesty conviction and owned a failed company which left creditors more than $150,000 out-of-pocket. However, the Companies Office will not investigate concerns about Mr Norris, saying laws do not allow it to take such action. Mr Norris, a director of Norris Management Services, came to public attention last month after he was convicted for secretly filming his former wife having sex with another man in their Kawerau home.”

• NZ often brags about being the first “country” to ‘give’ women the vote (1893) but in reality women only gained the right because a government strategy to deliberately scupper the bill backfired on it.

• The bill was only passed after two members switched sides in protest at the PM ordering them to vote against it. It was passed by 20 votes to 18. Both sides tried to claim credit for the bill and sought women’s votes accordingly. But women weren’t given full sufferage and allowed to stand for office until 1919 and they were not eligible to be appointed to the New Zealand Legislative Council (the Upper House of Parliament) until 1941.

• The media is quick to seize upon Kiwi successes, such as medical advances, but sometimes doesn’t tell the whole story if it detracts from the ‘Kiwiness’ of the discovery. For instance this story about a possible treatment for noise induced cochlear injury didn’t reveal that the funding was from a UK based charity the RNID who are supporting research into the use of antioxidants to protect hearing. The article also doesn’t mention that the group has been looking for an investment partner for clinical trials since Dec 2009.

• Women were able to vote in 1838 in the Pitcairns and in South Australia in 1861, long before their New Zealand sisters. Places with similar status which granted women the vote include Wyoming Territory (1869). South Australia went on to grant both universal suffrage and  allowed women to stand for the colonial parliament in 1895, long before NZ did the same. In 1906 (7 years before NZ) Finland was the first NATION in the world to grant suffrage (the right to vote and to run for office) to all citizens, including women.  Other possible contenders for first “country” to grant female suffrage include the Corsican Republic, the Isle of Man (1881) and Franceville.

• Despite a lot of hype about made about women’s rights and equality in NZ, women are still required to sit behind the men at Maori ceremonies.

• Far from being the progressive country it tries to portray, NZ is letting Women Rights slide backwards. See Here for more details.

• NZ did not invent the bungee/bungy  jump. By and large the first time the modern world saw the jump was in the 1950s when British film maker David Attenborough brought back footage of people jumping from wooden platforms in Vanuatu with vines tied to their feet. The first  modern bungee jumps were made on 1 April 1979 from the 250-foot Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK by David Kirke, Chris Baker, Simon Keeling, Tim Hunt and Alan Weston of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club. Kiwis, however, were the first to turn bungee into a commercial enterprise.

• Much is made of NZ being a supposedly secular state: “New Zealand is a secular State with no State religion, where religious and democratic structures are separated“. Even the immigration service perpetuates this by stating “New Zealand is a modern, secular, democratic society, with no ingrained class system.”  However, it is a country where Sunday trading restrictions apply and some shops and businesses are forced to close on Christmas Day, Easter Sunday and Good Friday, or face stiff fines. No similar provisions apply to any non-Christian festival days.

• The Health Ministry was accused of “putting a spin” on the findings of a study into the clean-up of chemical contamination near Nelson, saying that there were unlikely to be adverse long-term health effects for people living near the former Fruitgrowers site at Mapua. A Greens MP issued a challenge by saying that officials “got it wrong and the report highlighted shoddy practices and ineffective monitoring of the site.”… “chemicals used at the site are dangerous even in tiny amounts, so there is no way the Ministry can say there will be no bad effects.” (see also our Health and Death page)

• A List of 763 contaminated or potentially contaminated sites in the Tasman District Council has been released, but only after after the ombudsman ordered its release to the Nelson Mail. The sites include chemical, automotive, timber treatment, orchard land and landfills, a copy of the register can be found in the Box widget (below the videos) in the side bar to the right.  Many councils in New Zealand have these lists but they are rarely released to the public.

• Comedian Mike King is accusing the pork industry of “deception” over promises to make factory pig farming methods transparent and protect animal welfare. A new label developed by NZPork saying “100% NZPork Welfare Approved” will not say if pigs are reared in sow crates (metal cages, for sows during pregnancy, which are so small sows cannot turn around) and farrowing stalls (just wide enough to enable pigs to lie down to nurse). The pork industry argues the cages immobilise pigs to stop them fighting and mounting each other when on heat. But the cages also increase pigs’ stress levels. A Colmar Brunton Survey carried out late last year showed 77% of New Zealanders want a ban on sow stalls and farrowing crates, another 77% want production methods displayed on pork labels.

• An animals rights campaigner is pictured in a newspaper with a tracking device she found attached to her car. The Sunday Star Times alleges that this is the third time in three years that they have “caught Thompson & Clark Investigations doing covert surveillance on political groups for corporate clients.” The political campaigner told the paper she believed the  company had been engaged by the Pork Industry Board. Read the full report HERE