1Mediawatch for 11 June 2023 How stories about the war in Ukraine ended up with a pro-Russian slant on RNZ's website; reports of crime are on the up but does the story change when reporters run the numbers before running a story?

2[The House] The unbridled Question Time Every Parliamentary Speaker brings a different approach to refereeing the House, especially Question Time. Some Speakers take a light hand, others try to wrest control. The current Speaker is trying something different. He is almost entirely hands-off. Question Time is shorter, louder and more chaotic than it has been for a while; but is it doing its job? [Letting the House run free] Taking over from Trevor Mallard as Parliament’s Speaker, Adrian Rurawhe had a new approach. “Since taking over as Speaker of this House, I've taken on board the commentary from most of the parties in the House that they want a more robust Question Time," he says. "It's really up to this House to decide what it wants.” Trevor Mallard was pretty exacting. His strict control of Question Time likely aggrieved the Opposition. But he was also unusually strict on ministers’ answers to written questions, which benefited the Opposition. Mallard would intervene to rule questions ‘out of order’ as soon as he realised they were veering outside the rules; Adrian Rurawhe allows almost any question to be asked in full and sometimes leaves it to the ministers to decide whether to answer it. “I have allowed questions whether they're out of order or not. If it's the Minister's answer that she doesn't have responsibility, then that's the answer,” Rurawhe says. "If the House wants to tolerate out of order questions and address them, they can.” It’s a simple approach but it has drawbacks. Question Time has increasingly become a contest of political statements couched as questions and answers, but with much less information. [The rules] Question Time has many rules. Questions must not include arguments, inferences, imputations, epithets, ironical expressions or opinions. You can’t make claims that can’t be authenticated. You can’t suggest misconduct, dishonesty or corruption. Many of those things now turn up daily. Rurawhe is letting us judge them ourselves. “I have allowed the questions to be asked and members of the public will make their own judgments around them,” he says. In Parliament false claims from either side can go uncorrected. According to the rules, MPs must not accuse each other of lying because all MPs are presumed to be honourable. Thus false claims are hard to respond to and have become a common tactic. Question Time requires that every claim can be authenticated but no-one is live fact-checking, and only the Speaker could do so. MPs can rebut claims, but if they declare them false they are ordered to “withdraw and apologise”. [If only there was an arbiter] Periodically, MPs complain that it’s getting out of hand. When that happens, the Speaker has tended to threaten that he can blow his whistle if the House wishes him to. The whistle remains deep in his pocket, but Rurawhe acknowledges the rules are being flouted. “If the House wants to tolerate out of order questions and address them. They can …I think they should be ruled out of order. But …this House has told me that it wants more robust Question Time. Okay, that's entirely up to this house.” It’s not really up to the House though. If an MP thinks something is against the rules they must point it out to the Speaker (in a point of order), because they are the only MP empowered to decide. [Trying to redraw a line] The rules exist as a result of decades worth of Speakers finding ways to negotiate around tricky ethical, political and practical issues. Putting some rules to one side was always going to be hard. Adrian Rurawhe recently decided to adjust his approach to now require some aspect of every question to be inside the rules. “I have let things go. I think I'm going to make a new alteration to the way that I have presided over Question Time. At least one part of the question should be in order for it to be valid.” It brings to mind a rugby referee allowing a try because in the lead up to it ‘at least one of the passes wasn’t forward’. The Opposition appears pleased with fewer strictures. Senior MPs are quick to fend off any suggestion from the Speaker that he enforce more rules. When Michael Woodhouse recently reassured the Speaker that he has “done a very good job of allowing the flow of questions;” his urgency caused MPs to laugh. The questions have become more daring. Last week, Act leader David Seymour implied the Prime Minister’s entire department was corrupt. He wasn’t ejected from the House, or asked to ‘withdraw and apologise’. He even kept two extra gifted supplementaries. [But there are also downsides] Highly political questions are poor at forcing telling answers from ministers. Overseeing the government is the most important job of any parliamentary opposition. That takes more than a competition of statement and counter-statement. The very best weapon of any opposition is a very tight and well constructed question line. It is more effective inside the rules. The idea is the minister hangs themselves by their answers. Flinging accusations they can deny doesn’t achieve that.

3[The House] Rugby, racing and beer: MPs tackle NZ's holy trinity It’s the 2020s, right? Yes, but this week at Parliament you may have thought it was the 1960s. That’s because three dominant cultural forces of yesteryear showed yet again how they still hold sway: rugby, racing and beer. MPs have been making laws to enable access to alcohol at race days and during those early hours at pubs when the rugby world cup is being broadcast from the northern hemisphere. The first of the two bills concerning the sacred nexus of sport and alcohol this week related to the fact that later this year the World Cup of men’s rugby will be played in France, a time zone where games are scheduled at times when most of us here are asleep or something like that. Now, it's well established that people need to be involved with consuming alcohol in order to watch rugby. Pubs are often one of the few places people can get a chance to watch top rugby if they don’t already have Sky Sport TV. So if the game’s on during those wee hours when the pub is not licensed, that’s an obstacle. The government has come to the rescue with the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Rugby World Cup 2023 Extended Trading Hours) Amendment Bill, presented by Justice Minister Kiri Allan on Tuesday. “Time zone differences mean that many matches will be broadcast outside the maximum trading hours for pubs and clubs. For an event as important as the Rugby World Cup, we want to make sure that New Zealanders have options for enjoying live matches whilst also supporting the hospitality sector, and this is what this bill does,” she explained, adding that the bill is based on the amendments made for the 2015 and 2019 Rugby World Cups, which were also played in the Northern Hemisphere. “The bill exempts eligible licence holders from the special licence process and creates a notification system instead, where licence holders provide written notice to police and to their local councils. “The bill only applies to current on-licence and club licence holders that have not had their licence suspended or cancelled in the last year. Extended trading hours only apply to premises that will televise a live match. Extended hours will be treated as the premises' usual trading hours." [Lifelong interest] On Wednesday night, further recalling the spirit of Rod Derrett’s 1965 classic record Rugby, Racing & Beer, another alcohol and sport-related piece of legislation, the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Exemption for Race Meetings) Amendment Bill, was up for its last debate before being passed into law. National MP Ian McKelvie’s Member’s Bill exempts a racing club from the offence of using unlicensed premises as a place for consumption of alcohol, if booze is being consumed on its premises on the day of a race meeting. It's just a small thing, but fixes one area of the law which has curbed the enjoyment of a community that McKelvie has long been a part of. “As a teenager, I tried to train a horse. I've ridden a few, but you can tell I've never been a jockey—I wasn't built that way, unfortunately, or fortunately, whichever way you look at it. And I have had a lifelong interest in racing and have also been the president of a racing club—a two-meeting club, interestingly—and, as I said, have lifelong interests in the racing industry, the breeding industry, and all those things that go with it. "It's a very important industry for New Zealand, it's important that we continue to promote it, and I think that it's essential that we give people the opportunity to enjoy the things that my generation had the opportunity to enjoy, for much the same reasons that we're here looking at this bill now," McKelvie said. These bills don’t just reflect the long-running connection between sport and alcohol - they also speak to who the MPs are as people. Well, at least some of them. ['Ad hoc approach'] The Green Party voted against both these bills. According to Auckland central MP Chlöe Swarbrick, after the recent defeat of her Alcohol Harm Reduction Member’s bill, the question of how to regulate use of alcohol and other drugs so as to best reduce their potential for harm remains unresolved. Yet, as The House discussed on this very day a year ago, this parliamentary term had featured quite a lot of legislation that fights for people's right to access alcohol. This week Swarbrick noted that the Rugby World Cup 2023 Extended Hours Amendment Bill was yet another bill fundamentally about access and availability of "Aotearoa New Zealand's favourite drug, consumed by 80 percent of those of the age to do so, a quarter of them to really harmful ends". "As this House has canvased many debates previously, we do have quite a problem in this country with regards to how deeply intertwined sports and alcohol is. What many speakers have actually touched on is the fact that we are seeing this kind of legislation become ever more frequent. I think that there is an inherent problem with that when we have a kind of predictability of what is fundamentally quite an ad hoc approach and as, actually, my learned colleague from the ACT Party just raised, the fact that this was tabled in lightning speed and that the House is now passing it just as quickly. To that effect, I think that all of us would agree that there is perhaps the need for some greater interrogation of the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012.” During her speech on the Exemptions for Race Meetings Bill last night, Swarbrick asked "why is this only applying to that one section of our society, given that we tend to see criminalisation of substances occurring for other types of communities?" “There is an imputed sense of responsibility, as well, that we're hearing and many speakers have also spoken to with regard to the kinds of environments that a race meet provides - that is: a sense of community and that we're looking after each other in other ways. And to that effect, I'd say why can't we apply that same logical consistency to other substances - for example, when we're looking at cannabis legalisation and control?” McKelvie’s bill went to a conscience vote. As well as the Green Party, roughly half of the Labour Party including Prime Minister Chris Hipkins voted against the Bill. However it ultimately passed by 74 votes to 43 - another vestige of the Kiwi way of life safely secured, at least for now.