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A collage with a Kermit meme driving, a sweating cartoon character, a cat in a red vest at a computer, and a traffic app interface with options like Crash, Slowdown, and more. Bold text below says "Add a report.
The true anxiety of a moral conundrum while driving (Image: Tina Tiller)

SocietyJanuary 15, 2025

Is it OK to nark on the cops? An argument with myself

A collage with a Kermit meme driving, a sweating cartoon character, a cat in a red vest at a computer, and a traffic app interface with options like Crash, Slowdown, and more. Bold text below says "Add a report.
The true anxiety of a moral conundrum while driving (Image: Tina Tiller)

Is warning people about police on Google Maps aiding your fellow citizens, or abetting dangerous drivers? Anna Rawhiti-Connell debates Anna Rawhiti-Connell.

For over a decade, the navigation app Waze has used a crowdsourcing feature that allows you to report incidents on your route. With your phone plugged into Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you hit a button on your display and can report heavy traffic, lane closures, roadworks, potholes and the presence of “speed traps” (now just labelled “police”). This information is then shared with other drivers on the same route via notifications and visualisation on their own display.  “Police in 300m” will pop up, with a prompt to report whether they’re still there. If you’re doing something you shouldn’t, it acts as a heads-up to stop doing it before you get closer.

Google bought Waze in 2013, but it’s only been in the last few months that they’ve rolled this feature out to the navigation app most of us use in our cars, Google Maps.   

A carplay screen showing traffic report options: Crash, Slowdown, Construction, Lane closure, Stalled vehicle, and Object on road. A "Police" button is also visible at the bottom.
Google Maps incident reporting interface on Apple CarPlay.

For some, it’s a handy feature that alerts you to what’s on the road ahead. 

To others, it could be seen as a distraction and a thwarting of the police in their job to keep our roads safe.

This is an oddly specific and trivial thing to feel morally compromised about when the world is on fire, and the police are just trying to keep the roads safe. Keep driving and let them do their thing.

Questioning whether to participate in this technology-enabled exercise is a microcosm of age-old and relevant tensions between individualism, collectivism, safety, risk-taking, authority, courtesy and compliance. And I didn’t say I was morally compromised. It’s an ethical curiosity highlighting a weird grey area in our law where technology has outpaced regulation.

Liar – sorry to nark on you, but you raised this issue with your colleagues after a feeble and frozen moment in your car on the way to work on Monday. You agonised over whether to hit the button on your CarPlay display after seeing a police car on the motorway. I’d say that’s morally compromised.

Fine. I do feel morally unsure about it. On one hand, I struggle with it precisely because I am a law-abiding citizen who believes in the merits of policing road safety. On the other, I am also a human who likes to feel like I “belong” and occasionally gets irked by what sometimes feels like revenue gathering from officious authority.

Technology also alienates us from others and enables inconsiderate and uncivil behaviour. Alerting drivers to hazards or assisting them in not getting pinged for driving one kilometre over the speed limit feels like a bending of the arc back the other way. It’s a 21st-century nod to the power of small gestures in breeding collective courtesy.

Are you serious? Did you read a lot of contemporary non-fiction about AI or anxious children over the holidays?  You’re just pissed off about that fine you got for being on your phone while driving and for the occasional speed camera ticket you’ve gotten. You shouldn’t even be touching your phone in the car anyway, so it’s fitting that you’d want to break the law in order to warn other drivers about their own law-breaking.

You’ve possibly double-narked by outing me as someone who contemplated touching something in her car in the last paragraph, and now as someone who has occasionally done illegal things in her car. So you’re clearly not against narking in general, just against cops.

NZTA has guidelines on phone use in the car, and it is only “legal” to use a phone for navigation on apps like Google Maps when the phone is either:

  • “secured in a mounting fixed to the vehicle and doesn’t obstruct the driver’s view of the road. Drivers are encouraged to set their destination before driving and to rely on the GPS spoken directions rather than looking at the phone, or
  • “able to be operated without touching any part of the phone (eg by Bluetooth or voice activation).”

That doesn’t really clear up the matter of touching an Apple CarPlay or Android Auto display, which admittedly is a minor point to the “narking on cops” argument. But it shows that focused driving and car behaviour is often something that can only be policed by individual conscience and judgment, which surely bumps it into a moral category. You mock this dilemma, but moral it seems to be.

‘If you value The Spinoff and the perspectives we share, support our work by donating today.’
Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

It just seems like a silly thing to worry about. Why not skip thinking about it and let the police do their job? Ignore the feeling that you should be doing anything other than driving while driving, perhaps?

But it’s like its predecessor, the friendly and “pretty legal” light flash.  It satiates a desire for rebellion against egregious revenue-gathering exercises and authority. It’s an “us versus them” exercise. A small fist raised against “the man” in service of your fellow humans. It encourages an odd sense of collegiality on the road, and surely that’s good for building a sense of consideration for your fellow humans you share the road with. 

No, it encourages short-term behaviour change when longer-term punitive measures are likely to do more to change people’s behaviour. Someone might slow down for 300 metres to avoid getting fined. If they got fined, it would act as a greater deterrent. Just drive considerately and safely at all times, and you have nothing to worry about!

Hard to know who is the bigger goody-two-shoes here. Me in sharing the deep anxiety that this small thing causes me, ultimately driven by a question about what kind of person I am, or you with your punitive deterrent talk.

And yet you hesitated, so half of you agrees with me. On one side is your purported belief in old-school courtesy and covert displays of unity and rebellion and your deep-seated fear that’s all falling out of favour. And on the other side is your concern about being a distracted driver and potentially preventing the police from lightly punishing drivers who are breaking the law and endangering people’s lives. That’s why your little hand wavered the other day.

Well, my tiny hand and I will die before giving up the small wave to acknowledge someone letting me into a queue. My hand is off the steering wheel for that, too, you know.

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Keep going!
a background of an oil rig with New zealand dollars and logos from Westpac, BNZ, ANZ and ASB. there are too many acronyms in this story but that is due to the banks
New Zealand banks are implicated in their overseas owner’s investment and loan decisions. (Image: The Spinoff)

SocietyJanuary 15, 2025

How banks can make climate pledges – then keep funding fossil fuels

Contributing writer
a background of an oil rig with New zealand dollars and logos from Westpac, BNZ, ANZ and ASB. there are too many acronyms in this story but that is due to the banks
New Zealand banks are implicated in their overseas owner’s investment and loan decisions. (Image: The Spinoff)

A new report from Australian charity Action Aid reveals how the New Zealand banks’ Australian owners manage to sign up to international climate goals while continuing to fund fossil fuel companies. 

Most people in New Zealand bank with four large banks, all of which are owned by overseas companies. BNZ’s parent company is the National Australia Bank, ANZ is wholly owned by ANZ in Australia, ASB is owned by the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac is a subsidiary of Westpac in Australia. 

All four banks are members of the UN-convened Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). A voluntary organisation, NZBA requires banks to publish emissions targets and transition their lending and investment portfolios “to align with pathways to net-zero by 2050 or sooner”, according to their commitment statement, signed by bank CEOs.

Simultaneously, in the near decade since the Paris Agreement was signed, Australia’s big banks have lent more than AU$61 billion to fossil fuel companies, according to research from Australian charity Action Aid, which particularly focuses on how ongoing climate-caused disaster hurts low-income women, who are 14 times more likely to die in a climate disaster than men.

A digital collage featuring a blue balance scale against skyscrapers. On one side, a red-tinted person is reading a book, while the other side holds a globe. The background is a green-tinted cityscape with modern buildings.
(Photo: Getty Images; additional design The Spinoff)

Two fossil fuel companies that have received big chunks of money from Australian banks are Woodside and Santos, whose emissions in a year are more than most Pacific companies combined. These two companies alone have received more than $5 billion in climate financing since 2016 when banks joined the NZBA. 

How do banks square climate commitments and ongoing fossil fuel funding? One way is to take advantage of NZBA’s requirement that loans have to be made to companies with plans to transition away from fossil fuels. However, “there are well-founded concerns… that member banks will instead continue to finance fossil fuel projects through insufficient target and policy setting,” the Action Aid report says.  

In other words, banks can lend money to companies with transition plans, even if they’re not realistic. “There’s a lot of language like ‘we will engage with clients, we’ll work towards net-zero,” says Katherine Tu, Action Aid’s head of policy and campaigns, who helped write the report. “That’s not strong enough – banks need to say ‘we will decline’ clients without realistic climate plans.”

a pink tinged island with water around it and there is images of money in the waves
As the water rises, the question of how climate action is funded becomes more relevant. Pictured: an island in Kiribati. (Image: The Spinoff/Getty Images)

Another complicated aspect of managing climate funding is that banks can put money into different categories. Companies can get loans directly for a project, or as “corporate financing”, which just means money that can be used for the company’s general activities. Since the banks became members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, there has been much less direct project financing for fossil fuel companies, but continued corporate loans. The banks have also issued more bonds, which operate like an IOU, with the banks accepting the risk of bringing a product to market rather than providing money directly. 

“Banks might say they’re not directly funding oil and gas giants, but they find these loopholes to continue to fund more fossil fuels,” says Tu. Though Action Aid’s research concerns Australian banks, and the New Zealand subsidiaries may have different policies, profits from your home loan still benefit the Australian banks. Smaller New Zealand banks like Kiwibank and The Cooperative have no fossil fuel loans or associated emissions. 

More Reading

What would happen if fossil fuel companies could no longer get loans from banks? The furore around “debanking” cryptocurrency ventures – closing accounts or not allowing accounts to be opened – gives a glimpse of what is possible. Many banks see cryptocurrency as too risky (or scam-ridden) to guarantee. This allegedly makes it much harder for new ventures to start up, although it’s difficult to tell how common cryptocurrency debanking really is. What would happen if banks considered fossil fuels as risky as cryptocurrency or as stigmatised as sex work?

“Not being able to access money can certainly result in delays,” says Tu. “[Australian mining company] Santos has a gas project called Barossa off the coast of Darwin which has been delayed because of the environmental rights and human rights issues.” As a result, developing the project has become much more expensive. Fossil fuel producers and contractors have also told the Australian government that financial decisions made by investors and insurers wanting to reduce their exposure to fossil fuels have made it much harder for them to get funding or underwriting for projects. 

Pressuring banks to cease investment in fossil fuels is part of the divestment movement, an effort to get institutions like universities to stop profiting from investments in fossil fuels. Spearheaded by the group 350.org, the campaign has seen organisations with more than $40 trillion (USD) in assets committing to no longer financing fossil fuels. While it’s been argued that divesting will just mean less-transparent nationalised oil companies can make more profits, public pressure has clearly had an impact – and has in many cases led to financial gain for the organisations divesting.

The ease with which you can navigate a banking app to open a new term deposit or apply for a credit card might seem a world away from homes destroyed by wildfires or the stress of food shortages caused by rising temperatures. Yet through the financial system, all is connected. “By continuing to fund fossil fuels, banks fund the climate crisis – this affects us all,” says Tu.

‘If you value The Spinoff and the perspectives we share, support our work by donating today.’
Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

Society