Credit Where No Credit Is Due

As New Zealand enters the mid-game stages of the lockdown as scheduled, certain patterns that were nascent in the early stages of the response are standing out more clearly.

As reporters and politicians adjust to the enormity and strangeness of the new normal and revert to type in the crisis, we are starting to see how immense changes to the information environment, brought on by the pandemic, are causing different feedback loops trigger.

Press gallery reporters and modern politicians are symbiotic species that are behaviourally inseparable. One cannot exist without the other, at least in the daily practice of New Zealand politics that has been relatively stable over the past decade or two.

The unprecedented social consensus on measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 has short-circuited the usual adversarial partisan mechanisms of engagement.

David Clark’s egregious and foolish misjudgement resulted in his head being stuck on a pike, the proverbial scalp of heroic accountability journalism as its practitioners frame it to be. Through the lens of the partisan left—informed by knowledge of the information dynamic of the Key government years aka ‘Dirty Politics’—we see a broader context: the controversy surfacing via a rapid-fire hit piece from an anonymous source who tracked Clark’s movements; stand-ups dominated by adversarial gotcha questions and partisan interpersonal inanity, perceived to be disrupting important public health and economic information.

Whether or not this criticism is fair or true is actually less relevant than the observation that we are no longer operating in the same information environment that existed before the crisis. Continuing pre-existing norms of interaction between reporters and officials is leading to unpredictable but clearly visible consequences.

Press gallery reporters have been slow to recognise the crisis has meant huge numbers of people are now tuning in to the primary source material of the daily standups and are scrutinising the questions being asked, and the process of news-making itself, in a context that was previously only of interest to insiders and politics nerds.

Government departments and officials have deliberately been batting off requests from the media, referring them directly to the daily standup, putting massive pressure on reporters on the spot to squeeze huge amounts of information out of an extremely limited and restricted meeting.

While reporters are right to argue that the unprecedented emergency powers of the state require serious scrutiny and that this is of huge public interest, it seems unrealistic that a news-making process that is highly adapted to support partisan shit-flinging and horse race coverage is fit for purpose in this new information environment.

There are fair questions being asked of the government about whether their confidence and certainty is honestly reflective of the real situation on the ground. But the agitation of journalists in confronting officials with particular facts, anecdotes and individual data points needs to be tempered with a broader systems awareness. Complex systems are not understandable or even legible through dissecting individual parts of the system, without referencing their relationships to the whole.

In holding the government to account, journalists need to work equally hard to explain to their audience how their story is relevant and why it takes priority in the context of the global systems crisis. Not acknowledging the need for this effort and continuing to ignore their audience’s demands for context will lead to continuing breakdown of public trust and backlash towards the press gallery.

Media organisations need to consider whether they must attempt a whole new approach. Critics frustrated with the press gallery need to consider whether they should be putting pressure on the media organisations themselves, rather than individual reporters.

Unsurprisingly, this impedance in adapting to a new information environment is being chaotically exploited and trolled by people on the right.

The unheard-of unity and agreement across New Zealand society in our goal to stamp out COVID-19 has completely transcended partisanship and political alignment. We all have broadly the same access to information inputs and the actions we’re taking are emerging from empirical, scientifically-informed consensus.

If ideology still constrains these possible courses of action, it’s really only the most extreme and sociopathic forms of authoritarianism that would seem to prevent governments from trying to constrain the pandemic and buffer the economic shock.

This consensus breaks the brains of those who cannot comprehend operating in a world free of partisanship and political manipulation.

Hence we see the earlier nascent patterns crystallising and repeating:

1. There is a well-known and widely-agreed course of action.
2. The government and public service researches it and plans to execute it.
3. Scientists and public intellectuals share information and debate it.
4. Opposition ministers and political operatives accuse the government of idiocy and inaction for not immediately doing it.
5. The government does it.
6. Opposition ministers and political operatives claim credit for it.

What’s difficult to comprehend but is a distinct aspect of the current crisis is that in our complex information environment, there’s not necessarily a linear causal trajectory between steps 1, 2 and 3 here, but there definitely is between steps 4, 5 and 6.

We saw this with the lockdown announcement. With closing the borders and travel bans. With calls for more testing. With quarantine for new arrivals.

We are seeing this same performance in progress for digital contact tracing. This past week, David Seymour put on a show of sticking-it to the Ministry of Health for not immediately rolling out Singapore’s TraceTogether technology, despite the fact the technology only exists as a reference architecture and demo app with a significant amount of unavoidable investment and planning needed to run it in New Zealand at scale (and this too, was already being actively researched by the government).

Some will say this is democracy at work, integrating adversarial and collaborative perspectives, putting nonsense, well-informed ideas, wild schemes and differing points of view through the wringer of public debate and institutional filters and coming out with much higher quality decisions than the alternatives of markets or authoritarian command and control.

But the bad faith does stand out. If we really want to hold the government accountable, we need to raise the level of debate beyond the immediacy of a crisis response and pressure people in power to address the systematic, structural inequalities and injustices that fester after more than thirty years of neoliberal social order.

We need to avoid being provoked by the antics of baboons shitting into their hands and flinging it at bystanders. As the frenzy of immediacy propagates through information networks and attracts public attention and debate, we deprioritise important confrontations and conversation shifts around GDP growth, ecological economics and the transformative changes needed to ensure universal wellbeing and social participation.

This is a distraction we cannot afford. Champions of the status-quo and business-as-usual are already lining up to offer stale economic prescriptions and roadmaps for recovery. We need to skate to where the puck is going, not flail around where it has been.


Mark Rickerby is a writer, designer and programmer working at the intersection of software architecture and storytelling. He lives in Ōtautahi–Christchurch