Post-truth or recycled lies?

Clearing up the garbage from the leaders' debate

Much ink was wasted last week on the question of how Winston Peters and David Seymour, having so publicly fought like dogs, could work together in government with the National Party. The simple answer is that they’ll work harmoniously when and if they need to. Their antics on the hustings are about getting the attention of swing voters. Those who want change, but aren’t fond of National, have two other parties to consider.

Having got that out of the way… The notion of post-truth politics took off in 2016 thanks to the Brexit and Trump campaigns. But historians have yet to rediscover the Golden Age of truth politics. It certainly wasn’t during the Cold War or the 1930s or, for that matter, the 1640s. Thomas Hobbes knew about politically motivated lies.

Fidelity to facts and attention to scientific evidence are (or ought to be) important, but they inform – they don’t determine – political choices. And they don’t always change the minds of voters, who may well know better than the experts. We can, however, dig into the facts and evidence to test the claims made by politicians.

This is called for after leaders’ debates, as these events are breeding-grounds for exaggeration, error and lies. TV needs emotive, fast-paced and feisty debate – often using personalised and rapid-fire questions rather than analysis. The audience should be on the edge of their seats waiting for the ‘gotcha’ moment or for someone to crumble under pressure. A post-match review with the title Leaders’ debate fails to catch fire implies that burning down the house would’ve been better.

Even though the participants have to cite facts and figures when called for, their incentive is to go short on facts (which quickly bore us) and long on punchy one-liners and rehearsed messages. This doesn’t help those viewers who wish to weigh up options with care.

Readers may have noticed misinformation from the first leaders’ debate, and seen fact-checking on reliable news sites. I’ll review some of that below. But the consensus in the media was that Hipkins didn’t ‘win’. Some called it a draw and others gave the debate to Luxon. Our straw poll was quite mixed, with Luxon and ‘a draw’ each slightly ahead.

Lie: something you say that you know is not true (dictionary.cambridge.org)

Exhibit A: National’s idea of boot camps or ‘military academies’ for young offenders was debunked by the evidence long ago. If the aim is to prevent or reduce re-offending, then they’re ineffective. I haven’t found an expert in the field who sticks up for them. (See links below.) A recent survey indicated, though, that a majority of Kiwis support boot camps, and perhaps that’s all the evidence a conservative politician needs. If the aim, then, is to respond to the fear of crime and a desire for punishment – and to get voters behind you – perhaps they do work. Christopher Luxon reminded me of Sledge Hammer: ‘trust me, I know what I’m doing’. Military leadership and targeted interventions can make them better, he claimed.

B: ‘No cuts to education’ was asserted by both leaders. But tertiary education institutions were busily cutting staff and courses even as they spoke. The sector has been subjected to inflation-induced cuts and declining enrolments thanks to both National and Labour – although incompetent managers and daft academics bear some of the blame. Perhaps the question referred only to primary and secondary education, but no one said so, and it rankles to hear ‘no cuts’ when one’s own academic career has been cut. Universities are cutting courses in teaching and nursing, and yet both leaders insisted there’d be no cuts to health and education.

C: Luxon asserted that, in the last six years, ‘every single health outcome has gone backwards [and] not one has improved for Māori or for non-Māori’. This has been debunked by by Ella Stewart for RNZ. Things may not be rosy, but there have been some improved health outcomes – not none.

D: Hipkins mistakenly said in the debate that he’d ‘banned fizzy drinks in primary schools already’. He had the decency later to admit he’d got that one wrong, as the policy wasn’t finalised.

It’s not always easy to tell apart a mistake made under pressure, a genuinely held but false belief, and an assertion that the speaker knows is not true.

Recession? What recession?

The incumbent government got lucky with economic numbers last week. Stats NZ updated the figure for the March quarter from –0.1% to zero, or no change. That meant there hadn’t been two consecutive quarters of negative growth after all, and hence technically there was no recession. The June quarter was up 0.9%, bringing annual growth to 3.2%.

If it still feels to you like there’s a recession, then bullish words from finance minister Grant Robertson might sound like fiddling while Rome burns. The title of his press statement There is no recession in NZ echoed the 1981 Blam Blam Blam song There is no depression in New Zealand that had satirised the Muldoon government. Ministerial irony was misplaced on that occasion.

Robertson went on to say: ‘Net migration of over 96,000 is helping ease skills shortages and boost economic activity.’ It took a whole city of migrant labour to help keep the economy afloat – and to keep rents high.

So David Seymour was telling a home-truth when he said that ‘the economy is growing because the population is growing, not because productivity is improving’. The Kiwi way to earn more is to work longer hours, rather than produce more per hour. Employers add pressure for lower wages on top of the longer hours, all of which, for them, means efficiency. Once they run out of Kiwis willing and able to be exploited – as the best have gone to Australia for a better deal – the government lets in more people eager to work for longer at low wages. Quite a few of these migrant workers have been victims of fraud, and they’ve earned little, if anything, while living in squalid and over-crowded accommodation.

The cost-of-living crisis has consequences that go beyond the grocery bill, and any short-term ‘relief’ provided by the next government may only prolong high inflation and keep interest rates and rents up. The squeeze on people’s budgets diminishes their options for education and training, and for personal healthcare. This has consequences for their quality of life, now and in the long term. Individually and collectively, our potential to improve our standard of living diminishes bit by bit. Turning things around to get a more highly skilled, healthy and productive workforce – rather than an impoverished and exploited workforce – means overcoming New Zealand’s persistent problem of poor productivity growth. Our rich uncle in Wellington may give us pocket-money to tide us over, but it doesn’t go far.

Messages about productivity tend to be owned by the right. One long-term solution that most politicians point to, however, is Education. That must be why there’ll be no cuts to education – just as there’s no recession!

86% of readers who did last week’s poll expressed negative feelings about Winston Peters’ role in politics, while 11% were positive. He only needs 5% of voters, however, and he’s been touring the provinces drumming them up.

At the Newshub debate, Peters repeated his story about why, in 2017, he couldn’t form a government with the party that won the most seats: he alleged that National’s leader, Bill English, in their first post-election conversation, had revealed that his caucus was out to roll him. That’s Winston’s version, and I doubt that Bill is going to confirm or deny. In a future post I could go all out and explain why, in spite of his antics, Winston has played a constructive role in NZ politics. Before I do, you might like to…

One News reported a poll result in which 82% of respondents agreed that political parties should be upfront about who they’re willing to go into coalition with prior to the election. Most of the parties have actually been pretty clear about that, but there’s particular doubt about whether the National and ACT parties would be willing to form a government with support from NZ First – if the latter makes it back into parliament. Voters would like to know what arrangement(s) they might be voting for. This is understandable, but the trouble is that, unless they’ve made a formal pre-electoral pact, the parties can only sort it out after the election when the numbers of seats held by each are known. They can’t go into detail about post-electoral agreements while they’re competing with one another on the hustings and needing to promote their own brands and manifestos. Once the votes have been counted, the public need a stable working government – which may require some unexpected and awkward political compromises including abandonment of some so-called ‘bottom lines’.

Pre-electoral statements about ‘who will work with whom’ are an important feature of NZ election campaigns. But it’s up to the parties to decide what to say, and what not to say. Making firm commitments to other parties can be advantageous, but it can backfire. There are no rules here: it’s all about political judgement. Bear in mind that the election and the formation of a government are two distinct things. Constitutionally speaking, this has always been the case: it’s not ‘because of MMP’.

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Some links to expert comments on boot camps:

Reid-MacNevin, 1997

Lincoln 2012

Berentson-Shaw 2017