New Zealand’s overwhelmingly left-wing news media remain in a collective sulk over last year’s election of the centre-right government led by Christopher Luxon.

The tone was set within days of the election when TVNZ’s highest-profile journalist, its grandiosely titled Chief Correspondent John Campbell, wrote a long, anguished lament over the country’s shift in political direction. His opinion piece, published on the TVNZ website, was headlined, ‘What has the tide brought in?’, implying the new government had washed up like unlovely detritus from a shipwreck. It was the first of several such pieces by Campbell, all written in the same extravagantly whiny tone. This, on the website of a state-owned broadcaster supposedly committed to balance and neutrality.

In the months since, the drumbeat of media resistance against the National-led government has become steadily louder and more insistent. The contrast with the deferential media treatment of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government, when political scandals were ignored, destructive, radical policies escaped scrutiny and opposition groups were magically rendered invisible, could hardly be more marked. Where Ardern was given a free pass, taking tame questions from pet reporters to the extent that her press conferences became a national joke, Luxon and his ministers run a daily gauntlet of aggressive media interrogation.

Denunciation of the government is relentless across all media, with one notable exception, but is most pronounced on TVNZ and Radio New Zealand. Being owned by taxpayers, whose politics span the spectrum from hard left to far right, these are the very media outlets the public should expect to be even-handed in their coverage of news and current affairs.

The notable exception is the Newstalk ZB network, which consistently outrates its state-owned rival. But being generously bankrolled by the taxpayer, RNZ is insulated against commercial pressures and can safely ignore market signals that show it’s out of step with the people it’s supposed to cater to.

Tune into any RNZ news bulletin on any day and you’re likely to hear a wall-to-wall assault on government policies. Hand-wringing academics, trade unionists, teachers, Maori activists, public servants, environmentalists, health campaigners… you can visualise them forming an orderly queue outside the RNZ studios, patiently awaiting their turn on the flagship news and current affairs show, Morning Report. Never has its derisive nickname, Moaning Report, seemed more apposite.

Things are no better at TVNZ. If an issue can be blown up to make Luxon’s government look bad, it will be. An example was the issuing of an invitation to Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to attend New Zealand’s Matariki celebrations in June, which marked the Maori New Year (and which, under Ardern’s government, became a national holiday). Arts and Culture Minister Paul Goldsmith’s advisers wanted him to send Burke a letter including the now-standard Maori greeting ‘tena koe’ (‘hello’) and signing off with the phrase ‘naku noa, na’ (‘humbly yours, from…’). The invitation also used the terminology ‘Aotearoa, New Zealand’ – again, common practice in the New Zealand bureaucracy, although Aotearoa is a name of disputed authenticity whose usage has never been validated by legislation.

Goldsmith did the unthinkable, instructing his officials to delete the Maori words for the eminently rational reason that they would mean nothing to an Australian. (He might have added that even New Zealanders, unless they had studied the Maori language, wouldn’t recognise ‘naku noa, na’.)

Needless to say, Goldsmith was never going to be allowed to get away with such defiance. An internal email was leaked and 1News, TVNZ’s news arm, did its best to elevate the issue into a national outrage, seeking reaction from a predictable roll-call of Maori activists who condemned Goldsmith’s action as ‘shameful’, ‘shocking’, ‘a disgrace’, ‘an act of bad faith’ and ‘Machiavallian’ (sic).

Maori Labour MP Willie Jackson, a noisy and excitable bantam rooster of New Zealand politics, tried to embarrass Goldsmith in parliament by pointing out that Burke was on record as supporting First Nation culture and languages, thus implying the Australian minister would have welcomed an invitation partly written in Maori. But Goldsmith was unrepentant, telling 1News it was ‘hardly the scandal of the century’ – surely an understatement – and more important, making the point that until the country’s name is changed by a referendum, it remains New Zealand.

The confected fury over the Matariki invitation exemplified the media’s tactic of pouncing on any issue, no matter how inconsequential, that can be made to look damaging for a government whose election victory the media elite clearly resented. Only days earlier, journalists had worked themselves into a lather over a statement in which Luxon highlighted fourteen layers of management as evidence of a wasteful public health sector that urgently needed reform. The journalists heroically dug deep and could identify only ten. Gotcha!

The implication was that Luxon was telling fibs. But to a public anxious about inflation, housing shortages, rising unemployment, a hopelessly overloaded health system and a looming energy crisis, it would have seemed a classic ‘so what?’ story, of interest only to the press gallery and beltway obsessives. Needless to say, it generated headlines for days.

Should journalists give Luxon’s government an easy ride? Well, no. It’s the function of the media to subject all governments to critical scrutiny and hold them to account. Besides, Luxon and his ministers are sometimes their own worst enemies; political Brown’s cows who have yet to justify the confidence of the New Zealanders who voted for them. Their policies often look rushed and half-baked – perhaps not surprisingly, since they have a lot of damage to undo – and are not always convincingly explained. The zeal of some ministers is not matched by their competence and there are loose cannons whose conduct doesn’t always pass the sniff test. It follows that the government often leaves itself wide open to legitimate criticism.

The problem for the media, however, is that by rediscovering an ardent sense of journalistic mission that they mysteriously mislaid during the Ardern years, they have created a gaping credibility deficit.

And the public, who polls reveal to be increasingly distrustful of the people who curate their news, are not so dumb that they can’t see it.