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# Taxpayer-Funded Play about COVID-19 Is Propaganda
- URL: https://goodoil.news/taxpayer-funded-play-about-covid-19-is-propaganda/
- Published: 2021-02-17T23:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2021-02-18T00:18:35.000Z
- Author: General
- Tags: General, NZ, NZ Politics, Politics, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-17 02:14

**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](https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/r?u=6hyvAYXBs1PELL28GD73y9ZRdpyGFnltDeI4NcHHLbFdmSUf9jxzaolcNUW4vetD&e=60a74dab4ddca719e78a0482505556ed&utm%5Fsource=taxpayers&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=210217%5Ftu%5Fnewsletter&n=2):

> 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.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/unnamed-2.png)

Creative NZ has form for this. It has previously handed out grants to commission [poems on *Newsroom*](https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/taxpayer%5Fupdate%5Freturn%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fcgt%5Funi%5Fs%5Fmansion%5Frort%5Fbad%5Fpoetry?e=60a74dab4ddca719e78a0482505556ed&utm%5Fsource=taxpayers&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=210217%5Ftu%5Fnewsletter&n=3) attacking centre-right politicians, and [opinion pieces](https://www.taxpayers.org.nz/r?u=iZKD10YCA6yv1q8d1WgqzK%5FGDLmaUNejdHcjCRrb2fwb%5F8UuZ4XZsM3u9BnErYl3u1hvwzQiAGE%5FpARWqeNMkyrJbM-bnzvJFcwob%5F0%5FAKs&e=60a74dab4ddca719e78a0482505556ed&utm%5Fsource=taxpayers&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=210217%5Ftu%5Fnewsletter&n=4) 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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