Spinning the freshwater debate: When PR companies join the fray

Monday, 29 January 2018

Kids swimming in Blenheim's Taylor river earlier this month. Like many urban rivers, it is often too polluted to swim in safely.

ANALYSIS: In a strange press release earlier this month, a new social media campaign called Swim Fresh announced its song of the summer: 'We'll be fine', by Wellington band Clicks.

The campaign had been launched a week earlier and sought to 'call on Kiwis to show love for their rivers and lakes,' according to its inaugural press release.

Its Twitter account appeals to celebrities to share their favourite New Zealand swimming spot (Justin Bieber is one of many yet to respond). Its website features a large banner which reads 'Rivers are good for you' and a cartoon mascot, a kōura, donning a snorkel.

A few days after crowning its song of the summer, the campaign hit the mainstream media when it released the results of a public survey declaring many New Zealanders were not swimming in rivers, primarily due to water temperature.

It light-heartedly concluded the nation had become 'soft'; its press release appeared almost verbatim as news stories in several media outlets, repeating the line that Kiwis were not swimming in rivers, and that it was primarily because they were cold.

* 'Serious pressures' facing rivers, Government report finds

A message on the Swim Fresh website says worrying about water quality is stressful.

* Improving lake to national standard would have 'severe social and economic' consequences

* Political parties sense opportunity on water issues

* The thorny politics of 'swimmable', a word losing its meaning**

The sudden emergence of this campaign at a time of hyper-sensitivity around the politics of freshwater struck some as suspicious.

Swim Fresh, as it clearly states, was funded and conceived by Blackland PR, a crisis management and corporate consultancy that prides itself on influencing public perception of controversial issues that threaten a corporation's reputation.

In its own words, on its website: '[W]e take arguments and evidence in your favour deep into the New Zealand public. We change hearts and minds, undermining those who threaten your business.' It says the most direct way to do that is through social media.

It has used those skills to try and build public support for oil and gas exploration, to advise food manufacturers on debates about obesity, and assist alcohol manufacturers in debates about public policy.

It has also advised the dairy industry on 'influences of debates about water quality [and] environmental impact,' according to the corporate advocacy work listed on its website. One of the company's clients is Dairy NZ.

Swim Fresh's spokesman, Mark Blackham, is the PR company's founder and a long-time lobbyist. The campaign is staffed by Massey University's communication, journalism and marketing students. (Editor's note: Massey has disputed the staffing of the campaign. See the note at the footer of this story.)

Corporate lobbyist Mark Blackham, photographed in 2009.

The reason behind the campaign, Blackham says, was to show a different side to the water quality debate: one of positivity, in opposition to the 'silly polarisation between good and evil'.

'We've heard about all the rivers that are not good, but we're not necessarily hearing about the waterways that are okay,' he says.

'We think positivity and physical engagement by ordinary people is a more powerful way of improving the state of our waterways than complaining and not visiting them.

'If you looked at our social media channels you'd see photos of people enjoying being by and in waterways. It's a damn sight harder to accept rivers and lakes that are poor quality when the nation wants to use them like that.'

He acknowledged the company's work for Dairy NZ, but said the campaign was self-directed and self-funded, with no influence from its clients. Its intent was in part to give University students experience on an issue-based campaign.

'This is not an effort to undermine criticisms nor support one side or another,' Blackham says.

'We want to do better than criticise or to sugar-coat. What has the polarisation and negativity achieved in 10 years? We want to help save waterways by getting people closer to them.'

It is undoubtedly a contrast to other water campaigns, which have pointed to degraded waterways as the consequence of an extractive economy.

One example is Choose Clean Water, a grassroots campaign which has been an adversarial voice, intently focussed on the rivers that are polluted, of which there are many.

If every stretch of river in the country deemed unsafe for swimming was linked into one long chain, it would be 14,000 kilometres long, the distance between Auckland and New York. Those only include the ones that fail a broad health standard relating to fecal matter; it doesn't include rivers too high in nitrates to support aquatic life, or those where flow is diminished by over-extraction, or those covered in toxic algae.

Prominent freshwater ecologists frequently make the point that New Zealand's rivers are under huge stress, primarily due to intensive agriculture in rural areas and urbanisation in cities.

In that light, Swim Fresh's quest to share images of glistening swimming holes in the summer sun becomes less innocent: Its song of the summer, after all, is 'We'll be fine,' not 'This river is a public health hazard'. We don't swim in rivers because we're soft, it says, not because they're polluted. 'We'll be fine,' the chorus repeats in a drone-like hum, over and over.

There is cynicism about Blackland PR's entry into the water quality debate. Marnie Prickett, of Choose Clean Water, says it's fishy.

'The fact that it is being pushed by this PR company rings alarm bells,' she says.

'The public's seen this many times before, like the experts who used to say that smoking is safe or the industry-funded spokespeople who claim that climate change doesn't exist or isn't driven by human activities. Same thing is happening here. In this case, the Swim Fresh campaign appears to be an attempt to undermine New Zealanders' legitimate concerns about the ongoing pollution of freshwater.'

Blackham himself has commented on water quality issues. In 2016, he wrote an opinion piece in the farming publication Rural News, bemoaning how the rural sector was too modest in the face of criticism.

Silvereye Communications managing director and former Wellington mayoral candidate Jo Coughlan.

'Why does it seem like the work of the rural sector is being slowly asphyxiated by the pillow of urban feelings?' he asked.

He suggested the rural sector was unloved due to its innate humility: 'The rural sector has heaps of it,' he writes. 'The modern world of selfies and sexting has very little.'

For Prickett, the positivity campaign is less sincere than it's made out to be, and it was a concern that some media did not question the campaigns origins or intentions.

'If you really love our people and this beautiful place, don't ignore the contamination of the water we drink, the rivers we swim in and fish in,' she says.

'Swim Fresh isn't simply neglecting the issue, it's trying to stop the change that would improve our rivers. Luckily, these are silly arguments from an uncredible source and, as long as it's talked about openly, I don't think the public will believe it.'

THE WATER TAX

During last year's election, the most vigorous opponent of Labour's proposed water tax was lobby group Irrigation NZ, which regularly appeared in the media as a vocal critic of the proposal.

It's no surprise that irrigators would oppose a tax targeted specifically at them, but the industry group quickly took the public lead in opposing Labour's plan.

Its campaign against the water tax was led by Silvereye Communications, the Wellington-based PR company founded by Jo Coughlan. Her brother-in-law is Bill English, who was then prime minister; her husband, Conor English, is one of Silvereye's directors, and is a former chief executive of Federated Farmers.

The company says it helped influence the water tax debate through 'ongoing engagement' with leading media chanels - including television, radio and daily newspapers - and by establishing Irrigation NZ as 'a leading voice on water use and water quality.' The campaign reached 10 million people in six weeks, the company says.

It had a government relations component, too: the company explicitly says on its website it aimed to influence local and national policy and ushered private and public meetings with politicians on irrigation matters.

Coughlan says the company's work on water issues has been with all political parties, not just those in Government.

'We have relationships with all political parties in parliament, so our engagement on water issues has been with all parties,' she says. '[M]yself and others in my team have had a role in our relationships with the full range of politicians in Parliament.'

Silvereye Communications has a host of other rural clients, including Federated Farmers, Agribusiness New Zealand, and Milk New Zealand.

Then there's Fonterra, with its increasingly ubiquitous, occasionally Richie McCaw-themed television ads. It reportedly pays $6m a year to an Auckland PR firm, which has between 10 and 15 in-house staff based at Fonterra's Auckland office, The NBR reported in October.

In a sensitive debate like water quality, which speaks to fundamental issues of economy and identity, there will be competing interests and values.

Groups such as Greenpeace, Forest & Bird and Fish & Game get a lot of airtime on the water quality debate, too: some may argue too much.

Their own PR operations are significantly smaller, and the latter two have a legal obligation to advocate for the environment, one that is enshrined in legislation. Greenpeace's methods - such as locking themselves to an irrigation scheme to temporarily stop construction, or taking over the ground floor of a regional council - may be unsavoury to some, but they are direct, and lack the sophistication of attempting to influence policy through experienced and well-connected lobbyists.

Water quality is an issue with many millions of dollars at stake, one tied up in layers upon layers of lobbying and political influence, in which some are paid to tip the scale of public opinion. You will often see these industries portrayed as voiceless, or lacking in influence. But many of them are represented by powerful groups which have significant reach into media and political spheres.

These issues are rarely discussed in New Zealand; they seem like hallmarks of the American political system, where vested interests are deeply entrenched.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated Conor English was a former national president of Federated Farmers. He was the group's chief executive, not its national president.

Massey University responds: It is incorrect to state the Swim Fresh campaign is 'staffed by Massey University communication, journalism and marketing students'. The company running the campaign, Blackland PR, employs a part-time staff member who is also a student at Massey, but not in the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing. It previously employed a second Massey student, also not from the school. Both were private arrangements between the students and the agency and not part of any Massey internship. Mark Blackham of Blackland PR approached a staff member of the school last year seeking consent to have the school as a partner. He said partnership would mean Swim Fresh would be able to say it was staffed by students from the school. Consent was given on the assumption such a claim would only be made if were factual. It has now been withdrawn. - James Gardiner, communications director, Massey University