The Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy submitted its report to the Australian senate last month. Unsurprisingly, they found that, in a post-truth world, bombarded by AI, social media and billionaire-owned broadcasters, misinformation is rife and could be considered a threat to Australia’s democracy.

We’re not talking about placard-waving activists or fringe political parties here. A former chief of the Australian Defence Force is talking about how climate misinformation is speeding our descent into catastrophic global heating that will “crash society as we know it”.

Meanwhile, back in Aotearoa, Resources Minister Shane Jones talks about the “moral hysteria of climate change.”

It’s not a coincidence that that quote comes from a speech he delivered in Taranaki, New Zealand’s oil fields, where he focussed on economic and energy security for the region, as he pledged to help his audience keep extracting our natural resources. These tactics are straight from the disinformation playbook started by big tobacco in the 1950s and ‘60s and perpetuated by polluting companies ever since. Being “merchants of doubt” means that big oil has no need to overturn the scientific consensus. They only need to seed queries in the minds of the public (their customers) to keep the false controversy alive and maintain the status quo - oil as a daily concern. It’s also no coincidence that the main narrative of big oil’s advertising and PR campaigns has moved from energy security to fossil fuel dependence over the last 5 years.

Unfortunately, in some ways, they’re right. Our society does overwhelmingly rely on the supply of cheap oil to run the way it does. However, we now know what the consequences of continuing to live the way we do will mean. We’re seeing it in the extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency and intensity on both sides of the Tasman. What the Australian Select Committee has highlighted, is that these vested interests are doing everything they can to keep the fuel lines pumping rather than help the transition, despite what the sustainability pages on their corporate websites say.

What does this mean for New Zealand?

In some ways, we’re even more vulnerable to misinformation and unseen influence here in Aotearoa. Australia has lobbying laws. Anyone acting on behalf of third-party clients, trying to get into the ear of politicians, must be registered. We don’t have any such laws. In 2023, the Ministry of Justice was tasked with helping third-party lobbyists develop a voluntary code of conduct and review “different policy options for regulating lobbying activities.” However, the MoJ website says they’re currently “assessing the scale and scope of any review” and there have been no updates for almost two years. This leaves our politicians open to be influenced by big industry with deep pockets.

Just hours after announcing a new LNG terminal as the supposed solution to New Zealand’s energy worries, Climate Change and then-Energy Minister Simon Watts and Resources Minister Shane Jones were both at a breakfast event co-hosted by fossil fuel lobby group Energy Resources Aotearoa.

While the LNG plan has been slammed by multiple energy experts as locking in further dependence on foreign fossil fuels, Energy Resources Aotearoa head John Carnegie was in a small minority of commentators to welcome the LNG plan. He is also on record criticising the previous Labour Government for helping companies get off coal and gas and shrinking demand for fossil fuels in the process.

On the same day as the fossil fuel breakfast, it was revealed that New Zealand has sunk further in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, while the Government’s Anti-Corruption Taskforce released its first pilot report, flagging potentially billions of dollars in public-sector fraud.

New Zealand remains the only Five Eyes country without a whole-of-government national anti-corruption strategy. With no lobbying register – the OECD ranks us 34th out of 38 countries for regulating influence on policymaking. We have no cooling-off period for ministers entering lobbying. We have no beneficial ownership register and no independent anti-corruption commission.

Industry influence

Recent changes to tobacco laws offer a glaring example of industry influence. Tobacco regulation has been one of the most successful examples of public health regulation globally, with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control now ratified by parties that represent over 90% of the world’s population.

Which brings us back to Shane Jones and his buddies.

The current coalition government repealed Aotearoa’s world-leading tobacco regulation. This was not something any of the coalition parties had campaigned on, yet it was one of the first actions taken in their first months in office. The Public Health Communication Centre outlined how closely politicians across all three coalition parties modeled their talking points on propaganda seeded by the tobacco industry. The difference between tobacco and climate change is that people noticed this break from the social norm. Smoking has lost its social license; decades of dedicated work by non-profits, health professionals and regulators meant that within my parent’s lifetime smoking went from being a signifier of cool to one of shame.

We’re not yet at that point with fossil fuels, which means that when our politicians repeat fossil fuel industry rhetoric (as Shane Jones does) it doesn’t jar us the way the tobacco rhetoric does. Fossil fuels are still a part of everyday life. Current conflicts have illustrated how over reliant our global society is on them. What the Australian Select Committee Report highlights is how much lobbying, sponsorship and disinformation are a part of keeping us reliant on them. It recognizes coordinated campaigns of disinformation amplified through various platforms. These campaigns work on us because they’re all closely tied to how embedded fuel companies are into everyday communities, often through their sponsorship of sport and cultural activities. Activists in WA have pointed out that with sponsorship of Nippers surf lifesaving, the Woodside logo appears about 42,000 times every Sunday in summer. Their logo appears in five different places on the uniform each kid wears.

Over here, BP have been sponsoring Surf Lifesaving NZ for almost 60 years. True, climate change wasn’t in the public consciousness when this partnership started. But it is now. These logos tell us stories of oil corporations saving lives, instead of the truth; use of these products is already taking more lives than smoking each and every year. Along with seeded disinformation (which turns into misinformation) this type of sponsorship and promotion helps us justify doing what we’ve always done, instead of being able to imagine a different future for Aotearoa’s next generation.

The Australian government is taking steps in the right direction. They’re now aware of the threat of coordinated disinformation campaigns and how they affect public consciousness. Hopefully they take the next step and turn these recommendations into policy that helps protect their people and our climate.

Aotearoa needs to catch up. Even though we’re a country known for our sheep, kiwis don’t like having the wool pulled over our eyes.

These corporate communication tactics have been used for decades to encourage mistrust in science. The rise of social media’s controversy-driven algorithm, and now AI’s self-reinforcing tendencies, have given these companies more tools to accelerate the doubt in science they’re peddling.

The question is: are we going to believe them, or do we believe the evidence we see in the extreme weather that’s becoming more frequent and changing the shape of New Zealand?