Grant Robertson quits – goes back to uni

And what's up with the media?

Former finance minister Grant Robertson has announced he’s quitting politics to become VC (that’s chief executive) of the University of Otago.

Having served six years as Labour’s minister of finance, it’s timely for Robertson to make the big change. His alma mater Otago Uni stands to benefit from the experience and the networks that he can bring – although he’ll need to keep party politics at arm’s length. Indeed, he’ll need to cancel his Labour Party membership.

The downside could be that Otago’s new VC treats the job as an opportunity to advance pet projects that he began in Budget 2019 but were derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic and terminated by the 2023 election. In simple terms, will Otago get rebranded as the Wellbeing University?

I hope not, as a university doesn’t operate like a government department. In any case, the country’s universities all suffered financially during Robertson’s tenure as minister of finance. Being a VC will make him responsible for the consequences of that.

Now that Grant’s moving on, people are asking if it’s Chris Hipkins’s turn. Polling data aren’t suggesting that he really must stay on.

NZ Labour are back where they were over a decade ago: in the doldrums, not polling well, uncertain about leadership, and no idea where to go next. In opposition, Labour are still using lines that helped them to lose the election.

NZ Labour surprised everyone in 2017 when Ardern took the leadership, and they became an inspiring example for labour and social-democratic parties around the world. But that all collapsed during their second term in office. Now the leading labour (or labor) party is Australia’s, and the next one to step up into office will be the UK’s.

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The media malaise: How to deal with it

Our trust in the news is, according to surveys, in decline. And most of us are avoiding news, at least some of the time, as it makes us feel depressed or anxious.

As news agencies lose advertising revenue, budgets and staff get cut, and newsrooms pressure people to do more with less. Consumers often complain that reporting is shallow and unbalanced. High-profile columnists with tight deadlines scribble op-eds that aren’t carefully thought through. Their incentive is to get clicks from a punchy headline. Often they don’t appreciate the historical or institutional context, and so they don’t assist the reader to gain a better understanding of what’s going on. But they do rark people up.

Nonetheless, there’s also a lot of good reporting and analysis out there. Many journalists seem well aware of the criticisms of their industry and they’re striving to do better. We can reward the best by just reading them.

If you think of ‘the news’ as the content that’s put on show to draw your attention to paid advertisements, then, in an age that’s dominated by big Silicon Valley platforms, the competition for advertisers’ money and for your attention is likely to be lost by the smaller local firms.

So there is a problem, but those who are deeply distrustful of ‘the MSM’ and resort to alternatives are only making themselves worse off. Alternative channels on the left and the right aren’t better resourced, and they won’t help you to be better informed – although they may satisfy a desire for revenge against those whom you dislike politically.

You can find good reporting as well. On the present National government’s ‘reset of the welfare system’, the Radio NZ website covers the government’s policies and opinions as well as the reactions of the opposition parties. And I’ve seen reporters reaching out to beneficiaries and their representatives to hear about their experiences and views. It’s a topic that triggers strong feelings for many people, however, from both sides of the spectrum of opinion.

When we hear things we don’t like, we might just shoot the messenger. And there are channels that do display a left or right bias. Uncritical reading of anything, however, no matter how objective it looks at first, is never a good idea, so it does make sense not to trust the media.

So, is declining trust such a bad thing, if it arises from a more critical readership? Putting it another way: how much trust are we expected to have? We wouldn’t expect people’s trust 100% of the time or anywhere near that, and there’s no science that sets an optimal trust-survey result.

I’m an academic, not a journalist, yet I try to be politically impartial and balanced. (Not all of my academic colleagues feel any such obligation.) But I know how difficult it is in the media whirlpool, as there’s no position of pure objectivity or indisputable truth, and the ground shifts under one’s feet as events unfold. There are, of course, facts that we must recognise, but much of what we see, hear and write in political life is about opinions and values. I don’t say ‘mere opinion’, because people’s opinions about public policy do matter. Some people, preferably elected and accountable people, get to put their opinions and values into action. It distresses us when the people we disagree with are the ones holding the reins. But a free press and a sceptical audience help to keep them in check.

One feature of teaching political ideologies and public policy was having often to talk about ideas and policies that I didn’t agree with. Reading about it made me understand the reasoning behind the politics that I didn’t like. Then I disliked it less, and became more accepting of difference and debate. I learned to respect people whose opinions aren’t like my own.

The media and the news form an essential feature of a democratic society. We need to have a free press and to allow individuals to make up their own minds about parties and policies with the aid of diverse, contestable and well-presented reporting. Here’s some advice for readers.

• Don’t expect news to come to you. Go and find it.

• Get rid of your TV. It’s a piece of e-junk. The 6pm news is almost always the most shallow. (And I know what it’s like to be selectively ‘sound-bited’.) Sometimes, you need to see the video record, but you can do that online on demand.

• Don’t rely on social media feeds. Sometimes we do pick up interesting news items from social media that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen, but don’t be a victim of the algorithm.

• Go directly to a variety of local and international news sites each day. Better still, download the apps onto your mobile phone. RNZ and BBC, for example, are great because they’re ad-free. The best ongoing coverage of Gaza is on Al Jazeera.

• I take more in when I read the actual paper newspaper. For me that’s normally the NZ Herald at the local caf.

• Follow some good podcasters, such as The Rest is Politics. You can listen while you drive or cook dinner.

• You may not have time for all of the above, but make a judicious selection of channels for the precious time that you can devote to following the news. Above all, if you want to keep your sanity, I recommend less reliance on TV and social media. Stay off X altogether if you can, as it’s feeding out really awful junk these days.

Having boosted RNZ and BBC just now, though, I do have a criticism of one recent piece of poor editing. Their headlines covering the big interview between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin quoted one word from one historian who said that one point Putin made about Poland was ‘nonsense’. But the message the headline gave was that it was all nonsense. Now, I too am appalled by Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but readers were told he spoke ‘nonsense’ before they learned anything about what he actually said. A good report would give us the facts about what he said and then present critical comment and historical fact-checking from experts. As most English-speaking consumers of news already detest Putin, the standard of reporting can be lowered, it seems, in his case.

Putin’s history lesson wasn’t entirely nonsense in factual terms, but it made no sense as an explanation for his illegal actions in the present. Moreover, Carlson asked no question about, for example, Yevgeny Prigozhin (who’s presumed to have been assassinated). Certain silences were the price of getting any access at all to Putin. I recommend listening to the full interview and forming your own opinion. There’ve been many criticisms of the interviewer and the interviewee, but it was better to get Putin on the record than not, in my opinion.