The budget can feel like a short-lived newsapalooza but follow-ups from journalists this week got into the stories and impact behind the numbers, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in The Bulletin
Beyond the budget week headlines
The budget is reported in a flurry of press releases and numbers. It’s too easy in a daily news environment to file your last bumper budget edition and say “it’s done”. I am specifically talking about me after last week. We had the first follow-up to a large pre-budget announcement yesterday with details of a $6m plan to help retailers protect against ram raids. I thought it would be worth looking at some great follow-ups from this week that go beyond the initial announcements and the “we love it/we hate it” reactions.
Cats: the elephant in the room
Newsroom’s David William’s has written this superb example of taking a comparatively small allocation and digging into the story behind it. Budget 2022 allocated $7.1m towards a programme to save the endangered Māui dolphin. As Williams writes, “the programme was deemed so important a picture of Māui dolphins adorned the ministerial press release”. Williams starts by asking why, for a species on the brink of extinction, funding for the work doesn’t start until mid next year. It goes from there and is a truly great deep dive into scientific spats, the seafood industry, cats and government departments being concerned about sounding like Gareth Morgan.
Justice funding revives optimism after years of little progress
The NZ Herald’s Derek Cheng has picked up on the justice allocations in the budget looking at legal aid and support for victims of crime. This goes beyond last week’s budget and back to the sense of optimism about change in the justice sector after a series of government-run summits in 2017. Little progress has been made since then. Budget 2022 allocated $45.7m towards a victims operating model. It has renewed optimism among those who’ve been calling for change since 2015. On legal aid, inadequate pay for legal aid work has been one of the biggest deterrents for lawyers. From July, the rate will be lifted by 12% but Law Society president Jacque Lethbridge has said more needs to be done to ensure people have access to legal aid.
Mediawatch goes hunting for a long-promised strategy
RNZ’s MediaWatch picked up on the $40 million for Māori media in the budget. It follows a similar increase the year before. Mediawatch isn’t critical of the funding but has asked where a long-awaited Māori media strategy review is. The Māori Media Sector Shift review was launched in 2018 by Nanaia Mahuta. In 2020, a document was released that proposed a “one-stop shop” for Māori media. It was not beloved by the sector. Willie Jackson took over the portfolio and appointed a new Māori Broadcasting Advisory Panel to rethink things. Hayden Donnell spoke to Ella Henry, who stepped down as chair of the advisory panel last year, about where the review might be at.