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Louis Houlbrooke
Campaigns Manager
New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union
Teasers for a new play about New Zealand’s COVID-19 response suggest it will be nothing more than taxpayer-funded propaganda.
The play, named “Transmission”, received a $57,000 grant from Creative NZ taxpayers, and according to its co-director Miranda Harcourt:
It is a verbatim stage-show drawn from our interviews with NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Finance Minister Grant Robertson & leading epidemiologist Michael Baker around last year’s decision to lock down NZ in response to Covid-19 & its targeted elimination. It is a behind the scenes glimpse into how these remarkable people were thinking and feeling at the time. And into the life events that have shaped them as leaders.
What an embarrassment.
We say New Zealand’s playwrights are welcome to produce obsequious propaganda, but taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund it. This stinks of a state-supported cult of personality that you’d expect in Kazakhstan or North Korea, not an egalitarian society like New Zealand.
Creative NZ has form for this. It has previously handed out grants to commission poems on Newsroom attacking centre-right politicians, and opinion pieces on soft-socialist blogsite The Spinoff agitating for the Government’s Maori wards legislation. We’re yet to see Creative NZ fund a single project that doesn’t fit their politically-correct, Wellington-centric, left-wing world view.
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