Table of Contents
Owen Jennings
Here is how the circus of public opinion and regulation-making works.
The Save Our City Fences (SOC) group, meets, yawns and decides to campaign on the quality of city fences. Step One involves enlisting a couple of professors and scientists at the meeting to write up some strongly worded articles on the deteriorating quality of the fences. Step Two: the few, inadequately trained journalists at the meeting looking for subjects to stir on – following their editors’ instructions to ferret out trouble – are encouraged to write up stories and use pictures to show the worst examples of broken down or even non-existent fences.
SOC members fill the response columns with statements of outrage and condemnation. The academics write more biased and unscientific nonsense. Facts are made up. Truth gets trammelled. Even more outrage. Other media join the scrum. More stories, more pictures. TV arrives claiming it was their story all along.
Some backbench MPs with little to do climb on board. Momentum builds. Homeowners protest and claim to be doing all they can. They show examples of smart fences and more coming. They are dismissed as ‘intolerables’. The MSM refuse to publish their defence or any material supporting their position. It is now a ‘big story’. The public have no idea of the strong progress being made in suburbs around the nation. Innovative and self-regulation is producing great fences but few know the truth.
The government comes under pressure and sets up a high level, highly paid commission to investigate and report back. SOC members churn out hundreds of submissions using dead relatives, underage kids and senile uncles to make up numbers. Maori are consulted and Whakatikahia te taiapa is formed.
Government says they have to act in the public interest and introduce new legislation requiring fences to be improved. A new commission is established to oversee the regulations – outgoing MPs get seats on the commission.
Local Government get given new powers to police the regulations, and homeowners are hassled, arrested and fined for missing palings and wrong paint colours. More staff are added and rates go up. At the edges, homeowners under severe pressure suicide. Fences remain in ordinary shape as homeowners simply cannot afford the high cost.
Ridiculous? Yes. True picture? Yes. Is it happening? Yes.
The latest effort is the freshwater regulations. Farmers are about to be saddled with a raft of unbelievably draconian regulations in the name of improving water quality. It all started with hugely exaggerated stories by persons claiming to be experts. Farmers who have made huge strides over recent years are ignored. Interest groups climbed on board and created a stink. The rest is history.
The word circus comes from the Latin for ‘ring’ – an arena for games. It says it all.
