The public relations war over freshwater has re-started

Monday, 28 January 2019

OPINION: Around this time last year, I wrote about a seemingly innocuous PR campaign called Swim Fresh, which encouraged New Zealanders to appreciate their rivers and lakes.

It had the trappings of a grassroots campaign, albeit one with a vague purpose. After some digging, it turned out to be murky.

The campaign was run by Blackland PR - a communications agency that specialises in rural issues - ostensibly with the cooperation of students from Massey University (the university later denied it had sanctioned any student involvement in the campaign, contrary to what Blackland PR had said).

Kids swimming in the Waikato River this month.

* Riparian planting does not counter nitrate runoff says environmentalist author

* Farmer hits out at both National and Labour water policies as bad for farming

* Top scientist: Fixing freshwater issues an 'enormous challenge'

* NZ reputation hurt by declining water quality, tourism industry says**

Several press releases from the campaign were repeated almost verbatim on mainstream news websites: One in particular noted that people didn't swim in rivers because they were too cold.

Swim Fresh fleetingly acknowledged concerns about water quality, but never in a way that lingered on them, in contrast to the election campaign several months earlier which had underlined those concerns among the public.

A selection of stories published under 'The vision is clear'.

This specific brand of PR has a long and well documented history.

In these campaigns, the underlying issue – in this case, deteriorating water quality – isn't denied, per se, but responsibility for it is subtly shifted.

Tobacco giant Philip Morris responded to concerns about the link between secondhand smoke and diseases such as lung cancer by launching a campaign that cherry-picked data to equate the risks of secondhand smoke to drinking milk or eating biscuits.

Fuel company Exxon published regular ads in major newspapers minimising its role in climate pollution by claiming far more scientific uncertainty about the causes of climate change than actually existed.

A common thread in these campaigns is that they originate from economically powerful industries at a time when public scrutiny of their activities is high.

Swim Fresh quickly faded, and made little discernible impact. But it has been reborn, at least in spirit, in a way that shows how industry messaging is having a growing influence on the tone of a public debate.

DairyNZ launched a campaign late last year called The vision is clear.

The lobby group described it as a 'movement… to encourage and inspire every New Zealander to think about their personal impact on our country's water quality.'

It is partly the product of an agreement with Auckland-based NZME., publishers of the NZ Herald and owner of several radio stations, which hosts content produced by DairyNZ on its platforms.

Angelo Winter-Robati 14, from Upper Hutt has fun swimming and diving off rocks with his friends in a popular Upper Hutt swimming hole.

The campaign shares superficial similarities to Swim Fresh. The Hits radio station is running a competition called Clear Favourite, inviting listeners to submit pictures of their favourite swimming spot for the chance to win a $10,000 holiday. It borrows some of the grassroots-feel, too, in its description as a 'movement,' rather than an industry-funded public relations exercise. (It is always made apparent that DairyNZ is behind the content).

The campaign's biggest presence is a series of articles and advertisements published in the NZ Herald, which are all optimistic, inoffensive, and ruthlessly on message.

One article touts 10 ways you can help clean up waterways: The tips include using a bucket instead of a hose to wash your car and picking up three bits of rubbish when you go to the beach. In the print version of the NZ Herald, a prominent ad noted that one way to improve water quality was to sweep one's paths and driveways.

On the website, there are several articles about beach pollution, and urban waterways that are being cleaned up. There are stories about new technologies that could help reduce contamination in waterways, and several that detail how award-winning farmers have reduced their environmental footprint. All are soberly written and factually based.

Christchurch's South Brighton Beach on a sunny day this month.

While Swim Fresh was vague and amateurish, The vision is clear follows its blueprint with a strident sense of purpose. Yes, there's a problem with water quality, it concludes; We all have a responsibility to fix it.

By partnering with the publisher of Auckland's largest newspaper, it's not difficult to guess who the campaign is targeting.

As observed by Glen Herud of Happy Cow Milk, any time someone in Auckland washes their car on a driveway, it should prompt cognitive dissonance: If my actions pollute waterways, then what right do I have to feel critically towards the dairy industry?

Because it is transparently a PR campaign, The vision is clear studiously avoids any context that would complicate its premise.

The campaign consistently equates urban and rural water pollution, but only 1 per cent of New Zealand's waterways flow through urban areas (where 86 per cent of the population live) while 43 per cent flow through pastoral land (where 14 per cent of the population live).

Including beaches does little to change that proportion. If anything, it would make the comparison worse, given coastal water quality tends to be better than freshwater quality. In Christchurch city, for example, one of four river sites is suitable for swimming, but 20 of 21 coastal sites are swimmable (the one that isn't is an estuary polluted by the rivers).

The Black Hole swimming spot on the Waihao River, Canterbury.

Numerous studies have demonstrated a link between poor lowland water quality and the boom in more input-heavy forms of agriculture in the 1990s and 2000s. A recent peer-reviewed assessment, based on analysis of 26 years of data, found that the greatest negative impact on water quality in New Zealand had been 'high-producing pastures that require large amounts of fertilizer to support high densities of livestock'.

Toxic algal blooms are increasingly common in rural waterways, partly in response to nutrient enrichment and water extraction for irrigation. New Zealand has the highest percentage of endangered freshwater fish species in the world, partly due to the expansion and intensification of agriculture.

The pressure to improve water quality is weighted heavily towards agriculture because it has a disproportionate effect on the environment. DairyNZ would instead cast this as bias.

In an opinion piece in the NZ Herald touting The vision is clear, chief executive Dr Tim Mackle - seemingly referring to the media - noted the 'apparent hypocrisy' of their 'reluctance to publicly call out concerns over urban or wildlife induced environmental pollution'.

He speculated there were financial motives that prevented coverage of issues such as the human waste polluting Auckland's beaches or an E. coli contamination in Lake Wakatipu.

Both of those issues were covered by mainstream media outlets, including Stuff and the NZ Herald (Stuff has written many dozens of stories about the pollution of Auckland's beaches). The notion that the media has a bias against the dairy sector is contradicted by DairyNZ itself, which in its last annual report noted that over 90 per cent of media coverage of the dairy industry was either positive or neutral.

These industry-led 'movements' risk becoming more effective in the modern media environment, where content of varying degrees of credibility gets mushed together into the digital soup that is social media.

The video announcing The vision is clear, filled with lavish images of lush waterways and people cleaning up beaches, has been seen more than 100,000 times on Facebook.

When combined with the increasingly loud voices of opposing groups such as Greenpeace and Fish & Game it can result in an adversarial frame - an us versus them, two sides mentality - which can override the fact water pollution is a problem with clear causes and solutions.

Not long after the campaign started, I attended the Freshwater Sciences Society's annual conference, and was struck by the gulf between the world imagined by The vision is clear and the views of freshwater scientists.

In a pointed keynote address, freshwater ecologist Dr Russell Death said there was little evidence that water quality was meaningfully improving after 20 years of decline, and freshwater scientists had watched it get worse. He said they should take inspiration from climate scientists in more aggressively countering forces that seek to undermine their work, and to support scientists such as Mike Joy who speak out against the dairy industry.

In aggressively pushing the notion that water pollution is everyone's problem, DairyNZ is following a well-worn play-book to minimise its own responsibility. That's its job - last year it collected $66m in levies from farmers, part of which is expected to be used to lobby for farmers' interests.

The risk is that lavish campaigns fool the public into thinking adequate action has been taken if it has not, which has long term repercussions for New Zealand's vitally important agriculture industry. Telling Aucklanders to clean up their rubbish may feel cathartic, but PR won't stop incoming regulation, changing consumer behaviours, or a warmer climate, which together pose catastrophic threats to the viability of the industry.

The vision is clear advocates for farmers doing the right thing and being part of the solution. Few would dispute that highlighting the good work of farmers is useful - profiling the best practitioners in the industry is one way a group such as Dairy NZ can push for the excellence needed to ensure the industry's future.

But by cynically minimising the industry's own role in the causes, and therefore the solution, it's simply muddying the waters.

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