Speaker by Various Artists

Let me tell you something about fear; about what happens to the pit of your stomach when sirens go off and bombs rain down on your city; about what happens when you are woken up in the middle of the night by your frantic parents who are shaking with fear; about when your dreams are reduced to staying alive, and when all you can ever hope for is for peace. Let me tell you; it’s awful!

And when you are young, like I was during the Iran-Iraq war, your sense of danger heightens.

With each whistling sound that came before the explosions, I assumed our house was the target. A light left on at a neighbour’s house during the bombardments would send me into a panic that our whole street would be wiped out soon. Food shortages, rations for everything, the long queues and the tapes on our windows at home, were constant reminders of war.

I was fortunate enough to be able to leave behind the trauma of a bloody revolution and the war that followed it, and take sanctuary in the country of my birth, the UK.

For millions of Syrians, the daily life is much more horrific than anything that I experienced in Iran. It is utter desperation that leads so many to risk so much to reach safety. Many refugees experience dislocation within their own country first before deciding to move across the border in search of safety.

For refugees fleeing war, life is a constant game of hide-and-seek with death.

Every refugee has a unique story. The Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was washed ashore on a beach in Turkey was named Aylan; an Arabic name which, figuratively speaking, means “great”, “supreme”.

It is not too farfetched to assume that all Aylan’s parents wanted was a chance to keep him safe, and for him to have the opportunity to live up to his name.  

Some have questioned Aylan’s parents’ decision to leave the safety of Turkey, a decision that led to Aylan’s tragic death.  

The clue to explaining their decision not to stay in Turkey is in their surname “Kurdi” which means “ from Kurdistan”. Aylan’s father is a Syrian Kurd.

Anyone who knows anything about the Turkish history would tell you that, at best of times, Turkey is not a welcoming place for Kurds.

Having said that, Turkey must be commended for taking over 2 million refugees so far; but life for Syrian refugees, especially for the Kurdish Syrians, is not easy.  

Turkish forces have been accused of targeting the ISIS-fighting Kurds in Syria and have recently launched raids on Kurdish PKK militants in Iraq. These developments, together with burgeoning refugee camps in Turkey, are seen as serious sources of instability and threats especially to Syrian Kurds.  

Aylan’s father is, no doubt, laden with enormous sense of regret but we must understand the desperate circumstances that force refugees to risk their lives.

We also need to understand who created those circumstances and how the situation in Syria developed into a humanitarian crisis.  

The Free Syrian Army was formed in August of 2011 by army deserters based in Turkey. The Western and Gulf Arab backers of the Syrian opposition encouraged it to grow and merge with other regional armed forces.

As early as 2012, the American Defense Intelligence Agency was fully aware that the Syrian opposition included known Islamist terrorist groups such as the Salifists and Al-Qaeda, but despite this knowledge, they continued to arm and fund the Syrian insurgencies in the hope of toppling the Assad regime.

It is widely accepted amongst the analysts that the chaos created by the resultant civil war led to the rise and strengthening of ISIS in Syria.

In addition to President Assad’s barrel bombs, the Syrian civilians have had the great misfortune of falling victims to the illegal airstrikes conducted by the US and its regional and NATO allies in their country.

In complete violation of Syrian national sovereignty and international law, the airstrikes continue as part of a two-pronged war designed by the US and its allies to weaken the Syrian government and defeat friends-turned-foes ISIS militants.

There is little doubt that the misguided American and European policies have contributed significantly to the creation of millions of refugees in Syria, Iraq. Afghanistan and Libya.

Desperate Yemenis will soon add to the rising tide of refugees turning up at Europe’s doorsteps.

America’s greatest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, is continuing its illegal war in Yemen; bombing and starving the Yemenis with arms and logistical support provided by the US.

Europe should now face the consequences of its blind support for the US’s foreign policies and deal with the human cost of their misguided strategy in the Middle East and North Africa.  

But how about New Zealand: why should we have to respond to the current refugee crisis?

We have a moral obligation, as a member of the United Nations, to respond to the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding before our eyes. In addition, we are also involved in the foreign meddling in the Middle East that has done nothing but to strengthen the hands of ISIS.

The decision to take part in the war in the Middle East obliges us to also take responsibility for the consequences of that war.

But what about the argument that we cannot afford to take on more refugees and that we should look after our own needy people first?

It is a shame that people who make this argument did not apply it to the deployment of our troops to the Middle East.

The cost of sending our soldiers to the Middle East for two years happens to be exactly the same cost as doubling our refugee quota; $60m.

On the face of it, $60m seems like a lot of money, but don’t forget that we are spending half as much on the flag referendum alone. The total cost of a new flag is estimated at $70m.

Then there are our government’s subsidies and various tax credits to big businesses that, by comparison, will dwarf Government’s required contribution to the refugee crisis.

Simply put, the money argument doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny because we are asking the government to get their priorities right, not to spend more money.

Incidentally, that reorganisation of priorities includes addressing the needs of our own people, who may not be facing the same life-threating dangers as some refugees do, but certainly deserve to have their needs addressed too.        

Furthermore, the cost of resettling refugees in New Zealand does not take into account the potential benefits and contributions that will be made by this group in the future.

It will not surprise me to learn that many of the current refugees are highly educated and skilled people, surgeons, engineers, academics etc., who will be able to offer their talents and skills, paid-for by their home country, to the benefit of our society.

Refugee families are usually highly motivated to make the best of the precious opportunities that are given to them. Our own Prime Minister, a son of a refugee, is a good example.

But how about cultural clashes, and the possibility of Muslim fanatics stirring up the same problems here as they have elsewhere?

Yes, the people who will arrive here will have a different culture, just like I have and just like the Dutch, the British, the Fijians and many other minority groups have. The Kiwi culture is already a mosaic of many cultures; refugees’ cultures will only add more colour and vibrancy to our country.

Also, let’s not forget that these refugees are fleeing extremism; their prime goal is to seek safety and peace for their families. Social cohesion is only threatened when minorities are marginalised and discriminated against. It is our response, as a society, which will determine whether we will end up with a pluralistic society or become a racially and religiously intolerant nation.

The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving and law-abiding people who make excellent citizens in their adopted countries; don’t let Islamophobic ideas persuade you otherwise.

Here in Canterbury, we were so grateful to the international community for helping us in the aftermath of the earthquakes. With the Alpine fault running up the spine of our country, many of us might have to look for outside help again.

Let’s do our fair share and help those who desperately need our help now. There are really no excuses for not doubling our quota.

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Donna Mojab (Donna Miles) is a British-born, Iranian-bred, New Zealand citizen with a strong interest in human rights, justice and equality issues. Mojab worked as a senior mathematics lecturer in the United Kingdom for 10 years before migrating to New Zealand as a new mother. Mojab currently works and resides in Christchurch.

I've been playing with the New Zealand Electoral Survey data for the 2011 election and what interests me more than arguments about voters and parties and alliances is what we can see in the data about why people vote, and what the data points to as what we as individuals can do about the declining voting rate.

Looking through the Election Survey data, you can ask the computer to build a model of important predictors of voting. Then you spend a while going “no, don’t use that variable” and redoing the model (then repeating the excluding of variables).

There were a number of reasons I was removing variables – for example, that they were too specific to a party to be of general use. (As a technical note, this is just playing with the survey results themselves, without working through the weightings to make them representative of the general population.)

Early on in the process, the computer recommended that, in 2011, liking Phil Goff was a strong predictor of voting.

What was important was not that you liked Phil Goff, it was having any opinion at all. Do know (99) matched to a 66% likelihood to vote, while having any other opinion at all matched to between 85% (right in the middle, so knowing you neither like nor dislike vote) and 93% for the highest voter turnout. What it was saying is that having an interest in politics is important – it was just saying it in a way that was party specific, and I didn’t want that party based view.

It also told me age was important, which I also discarded.

Basically, the 18-26 year olds (as I divide it up in this graph) are not-voting at about twice the rate of the next cohort. But age is not something you can do anything about, so it is not actually use for guiding individual behavior (at a government level, the voting age could be lowered and students enrolled at school, but that is not an individual action).

Another thing that it showed, and I discarded, was going to church.

While there is a 14% non-voting rate among those declaring No religion, and a 9% non-vote rate among those declaring themselves Very Religious, telling people to get a religion to increase the voting rate is a non-starter. Anyway, I suspect it is putting the cart before the horse, as other concepts tied in with “dutifulness” have shown up as well.

So, after checking, and discarding 35 or so variables, what the computer was suggesting to me was a fairly straightforward model.

Let's go through what the variables are and what it means in terms of actions people can actually take.

jknow  is top of the list, and is "Political Knowledge Scale". It is representative of all of the “knowing things about politics” measures.

While it is not wonderfully clear in a bar graph, there is a steady progression in political knowledge and voting.

So, the single biggest thing people can do, acting in a private capacity, is increase other people's knowledge of politics. If, through talking to them, you increase their knowledge of politics from 0 to 0.5 (nothing to half informed) you increase their chance of voting from 67% to 89%, and they are a more informed voter (but that is more about how they are voting than participating in the process).

I think this is what was behind discarded variables like “Liking Phil Goff”. If you have enough knowledge of politics to form an opinion about the then leader of the main opposition party, you were highly likely to vote.

jduty is the response to the proposition “it is a citizen's duty to vote”:

Rendered as a line plot of the proportions this looks like:

 

This initially seems not something we can do much about in a liberal democracy, without resorting to clichés like “Make young people do national service” (or, indeed, as an entire generation missed it, “Make everyone do national service”) and maybe in a hand-wavy unexplained way they will get a sense of duty.

But I want to make the point that the duty criteria is applying to people who slip past the knowledge one – so knowledge trumps duty. Now, they may be interlinked (I haven’t explored that) and knowledge could lead to a feeling of duty, but regardless, duty doesn’t matter if people have enough knowledge to vote.

I also suspect that this ties in with variables like religiosity – people who are dutiful about attending church bring that duty to the voting process, regardless of political knowledge.

There are plenty of other posts that could also be made about increasing people's sense of duty/care for society/involvement in society, but you won’t find that data in the Election Survey. The practical step is to increase knowledge (talk to people).

Jdiffvot is short for jdiffvoting and is based on the question “does voting make any difference to what happens?”, so is very much in the engagement/enthusiasm/knowledge area.

This is a rising pattern with not a lot of difference between extreme and mild answers.

Now actual disengagement/rejection of the political process is a hard one for individuals to do much about (parties can clearly offer alternatives and carry them out), but this does only kick in for those who aren’t voting due to knowledge or duty, so it is making less of a difference.

jmpspaci is short for jmpspacific, the question that asks “how many Pacific MPs should there be?”

This sounds like a hot-button topic, but bear with me on this. The actual percentages are:

 

There are two groups not-voting here – the Don’t Know, and the Fewer. The “Don’t Know” can be fixed way up the chain in the political knowledge section. And as for the “Fewer”…

Well, to be honest, if someone who doesn’t know much about politics and doesn’t feel it is a duty to vote, feels that voting can make a difference, and feels (despite having a low political knowledge) that there should be fewer Pacific Island MPs, I personally am not that motivated in finding a way to get them to vote.

Now, there are other groups where things effect voting – for example English language fluency, but in terms of a simple model that makes the most difference the computer recommended this one (which suggests that those groups are smaller in number and their needs are more specific). While a different exercise could be conducted to find a set of needs and independent interventions. A quick easy thing you can do, if you want to increase election turnout is talk politics- at the hairdresser, in the supermarket, on the bus or train. The question is, do people want to increase turnout enough to do that?

Finally, in a show your working kind of way, if anyone wants to review my R code, it is here on Github. 

They were, until a few months ago, the biggest company you’d never heard of. Well, that’s not entirely true. In New Zealand, Serco are not a big company. They have two public sector contracts, just two. Unfortunately, you already know about those two contracts. Because they’re in New Zealand’s prisons.

It would be nice to say that this was a unique set of circumstances, that the fact that Mt Eden Corrections Facility is a remand prison meant that there were always going to be problems. I say that because that is exactly what the Minister for Corrections said when he was challenged on the rates of violence at Mt Eden on TV3’s The Nation. That was in May, before the Fight Club allegations had surfaced.

It would also be nice to dismiss Serco overcharging the UK Government by NZD $164,776,181 for tagging ex-offenders who had either returned to prison, left the country or were dead. As well as their chronic mismanagement of Fiona Stanley Hospital in Australia. Not to mention forgetting that Serco only managed to make a profit in 2014 from the lucrative nature of their contracts with the Australian Government and their deeply awful refugee policy. Actually, no, it wouldn’t.

The Department of Corrections is currently investigating the fight clubs, arrests of prisoners for managing a meth ring, the guards offering ‘sparring tips’, and much more. What was supposed to take a month is now going to take four, with Phase 1 reporting October 30th and Phase 2 on November 30th. If you’re seeking the way to minimise the impact of what is clearly a catastrophic systemic failure, punting that far down the line and breaking up the report is definitely one way of doing it.

But basically, it’s just not thorough enough. Prison officers don’t have faith in Corrections to conduct their investigation with integrity. Ex-inmates fear speaking out, in case of retribution if they end up back inside. And while Serco have mismanaged Mt Eden, surely some questions need to be put to Corrections and the Minister for Corrections about exactly why they needed leaked videos on YouTube to let them know one of their prisons was failing?

And boy have they failed. They failed in the UK, they failed in Australia and they’ve failed here. But the investigation isn’t focusing on the systemic problems caused by a company who slash staff numbers to make a profit. It’s not recognising the tragic history of Serco involvement in overseas public services. The problem isn’t fight clubs, it’s not prisoners. It’s Serco.

What’s needed is an independent inquiry. Labour’s Kelvin Davis has called for one as this whole mess unfolded. David Clendon of NZ Greens has also called for their contract to be cancelled. The idea of an independent investigation is supported by the Howard League For Penal Reform, the Corrections Association of New Zealand and the PSA. Because unlike many, many other countries New Zealand lacks a truly independent inspectorate of prisons. Say No To Serco Aotearoa is joining the politicians and the unions in calling for an independent inquiry.

Despite all the failures, Serco will continue to make money from Mt Eden. Because their contract ensures they will. The fines that Sam Lotu-Iiga has talked about aren’t fines, they’re just not paying them their performance bonuses. Bonuses which make up 10% of the contract. The other 90% is, contractually, untouchable.

There’s obviously more to do here. In New Zealand Serco are not a big company. Sure, they have a $300,000,000 contract for Mt Eden. Yes, they’re expecting $30,000,000 a year in profit from South Auckland Wiri prison. But that’s just two contracts. With social impact bonds and social housing up for privatisation in the future, you can bet Serco will express an interest.

Why? Because that’s what they do. Serco don’t stop just because they’ve been a catastrophic failure in one part of the public sector. They’re dedicated, it seems, to making a profit while failing to deliver lots of different public services. Right now, we’re in a good position to ensure that Serco don’t make a first class profit, while New Zealand gets second class services.

So, while we’re asking for an independent inquiry into the Mt Eden fiasco, we’re also demanding a moratorium on Serco being considered for any further public sector contracts. It makes sense. Why would you give them a second chance in New Zealand, when the number of chances and failures globally far exceed that number?

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With help from the wonderful ActionStation, we’ve started a petition calling for an independent inquiry and a moratorium on Serco bids for New Zealand’s public services. You can sign up, here. Our campaign is in its early stages, and your support is vital You can find us on Facebook here, or track the hashtag #NoToSerco on twitter.

Thanks,

John Palethorpe

No To Serco Aotearoa

In my last post I talked a lot about the problem with problem-focused messaging and the power of metaphors and frames in changing how people think about complex issues. But to change how others think about inequality we have to unpack how we think about it and what we actually want.

‘Inequality’ on its own doesn’t actually mean anything. What bothers us is not a single metric getting worse – it’s the steady transformation in our idea of what society should be.  Inequality is one part of a wider ecosystem of concepts about society and our place in it, including the role of government and the function of the economy. And our language around it isn’t great.

The political right have a fairly consistent ecosystem of language to articulate their worldview on these concepts. They know what they want and can communicate it, and this is not by accident. It comes from the robust American research, where think tanks have been using focus groups, surveys and endless testing to perfect it since the 60’s. And since the 80’s that language has found its way into New Zealand’s political discourse.  

One key concept which currently gives the right its linguistic strength is how they frame the economy. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a leading communications researcher, analysed data from multiple sources on all sides of the political spectrum in the USA, to understand the underlying metaphors they use to talk about the economy.  She found there were around eight distinct metaphors, and what’s more, there was a noticeable difference between the ones used by progressives and conservative economists.

An argument you probably hear a lot from the right goes something like “You can’t do that, it will hurt the economy”. It may not sound like they’re using a metaphor but they are. You can only hurt living things.  The underlying metaphor is that of the body. Living beings have agency, and are better off free; so any interference by us to “restrain the economy” is seen as something that’s inherently unnatural and should be avoided.

By contrast, you might have heard how “Wall St bankers crashed the economy”. In that phrase is a metaphor of the economy as a vehicle in motion: an object created by humans to perform a certain function; to get people to where they want to go. Suddenly having government “in the driving seat” seems natural and obvious, as does “making sure nobody gets left behind.”

The most interesting part is that all this happens subconsciously.  If you want to read up on some of the other metaphors Shenker-Osorio mapped, have a read of the original document here.

There is pretty much no way to use neutral language when talking about the economy. It’s a very abstract concept, so we have to use more familiar physical concepts to both understand and communicate what’s going on. There’s almost always some kind of subtle underlying metaphor in every mention of the economy or markets. So the economy is “thriving” or “sick”, or “picking up speed” or “slowing down”, or – as you might have heard in the last week “Dairy is the backbone of our economy”, or we’re running into “head winds in the market.”  

The right wing frame of the economy is so common that it’s hard not to use it even when you disagree with the premise. Say, for example, you’re a progressive and you go on TV and say something like “This [climate/tax] policy won’t hurt the economy” – by even using the language of “hurt”, you’ve reinforced the right-wing framing of the economy as a free, independent, living thing that needs a hands-off approach.  Their frames contribute a long way to why their ideas have become the near unquestioned norms.  

It doesn’t have to be that way. If you say “This [climate/tax] policy will steer our economy in the right direction”, the audience starts to see the economy as something that has been created by humans for a particular purpose - to improve general well-being. The economy is guided by real people in positions of power who make real decisions that are moral choices, and our language needs to reflect that.

Only once we have a consistent frame for the economy can we bring in the frames for inequality itself, where we once again go to the work of Shenker-Osorio.  I’m not sure how she found enough conservatives who thought inequality existed in the USA, but the results are just an interesting as with the economy.   A very common metaphor is that of the horizontal gap. E.g: the gap is widening, and so on.

Talking about a ‘gap’ ignores causation – what or who created it? And what’s wrong with it?  And there’s nothing there that indicates to the fact that we live in a society that is interconnected and interdependent.

Also quite common is ‘the vertical gap’. E.g: “too many are at the bottom, and need a hand up”. Unfortunately all language naturally attributes moral superiority to being on top (upright vs lowdown), so it’s not a big leap to think that those on the bottom deserve their situation.  

A better metaphor - and one the NZ Greens have started using – is that of imbalance.   You don’t have to explain why it’s bad: being off balance is just not a great feeling. It also gets across the idea that we’re all part of the same interconnected system, and that inequality is bad for everyone, not just the poor.  With a little bit of effort we can connect ‘bad policy choices’ to ‘putting our society out of balance’, and put some agency back into the picture: we have the power to rebalance things.

There’s also inequality as a barrier, something that prevents you from getting where you want to go. This can be used well with the metaphor of the economy as a vehicle. “Inequality is holding back our economic power by keeping tens of thousands of kiwis from getting ahead.”

I personally found this metaphor quite a challenge to use elegantly.  But someone a LOT smarter than me made several historic speeches on inequality using this metaphor before anyone even imagined these studies.

“One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” - Rev. Martin Luther King

If you want more detail on this and other metaphors I highly recommend you read Shenker-Osorio’s paper on inequality here.

As for metaphors for the government itself: again we don’t have too much local research, but framing pioneer George Lakoff found that in the USA both sides of the political spectrum use the same metaphor – that of the family. Our family is the first form of governance we encounter, so we naturally attribute that metaphor to the government.  That’s why we hear terms like “Motherland” and “Father of our Nation” or, more locally “nanny state” and “Aunty Helen”.  If you don’t have the time to read any of Lakoff’s books, this hour-long YouTube video is pretty much what introduced me to the field of framing back in 2012 – essentially ideological differences boil down to differences in views on parenting.  

Of course the task of reframing our language doesn’t end there. We also have to re-examine public (and our own) perceptions of the poor and the rich. There’s very interesting research from the UK that indicates that even some of those in poverty don’t necessarily think of themselves as ‘poor.’ Which might be one explanation why the Labour Party has so much trouble reaching the ‘missing million’ last election.

The systemic drivers of poverty and inequality are everywhere, from education to housing, to health, to crime and policing, to regulation of pokies and sugar. Each of these issues can be framed in different ways using competing metaphors. It’s complicated, but it’s also powerful, and empowering. Because being able to communicate what you actually believe can even the playing field in public debate.  

There’s some pretty fresh local research to back this up by Peter Skilling at AUT. He ran several focus groups on inequality, to see what effect (if any) “open discussion between people with competing views” might have on people’s opinions. Or, more generally, to see what arguments were most powerful in the context of debate and discussion. What he found was that there was very little evidence of people changing their views on inequality through deliberation for a very interesting reason.

During the course of the focus groups, many people who said they supported greater equality found it difficult to argue in support of their egalitarian commitments when faced with opposing views.  More specifically, they found it hard to defend their original opinions once someone else argued that greater equality wasn’t possible, given “the realities of the marketplace.” Appeals to the norms of market competitiveness and of individual responsibility tended to be pretty effective in ending further debate.

Developing our own ecosystem of frames and metaphors across issues will mean that progressives will have the tools they need to challenge those norms, and actually have a fair debate about where we as a society should be going.  

Ultimately framing is a way for us to say what we mean and be true to our values, and not get caught up in saying things we don’t believe to try and “meet people halfway”.  And you know what, people appreciate and respect honesty.

If you do want to know more about framing on your particular issue or passion I have come across quite a few other studies from my wanderings but it would be quite impractical to list it all out here. So feel free to get in touch with me, or (shameless plug ahead), come along to Step it Up 2015 and chat to Anat Shenker-Osorio, one of the smartest researchers in the world in this space.  You’ll also get to meet and collaborate with some brilliant kiwis who are leading the progressive movement in New Zealand across pretty much every major issue.

 t: @kirkserpes

w: www.nzprogress.org.nz

Over the past four decades, the business model for all media has been completely disrupted by the internet as established patterns of media consumption have completely changed.

Online time is now equal to TV watching time at around 14 hours per week - and roughly half that time is spent on Facebook. Here in New Zealand, advertising revenue for digital/interactive will overtake that for television for the first time this year. It overtook newspapers about two years ago and radio a year before that.

The sad fact is that this revenue isn’t going to online news publishers.

Roughly half of the global revenue goes to Facebook and Google alone. News organisations have responded by trying to build innovative revenue models based around new kinds of advertising product suites, but reality seems to have a different view. While people support a strong news media that speak truth to power, it appears they don't want to devote large amounts of their time (or money) to viewing or reading news, preferring to use their online time to pursue their niche interests within a globalised community.

Our site, Scoop, has not escaped this disruption. Our advertising revenue peaked in 2007, after which it has steadily declined. After the 2014 election advertising sales fell off a cliff, hastened by one consequence of 'Dirty Politics' - the perception that news media in general and internet media in particular were implicated in something that made us all feel bad.

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Scoop then went back to the drawing board. We knew that if we wanted to survive we would need to change radically and rapidly. So last year we launched 'Operation Chrysalis.' This was an effort to secure a sustainable platform for Scoop in the future and it has three legs:

• Truth - We wanted to break the complacency and silence around the state of NZ news media as a first step towards solving the problems facing us. We needed to identify and understand the nature of these problems, so we started a public conversation about the “State of the NZ News Media.” Our timing – just before the “Save Campbell Live” controversy – was fortuitous and the conversation is now bearing fruit in sparking a debate about its future and an increased level of reporting about the challenges facing the industry.

• Trust - The loss of trust in news media has created a vicious cycle of value destruction which needs to be addressed. 'Operation Chrysalis' introduced our plan to convert Scoop into a not-for-profit organisation. We hope to create a news organisation about which people feel a sense of ownership and in which they’re able to invest a high level of trust and faith. We‘re currently working on publicly releasing the legal structure of the New Scoop for public consultation.

• Sustainability - We concluded that the advertising revenue business models for news being developed elsewhere in the world simply aren’t applicable in NZ. This is where our ethical paywall came in. Its origins are in response to a 2011 UK Court of Appeal decision, NLA vs Meltwater. Meltwater is a global media monitoring company that scrapes the web, trawling for news that’s of interest to their clients and sending them reports.

A year later, Scoop soft-launched its new approach in an editorial and we amended our terms of use to reflect this. Scoop's application of the principles in the case is not without precedent. There are lots of software distributors who have free public versions of software but who assert the right to be paid for commercial use. Our claim is that Scoop has a right to set its own terms of use. If organisations who are informed of those terms continue to use Scoop, they are ethically obliged to honour those conditions and get a licence.

It’s one thing to figure out a new method of making a news organisation sustainable and quite another to get people to agree to it. Asking people to pay for a publicly accessible website is problematic and our experience of introducing it has been both challenging and instructive.

What we've learned is that people are more willing to accept what we’re doing once they understand not only the context of why we’re instituting the model (and how it benefits them), but also the nature of their staff's usage of Scoop for professional purposes.

Here's our argument: As collectors and curators of news content, our approach is principled and reflective. While most media select and filter the news, our approach has always been to publish it all. We estimate that at least half of the content that we publish never makes it into the mainstream media. We're committed to providing public access to our fully-faceted search engine because in doing so we're strengthening our democracy and creating the value which will sustain us.

Scoop has about a million pages in our database, all indexed by Google and freely accessible to the public. We furnish a full-text search engine which allows users to drill into the content by source, tags, and date ranges. Consequently, we're the deepest and richest source of actionable intelligence in the NZ information ecosystem.

The press releases which form most of our content are a crucial form of communication. It's immediately clear who they are from and almost certain that the person quoted will stand by what they are saying. They are usually produced by a team, often including the CEO, and are therefore expensive to produce. Anything stated in a press release has not only been signed off by the people quoted in it, but also by a range of other stakeholders involved in the announcement.

Press releases are certainly a subjective view from the perspective of a particular organisation or person, but they can be relied upon as an accurate and nuanced expression of that viewpoint. In contrast, when you read something in a news article written by a journalist there’s a transformation process involved. Facts and assertions are interpreted, supplemented, checked, and sometimes critiqued. This is also useful, but in a different way.

Our professional users consistently tell us that what they most value about Scoop is that they’re able to read all the information from the source and draw their own conclusions about what’s important and what it means. Scoop provides a voice to all comers across the political spectrum to debate a variety of issues and allows the community to respond in real time. Media commentator Russell Brown has described us as "the home of the national argument."

When people send material to Scoop they reach a highly influential audience. When we publish an item it’s instantaneously indexed by Google, which ensures that their version of what’s happening can be found alongside the interpreted views relayed via the mainstream media.

As a result, Scoop acts as a magnet to content from people who are seeking to be heard - and publication by Scoop often provides the most high profile outlet for their material. Our product is more valuable to the professionals who routinely use it precisely because it’s free: if Scoop charged for publication, we wouldn’t have a comprehensive set of all the day’s press releases; and if we charged for access to our website, we would reduce the visibility of the releases.

For many of those who have accepted our invitation to become licence-holders, ethical and  legal questions have often been secondary to the question of utility. This makes perfect sense, since Copyright Law has always been about utility. In order to encourage the publication of useful and enlightening books and music there needs to be protection of the creative rights of those who create the work.

Scoop adds value to the content that it collects, curates, and makes available to everybody as a public resource. Some derive non-business benefits from that activity, whilst others obtain direct business benefits. We enable them to do their jobs more efficiently and productively, knowing that they are as well-informed about the deep background as everybody else.

When professional usage of Scoop is fully understood, our clients accept that Scoop's approach to news is useful to them. Above all else, we furnish an invaluable set of news content - and the fact that we’ve done so consistently for so long is the reason why we have such a large and loyal audience.

The depth, richness, and diversity of our database provides a yardstick for purchasers of Scoop licences to compare what we provide with other commercial products. When our consumers and contributors make this connection, we’re convinced that we will come on out on top.

Alastair Thompson is the Publisher and editor of Scoop.co.nz