I am tremendously grateful to the current president of the United States of America for adding even greater validity to the defensive mechanism I have named in his honour – The Trump Filter.
Before I go further, I should also thank Mr Trump for adding the word “tremendous’ to the lexicon of verified facts.
But to return to The Trump Filter.
It is a process I have developed against which I test the robustness of political decisions and, in particular, legislation produced by the New Zealand Government.
The filter applies a simple question: “Could this be misused or abused by a future government or leader, the nature of which we do not yet know?”
I don’t pretend the test is a novel one. It is really no more than an assessment of the ability of constitutional safeguards to do their job on behalf of the public. I do, however, suggest that the actions of Donald Trump provide us with excellent benchmarks against which to view the potential future misuse or trashing of things that this country takes for granted or, in some cases, holds dear.
There were warning signs in Trump’s first term, but his current term as president has created unprecedented assaults on institutions once thought fully protected by the US Constitution and the amendments embodied in the Bill of Rights.
Domestically and internationally, he has ridden roughshod over far more than the length of this commentary can accommodate. However, last week the impact of one of his more vengeful acts prompted me to apply The Trump Filter to the current state of a century-old institution in this country.
Let me address a specific question: “Does New Zealand’s public service media have sufficient safeguards to protect it against a future government or leader, the nature of which we do not yet know?”
What prompted me to put the question was a series of stories in US media last week on the impact of Trump’s decision to defund the country’s public media organisations – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the US Agency for Global Media. The former partially funds a host of local radio and television stations while the latter is the formal title of the international Voice of America (VOA).
Last week a federal judge put an 11th hour stay on dismissing 532 full-time government employees (the vast majority of VOA’s remaining staff) who were due to lose their jobs today. Trump can’t close the agency, but he is determined to reduce it to a husk. Last week’s decision may be a reprieve of sorts, but it does not guarantee the viable survival of an agency that had its genesis as a counter to Nazi propaganda in the Second World War.
Local US public radio and tv stations have been struggling to ensure their survival through cooperative efforts and an appeal to the philanthropic support on which it has always partially relied. Last week two of the better (philanthropically) funded organisations announced packages aimed at supporting stations facing possible closure but the future of those at risk remains perilous.
Could our public service media – which has just celebrated its centennial – be attacked in like fashion by a future government that is either ideologically opposed to government funding of media, or which is determined to exact revenge for perceived ‘bias’? ‘Bias’ in this instance is a Trumpian way of saying ‘does not parrot our worldview’.
There is nothing in legislation to prevent a future government from either defunding, selling off, or closing its public media assets. RNZ, like TVNZ, is a Crown Entities Company. Last week the New Zealand Herald’s Media Insider Shayne Currie speculated that the appointment of retiring Goldman Sachs New Zealand managing director Andrew Barclay to chair the TVNZ board could be a precursor to preparing the television broadcaster for sale.
Under current law the TVNZ board cannot sell off the company but there is nothing in that law preventing the owner – effectively the Government – from doing so.
And we are already seeing the effect of RNZ defunding by degrees: Last week the state broadcaster released the results of a review following the Government’s seven per cent cut to its annual budget. It will close its TAHI youth platform, end two long-established programmes, and cut staff on another. It had already instituted voluntary redundancies in other parts of the organisation.
The bottom line is that, should a future government decide to do so, there is nothing that will prevent the decimation or demise of RNZ or TVNZ. Māori Television Services may be more problematic given their origins in a Waitangi Tribunal decision but they, too, could be subjected to forms of deprivation.
What about the media more generally?
Donald Trump’s assaults have not been limited to public service broadcasters. A fortnight ago, The Washington Post carried an article on the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr. It described him as “a gleeful avatar of what critics say is a sweeping government crackdown on speech”. It was Carr who threatened to pull television licences unless Disney forced Jimmy Kimmel off air – in what the Post called “an extraordinary act with almost no precedent”. He has forced Trump-favouring concessions from broadcasters attempting mergers and takeovers. The newspaper said he had criticized almost every major media company since assuming the chair.
For his part, Trump has instigated numerous lawsuits against media organisations and extracted concessions or windfall profits in settlements. Editor & Publisher has drawn attention to official intimidation of smalltown newspapers. Last Friday, the Trump administration deported to El Salvador a Hispanic journalist who had been held in detention for 100 days after exposing the excesses of ICE raids on immigrants. One of America’s top First Amendment lawyers, Bob Corn-Revere, has warned that these are symptoms of a larger erosion of free speech and “you ignore it at your peril”.
If the US Constitution is failing to protect Americans against Trump’s assaults on free speech, how well are New Zealand media protected against that government we do not yet know?
Apart from the fact that we do not have a presidential system which apparently allows executive authority to trump (sorry) representative government, we are not well protected at all. Brendan Carr‘s appointment to the FCC suggests, for example, that we need more robust safeguards put around appointments to boards and authorities to prevent them becoming mere extensions of political will.
Our Bill of Rights Act provides only qualified protection of rights like freedom of expression, and it can be changed by simple Parliamentary majority. In fact, only six provisions in New Zealand law are constitutionally entrenched – meaning they can only be changed by a vote of more than 75 per cent of the House of Representatives or more than half the voters at a referendum – and all relate to elections.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer is our greatest champion of constitutional democracy. In How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand, a book of essays published last month, he warned: “New Zealanders need to be on the lookout for Trumpian politics and political techniques, lest they take root here.”
In that book he reiterates his case for entrenching the Bill of Rights Act. To my mind, it cannot come soon enough. As part of that process, the Act should be revisited. Parliament’s obligations to ensure the public has access to independent, pluralistic, principled news media – and its obligation to support that ecosystem in ways that ensure the provision of public interest news, information, and entertainment – need to be spelled out in it. So, too, must the protections that prevent that government we do not yet know from repeating what we currently see unfolding in the United States.
Cartoon credit: Rod Emmerson, New Zealand Herald