Analysis: If you’re looking for buff firefighters, social media platform Instagram is home to the viral Australian Firefighters Calendar. But if you’re looking for the firefight over emergency workers’ pay and conditions, it’s being waged right across Insta, YouTube and TikTok.
The Professional Firefighters Union is quick to post videos of fire truck failures on social. And on the other side of their industrial dispute, Stuff Digital reports Fire and Emergency NZ is one of the top 10 government spenders on social media.
We know this, because journalist Lloyd Burr has requested details of 153 government department and entities’ spending on local and international media marketing and subscriptions. Good on him, he’s done a thorough and painstaking job. It’s useful shoe leather journalism.
The guts of his findings: Departments, ministries, entities, and companies spent a combined $19.4 million advertising or marketing with overseas-based companies in 2025. Or maybe twice that. We’re not quite sure, given many of the responses are so circumspect.
But here’s the thing: while I respect Burr’s investigative work, I disagree with the underlying premise of Stuff’s project.
First, it’s not so much journalism, as lobbying. It’s intended to make the case that the government agencies should be spending their marketing and comms budgets with local media (among them Stuff, and Newsroom) rather than with US- and China-based Big Tech.
In itself, that’s not surprising. Many industries plead for taxpayer handouts, or investment, though most can’t mask their lobbying as journalism and place it on the front page of the country’s best-read news website.
Sometimes, governments are responsive to these industry pleas.
Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis rewrote government procurement rules last year, to direct agencies to use woollen fibre products in the construction and refurbishment of government buildings, where practical. At a time when many sheep farmers were giving up and turning their pastures over to exotic forestry, that intervention has helped – though not so much as rising global wool prices.
After lobbying from restaurants, Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston has paid millions to bring the Michelin Guide to New Zealand. And she has a targeted $70m major events fund that she uses to help woo her favourite ageing rockers like Robbie Williams and Linkin Park (purportedly to fill hotel beds).
And don’t even get me started on Shane Jones’ $1.2 billion regional infrastructure fund, and its investments in energy projects, mining, regional airlines and more.
My point being, plenty of industries are going cap in hand to Government. Please sir, may I have some more? And there’s no harm in asking the question. But …
All else being equal, I’d prefer media organisations were able to stand on their own two feet, selling our hard work to people, businesses and agencies that see the value in it. Few of us would choose to be beholden to politicians.
My second concern is with Stuff’s assumption that government agencies should be expected to direct their spending to support local business.
Wrong. Government departments should spend their budgets responsibly, to get the most effective bang for their buck. And Burr provides (perhaps unintentionally) a good argument to support this.
He begins his first article: “It was a measles vaccination advert that popped up on YouTube that got me wondering how much taxpayer money was being spent advertising with offshore-based tech behemoths like Google, Facebook, and TikTok. At a time when the Government is meant to be tightening its belt, and when local media companies are scrapping over every cent in the advertising market, just how much was our public sector sending overseas?”
I think that’s the wrong question. The right question should be, are public health agencies reaching their target audiences in the most cost-effective way to improve immunisation rates, and save lives from measles?
If the target demographic can be best reached through doing a jab jam advert to a hiphop mix of The Beegees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’, and paying to post it on TikTok – then bloody well do it.
Supporting Stuff Digital’s ad revenues is a distant second priority, sorry. We don’t direct Kiwi civil servants to buy old New Zealand-made Trekkas to prop up a domestic motor vehicle industry, nor require schools and hospitals to source over-priced uniforms and scrubs from the local rag trade. Neither can we make protecting journalism jobs the main priority in public procurement, sadly.
Third (and sorry if this is a spoiler for the next leg of Stuff’s investigation) Burr has asked the Ombudsman to require departments and entities to disclose a breakdown of their spending on local and overseas media subscriptions.
As the editor of a subscription product, who appreciates those individuals and organisations willing to pay what this product is worth, I don’t expect our customers to disclose our commercially sensitive pricing details to a competitor – namely, Stuff Group.
I note that Stuff Digital’s sister company, The Post, has launched a subscription product that competes with Newsroom. I pay from my own pocket to read The Post; I’d hope they pay for Newsroom Pro. And I’d certainly hope they wouldn’t use backdoor methods to obtain our pricing, for a competitive advantage! I’d encourage them to instead compete on the quality of their journalism.
This brings us to a final point on which we might actually agree. Domestic and international media should compete on a fair and level playing field.
I don’t think that’s best achieved through heavy-handed government interventions and public procurement mandates.
Rather, the role of the Government might be to remove impediments to fair competition – specifically, iniquitous intellectual property protections and inequitable tax laws that require local media companies to pay their share, while Google and Amazon and Meta are able to wriggle out of them.
Similarly, let’s not kid ourselves that Stuff Digital itself is the paragon of Kiwi-ness. It’s half-owned by a London private equity firm now!
That’s not a criticism, but simply to make the point that these debates should be more sophisticated than ‘local good, foreign bad’.
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