Q + A
Episode 922
GAVIN ELLIS
Interviewed by CORIN DANN

GREG The right to know what our politicians are up to on our behalf to is a fundamental tenet of any democracy, but former New Zealand Herald editor Dr Gavin Ellis is concerned that those rights are being eroded. In a new book, Complacent Nation, he claims the release of information from a minister or a government department is increasingly seen through a political lens. He talked to political editor Corin Dann.

GAVIN I think there is a culture there; a culture that’s borne out of this no-surprises policy that was actually developed to take account of coalition governments under MMP, so that the minor parties weren’t gazumped. But, in fact, now it means politicians always know what our public servants are doing on their behalf, and whether a request’s under the Official Information Act, for example, except for the very mundane, those requests end up going through a minister’s office to check whether there is any political risk in the release of that information. Now, that shouldn’t be the way that it operates. It should be on the basis of ‘is there a public interest in this information?’ And that should be the criteria.

CORIN As someone who works in the gallery, I can certainly say that at times it does feel difficult to get information, and it can take a long time, certainly, but the Ombudsman’s report into this issue actually didn’t find any concerns.

GAVIN Well, I think that – and I read that report, and I have great respect for Dame Beverly Wakem, who wrote it – but I don’t think that public servants were in a position to tell it exactly as it is. I think that they operate in a climate where the minister is the person to whom they are ultimately answerable, and, therefore, they weren’t prepared to be as open as they might have.

CORIN Should they be braver? Should they stand up to ministers and say, ‘I’m a public servant. I’ll release it if I think it needs to be released’?

GAVIN I think we’ve changed the nature of our public service. You know, in the past, public servants had tenure. Now, that has good points, and it has bad points, but now, most public servants are on renewable-term contracts – certainly senior civil servants are, and how do you react if your contract is going to come up for renewal? Are you going to annoy the minister who may ultimately have the say on whether that contract is renewed or not?

CORIN So, it’s not an explicit pressure, is it? It’s more of a subtle pressure.

GAVIN No, no, it’s subtle, yes. It is subtle, but it’s there nonetheless. And that concerns me. And on the other hand, we have media that’s operating with diminished resources – virtually every media organisation has had redundancies – and the ability of the media to seek out the information to dig for it if it’s not immediately forthcoming, to find ways of inquiring, in itself is diminished. So both sides of that coin contribute to a lack of public ability to know.

CORIN And what about the – and you talk about this in your book – the appetite for—because what you’re essentially talking about is almost the process of government, of finding out what they’ve looked at, what they’re doing, what they didn’t do – all these sorts of things which can be very interesting. Is the public interested, though?

GAVIN Unfortunately, nowhere near enough. The public nowadays seem to be motivated much more by emotion than by cold, hard – perhaps boring – facts. Boring facts that may indeed influence the way they live, the way that they do their jobs, the way that they interact with society.

CORIN But that comes back to the responsibility of people of me and others to interpret that process failures that we might find in government and tell people why it’s important. We do that.

GAVIN You do that, but do we do it on the 6 o’clock news?

CORIN We try to.

GAVIN Do we do it in our morning papers enough? But do people watch the 6 o’clock news? Do they read our newspapers, or do they go online and perhaps look at the Daily Mail or the Guardian, and they don’t get enough exposure to domestic issues anyway. They’re being diverted. Now, how we overcome that, I’m not sure. It may be that it will require what I refer to as a cathartic moment. Something that happens that jolts people into the realisation that they do need to know more. They do need to take more interest that’s been done on their behalf.

CORIN What do we mean? Some sort of sandal in Government or something? Some sort of crisis of democracy?

GAVIN Or the loss of a right. You know, if we had a significant reduction in freedom of expression to the point where people couldn’t freely express themselves, then, maybe, that would be enough.

CORIN And I guess terrorism is the logical thing here, isn’t it?

GAVIN Terrorism – that’s very much the logical thing.

CORIN How much do you worry about that?

GAVIN Well, you know, if we have an act of terrorism close to our shores or, God forbid, on our shores, we would see, I think, very very quickly, the implementation of perhaps draconian laws that would prescribe our right to know and our right to free expression. Some of that would be necessary, but the question is is it all necessary, or are there ancillary effects that affect our basic human right?

CORIN You talk about some of the times that you yourself as editor took on some of those principled issues and had fights and took them all the way to the courts. But I wonder in this media environment, where commercial pressures are very prevalent – we’re seeing mergers all over the place – do you think media will be as willing to take on those fights?

GAVIN I think they’d be willing. Certainly, editors would be willing, and journalists would be willing. But these things cost money. I can recall one that cost well over $100,000, and that was on a point of principle. I doubt nowadays that media organisations would stump up that sort of money except in the most dire circumstances. So it’s not so much willingness; it’s ability. Because media organisations don’t have the money they used to have.

CORIN And you bring it back to the public. You say it’s up to the public, the viewers, to demand more, not just of journalists, but right across the board – government, the works. How do they do that?

GAVIN I do. Well, they can certainly make their views known now they have the right of free expression to a degree. There are ways in which it’s prescribed, but by and large, you can still stand up and make your views known. I think that the more people write to newspapers, the more people express themselves on the TVNZ website, for example, or other websites, social media, and so on. The only thing that will ensure that we have sufficient safeguards against the unnecessary erosion of this right to know is if politicians see that’s politically expedient to stay their hand.

CORIN But that’s unlikely, isn’t it? Realistically, from either party. Once they’re in power, they see it from the perspective of risk, of journalists coming at them, you know, sensationalising things. They’re risk-averse.

GAVIN Oh, indeed. Indeed. And do a degree, you can understand that. It’s human nature to minimise risk. But human rights transcend what an individual might like or not like to happen to them. And we need to be a little more mindful of just how precious those basic human rights are, what the Bill of Rights apparently guarantees, but it’s a leaky sieve.

CORIN What about greater public service broadcasting, greater investment? But again, that requires the politicians in some ways to stump up the money for public broadcasting, which isn’t necessarily going to mean commercial gain.

GAVIN It does, and we’ve seen under this government a freezing of Radio New Zealand’s budget, so the likelihood of that is not high, shall we say, but, you know, maybe we’ll have a change of heart within our media. Maybe there will be a turning of the wheel so that the emotion-laden stories that we see particularly on websites now, maybe the public will start to lose its appetite for that and start searching for more serious and more significant news – the sort of stuff that you can produce out of the gallery.

ENDS

© Scoop Media