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Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly column which appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings. If you enjoy a “serious laugh” - and complaining about politics and politicians - you’ll enjoy reading Greg’s latest grievances.
Let’s begin this week’s column with a minute’s silence for the departed. Not for Newshub, may it rest in peace. But for the death of any sense of shame in the National Party.
After many months of waiting and the sacking of Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee for being useless, the new minister Paul Goldsmith has finally shared the party’s exciting, new solution for supporting our struggling media industry: doing what Labour suggested.
It seems the weirdly named Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, which National has slagged off since Labour introduced it almost a year ago, is not the dog turd the Nats claimed it was after all.
No, it turns out that with a bit of elbow grease from Goldsmith, the turd can be polished into just the sort of, er, soothing balm the media needs.
Whether it will be seen that way by Big Tech giants like Google and Meta, and whether these multinationals will actually agree to pay anything for sharing local media content on their websites and platforms is uncertain. Overseas experience suggests Meta, which owns Facebook, certainly won’t.
The bigger mystery, however, is why it’s taken eight months and a new minister for National to decide what to do, and then do exactly what it said it wouldn’t do: back the bill. Act, which still doesn’t support it, has at least been consistent in saying the bill won’t work and that it ignores the fundamental problems the legacy media now has in the digital age.
So, what has precipitated the Nats’ flagrant flipflop? A cynic might suggest the answer is made abundantly clear by the uncanny timing in Goldsmith announcing National’s U-turn just days before the dying Newshub finally breathed its last.
Which is to say, it’s a fair guess National is now supporting the bill because, even if it doesn’t give the media industry the fillip its cock-eyed optimists think it will, it does make it appear as if the government gives a toss about the media’s problems, even if it doesn’t.
Backing the bill also means there will be one less thing for media commentators to bag the coalition about.
The whole affair reeks of expediency, really. It would certainly be more apt — and more honest — if Goldsmith retitled the thing the Getting The Effing Media Off Our Effing Backs Bill. It’s certainly a snappier title.
Still, in the absence of anything else — though Goldsmith is promising a review of media regulations — at least our puny media businesses will have the chance to “bargain” (isn’t that one of the stages of grief?) with America’s tech billionaires and their legions of highly priced lawyers. As a match-up, that will be the Battle of Thermopylae in reverse.
Act, meanwhile, has clearly had a strop behind the scenes about National’s shameless, Labour-lite U-turn on the bill, leading it to trigger the “agree to disagree” provision in its coalition deal.
It was the second time in a week that clause had been activated, after Winston Peters did the same thing over his objections to National’s expanded inquiry into the response to the Covid pandemic. That, of course, was another case of expediency: NZ First’s performative outrage over the inquiry is obviously for the benefit of the fake news, anti-vaxxers who helped get the party back into parliament.
The real bit of fake news is surely that Peters is capable of agreeing to disagree about anything with anyone. I would have thought an agree-to-be-disagreeable clause is much more his style.
A matter of write and wrong
Shocking admission of the week: tech savvy senior Judith Collins confessing she has been using Artificial Intelligence to draft her speeches.
Polls show that more than half the country is petrified that AI, yet another unregulated, wild west-experiment by Big Tech, is going to finish the job it started with social media: ending civilisation. But not Crusher Collins, our Minister for Digitising Government. She has thrown caution to the wind, and like some 15-year-old cheating on a school essay, is getting AI to do her homework for her.
What might a speech written by AI for Collins look like? We asked ChatGPT to write one for us, a short lecture from Crusher about why school kids shouldn’t use AI to do their homework.
It replied: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, gather round! Using ChatGPT for your homework is like hiring a monkey to write your essay – it might be entertaining, but it’s not going to end well. Sure, ChatGPT is smart, but it’s not your brain doing the heavy lifting. Imagine explaining to your teacher how you suddenly aced that maths test: ‘Oh, I just had a little chat with my robot friend!’ Besides, you can’t take ChatGPT into the exam room! Do your homework, make mistakes, and learn – it builds character. And who knows? You might even enjoy it ... eventually.”
Let that be a lesson to you, Judith.
These boots were made for running away
Forget war, it sounds like it’s boot camps that are hell.
As the skirmishes continue over exactly who will be involved in running National’s “military-style” camps for young ratbags, it seems the NZ Defence Force has suffered a humiliating defeat running something similar.
Documents obtained by RNZ this week revealed that a trial Limited Service Volunteer course run by NZDF and the Ministry of Social Development — something the coalition has been loudly talking up as a model for its boot camps — led to “severe mental distress and physical assaults”. Not for the ratbags, mind, but for military staff who ran the thing.
It now appears that the NZDF won’t be involved at all in staffing the boot camps, despite the Police Minister and Boot Camp Grand Poobah, Sergeant Major Mark Mitchell, claiming this week it would be.
The “military-style” camps will instead be overseen by the civilians at Oranga Tamariki, and community groups will apparently provide the staff. That is, if any community group agrees to do it, which is still unclear, even though a trial boot camp is supposed to begin this month.
Here’s a hypothetical question: if no community group agrees to do the government’s dirty work, will Sergeant Major Mitchell have to bring back the draft to drum up the staff?
