Jack Tame interviews associate justice minister Nicole McKee on TVNZ's Q&A. Photo: TVNZ
The associate justice minister was put through a tough examination on TVNZ's Q+A last weekend over past and present statements on guns laws.
But not every minister's recent announcements on policy plans have has been as rigorously fact-checked before ending up in the news.
Jack Tame arrived armed with a high-capacity magazine of facts to interview associate justice minister Nicole McKee about a potential loosening of our gun laws last Sunday.
After she talked about $350 million the Labour government spent on arms control, he asked how much the gun registry - which she opposes - has cost so far.
When the minister demurred, he told her not to worry.
"I've checked it out. It's public information. It's cost $10m to establish a firearms registry. And they estimate it'll cost $8.5m to continue operating. Seems like good value for money really," Tame told the minster.
That statistical bait-and-switch has become a signature move for the Q+A presenter.
He used the same tactic while interviewing aspiring finance minister Nicola Willis, Act leader David Seymour and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters last year.
But McKee's interview also included two on-the-spot fact checks.
When she said she had lobbied to close a loophole which allowed the Christchurch mosque shooter to modify a legally bought gun into a military-style assault rifle, Tame had trawled Facebook and found McKee telling members of her firearms lobby group COLFO she was working to defeat a recommendation that may have done just that.
McKee insisted she did campaign against the loophole in her role as a firearms safety expert hired as an adviser - and that she believed the proposals at the time could unduly restrict legal and responsible gun owners.
But it was definitely a bruising encounter.
Afterward she retreated into a safe space: Leah Panapa’s show on The Platform.
"To let the minister finish her questions and explain a few issues, please welcome associate justice minister Nicole McKee," she began.
"Thank you for the opportunity to have a grown-up discussion," replied McKee.
That grown-up discussion was followed by Panapa encouraging her listeners to complain to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about Q+A. She reckoned Tame had been unfair to McKee.
Others have called him biased, but that would be more convincing if Tame didn’t regularly harvest the political hides of left-wing MPs as well.
It's not bias Tame exhibits but a severe allergy to obfuscation, evasion, and spin. That’s probably a good condition to have as a journalist.
Not everyone seems to have it.
Almost every news media outlet reported a recent road safety announcement from transport minister Simeon Brown as a "crackdown" on drink and drug driving.
Headlines about the government's crackdown on drink and drug driving. Photo: Google
Money has indeed been assigned to combat impaired driving. But dig a little deeper than the media release, and it emerges that the overall road policing budget today has been cut over the last three years.
That's partly because the responsibility for operating speed cameras has been taken away from police and given to NZTA.
But people may have assumed the funding for targeting impaired drivers represented a large increase in road policing investment over and above what was previously in place - and that's not really the case.
It’s not the first time announcements from Brown have distracted our news organisations by dangling a ring-fenced pot of money in front of headline writers.
Earlier this year, he announced what many outlets described as a $500m pothole repair fund.
On the face of it, that was accurate too. But the cash for the new pothole fund came from zeroing the old road maintenance fund which was used in large part for fixing potholes.
The actual budget increase overall for fixing the roads was marginal.
For all our news organisations’ talk about cutting through the spin, the blade has sometimes been a little bit blunt.
One outlet didn't report it with a crackdown-infused headline on impaired drivers.
The Greater Auckland blog titled its piece on the government’s latest transport announcement ‘road policing reduction’.
"It's being presented as a brand new passage of new funding that's coming in but if you look at the detail it's actually a reduction," director Matt Lowrie told Mediawatch.
Lowrie said before publishing, the media needed to ask whether the funding being announced is new, and if not, where it's coming from.
"Road safety is a really critical issue in New Zealand. If we're seeing the government reduce funding, we should have that reported."
Brown isn’t the only minister benefiting from our media’s sometimes less than forensic analysis of the facts at hand.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon recently told journalists in Australia that 88 percent of Māori children in Year 8 can’t read.
As it turns out, he’d got his numbers mixed up, conflating maths and reading achievement rates.
His error didn’t get coverage until days later, after it was debunked on Reddit.
Just a mistake, but probably one the media should have picked up on.
Housing crisis
Some potentially iffy political claims are more serious.
On 11 August, associate housing minister Tama Potaka delivered some good news on emergency housing numbers, announcing they'd dropped 32 percent in this term of government.
He got the desired headline from the Waikato Times and the other Stuff papers, which ran with ‘1000 fewer children in emergency accommodation, associate housing minister reveals’.
But in the story, Potaka stops short of saying all those children were actually in a better form of housing, instead telling the paper 300 are in private accommodation and 500 in "some form of social housing".
That raises questions, chief among them: what about the other 200 children?
Other media treated the stats with more scepticism.
A Herald editorial questioned whether some of the reduction was actually down to the government making emergency housing harder to access. Ryan Bridge cast a doubtful eye over the figures on Newstalk ZB.
But it took a week for Stuff political journalist Glenn McConnell to ask the obvious question of the minister.
"No, I’m not worried that some are now homeless. But I am worried about the emergency crisis that is housing across the country,” Potaka replied.
Not all journalists have 25 minutes to interview a minster or days to prepare, as Tame does on TVNZ's Q+A.
On the internet, the deadline is always now and that creates a rush to publish.
But that doesn’t mean stories repeating claims in a government press release should be published before basic scrutiny. And it shouldn't take eight days and a completely different reporter to ask a simple missing question at the heart of a story.
