Stuff owner Sinead Boucher: ‘Big tech are sucking the marrow out of our economy’

Saturday, 27 June 2026

In a rare sit-down, long-form interview, Stuff Group owner and CEO Sinead Boucher talks candidly about the impact Big Tech is having on local jobs, journalism, the advertising market, and pretty much every other part of society. She believes politicians are too scared to rock the boat, have become thinner-skinned, and reveals one MP told her they’d care about keeping news media alive if journalists wrote nicer stories about them. Lloyd Burr breaks down the chat.

The full episode is embedded further down the article.

It’s not often you get to interview the boss of the company you work for. I’ve never done it with any of my former bosses, and certainly not for 40 minutes over mimosas and a bowl of pork scratchings.

But here I was in Stuff’s make-shift pub studio with Stuff Group owner Sinead Boucher to talk about the impact big tech giants are having on the company’s bottom line, and the local media industry as a whole.

The reason I asked her onto the show - and I didn’t expect her to say yes - was because of an investigation I’ve been working on for months about where government departments are spending their advertising and marketing budgets.

The answer? In 2025, they spent $17.2m with Alphabet (Google/YouTube), Meta (Facebook/Instagram), and Tiktok which is more than the combined spend with all major NZ media companies.

Is the government concerned? Nope. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says it’s “entirely appropriate”, although New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said it was concerning and wants the public sector to prioritise local media companies.

So what are Boucher’s thoughts on it all, and what are the solutions? She didn’t hold back.

Some quotes have been edited for brevity and clarity.

(It’s worth noting I asked Google NZ for an interview about local jobs, tax settings, and the impact its purchasing power is having on the domestic media economy - but they declined).

‘Govt departments are funding harm’

She’s not at all surprised by the results of the investigation, but that doesn’t mean she’s not angered and frustrated by them.

“These are the richest, most powerful companies we’ve ever had,” she says. “It is virtually impossible for anyone else to compete fairly against them because they control the whole digital ecosystem, they control access to people, to the browsers, and to the technology”.

“What I really loathe about the government department spend is that they’re funding totally unregulated companies that have been proven to cause all sorts of societal harms.

“There are all the issues with under 16s and social media, rampant online scams, misinformation, disinformation, breaching suppressions and they profit from those kinds of behaviours.

“Should our government - which is there to protect its citizens and ensure their welfare - actually be funding those kinds of organisations? I think no,” Boucher says.

‘They build their product on value created by others’

In order for Google and Meta’s AI products to be constantly up to date, they have digital crawlers that constantly map and copy everything on the internet.

What’s the best source of the latest, most up-to-date information? News websites. They scrape information from local news sources and use it to power their AI products, which they make money from.

“They build their products on the content and value created by other people, including our journalism, our content, and the things we invest in. They are very extractive rather than contributive to the good of New Zealand society and the lives of people here,” Boucher says.

“They’re scraping and extracting the value out of everybody's content. We can't control it, they don't have permission to do it, and they're building these massively valuable businesses off it without sending any of that value back to the companies that have invested in that content in the first place,” she explains.

“We try to block those bots that scrape us but you can't block most of them, they come back in different ways. With Google, you cannot block their AI crawlers without making yourself invisible in their search function.”

‘We pay more tax and provide more benefit’

Big tech subsidiaries operating in New Zealand can legally avoid paying a big tax bill by diverting the vast majority of their revenue offshore via ‘service fees’ to other subsidiaries in places like Singapore or Ireland, which send them on to their parent companies.

For example, In 2024, Google’s NZ operation had revenues of $1.139bn but incurred ‘service fees’ of $1.052bn from its Singapore-based subsidiary. It left a profit of just $29m, of which it paid around $8m in corporate tax.

This tax loophole is another thing that frustrates Boucher.

“New Zealand media companies definitely contribute more to the tax pool whereas the big tech companies are just sucking the marrow out of our economy and sending it all offshore.

“The core people for these companies are not based here. In fact, some of the companies are structured so that the staff who work here technically work for a different company entity than the one where the revenue is going offshore,” Boucher says.

If you can beat ‘em, join ‘em?

Why doesn’t Stuff just start a subsidiary in Singapore and do the same? If the government isn’t going to close the tax loophole, why not exploit it like the big giants are?

“I thought about that as an academic exercise for a little bit, and then I said ‘No, that's wrong’. That is not an ethical way for a company based in New Zealand who's holding others to account to behave,” she reveals.

“If we did that and were an offshore company, we could publish whatever we wanted, breach suppressions, and be dangerous - but we wouldn't get away with it because we've got staff based here, the police could turn up at one of our offices and arrest someone, arrest me, all the rest of it,” she says.

Ok, so tax evasion is off the cards. What’s the solution?

Most of the solutions have to come from the government, but Boucher says that’s far easier said than done.

“I strongly believe that the reason we haven't made changes is because our government is scared of rocking the boat with the US government which has threatened sanctions.

“There are lots of things other countries are doing. We've done nothing, we're doing nothing,” Boucher says, pointing across the ditch to Australia..

“They instituted a bargaining code which meant that unless Meta or Google came to the table and negotiated a fair price for content with media organisations, they would be forced to pay.

“The result of that was dozens of media companies signing deals and a quarter of a billion dollars a year going back into newsrooms. It’s been transformative,” she says.

“Why should they not be regulated here? Everything else is regulated, and we need to recognise we are a sovereign country and do the things that are going to protect the best interests of our citizens,” Boucher says.

Here’s another solution: “One thing they could do that's really practical now is to have guidelines for ministries to say you should prefer to spend your marketing budgets with New Zealand companies first. If you cannot achieve what you want to do, then look elsewhere, but that should be the guideline,” Boucher says.

Politicians are thinner-skinned and don’t value the role of journalism

This recollection from Boucher really pissed me off, not just because of the sheer self-interested arrogance of it, but the blatant dismissal of the value journalism provides to a democracy.

“There’s some actual things that senior politicians have said to me in the last year: One said ‘If you were nicer to us, maybe we would care if you lived or died’. Another said ‘We effectively weighed up the interests of you and big tech and decided they were more important to the country than journalistic organisations’,” she recalls.

Those attitudes should scare every single Kiwi. Why? Boucher explains:

“Good journalism is something that benefits everybody in the country, even if they never consume it or read it or watch it, because that role of a watchdog and holding the government or local authorities to account, is really important and everyone benefits from that,” she says.

It’s not new for politicians to despise the media, but to actively celebrate the existential demise of journalism because there were stories they didn’t like, is new.

“They are thinner skinned. I was a journalist for a long time, I've been in this industry a long time, and I think they're thinner skinned. They’ve put up more walls between themselves and journalists, or the public,” Boucher says.

“Most of the journalists I would speak to, particularly the ones who work around Parliament, can see this move by politicians to prefer using their own social media channels with their own social media staff to put their message out the way they want it to be, rather than to open themselves up for scrutiny and a robust debate,” she says.

Isn’t there a word for that? It starts with P?

AI can’t be the sunlight on those in power

Offshore-based big tech and AI cannot replace journalism. It can’t walk the halls of power and be the sunlight on those in power like Stuff’s Jenna Lynch did this week. Only journalists can do that.

“Nobody wants sunlight on them when they're in power,” says Boucher. “But they're not always the ones in power. Our job is to hold people to account. Our job is not to be nice to the government of the day, or deliberately try to undermine them.

“Our job is to hold them to account for the people who put them there and ask the hard questions, to look under the rocks they don't want us to look under, so that citizens can be informed and make informed choices,” she says.

Is the tide turning? Is there a revolt brewing?

It’s not just the news media industry that’s impacted by the dominance of big tech, which is why Boucher wants the government to tax and regulate them properly.

“The big tech squeeze affects retailers, and small businesses. Travel companies are forced to pay big chunks to booking.com or Expedia. There's a lot of money flowing out of New Zealand, and a lot of small businesses not being able to get off the ground because they just can't compete against these companies.

“But I sort of feel like the tide is turning a bit, and people are waking up to it. Individual people and businesses also play a big, big part in this, and how they choose to spend their time and money.

“It is local businesses and subscribers who fund our journalism. So if you want a healthier, thriving society, everybody really has to think about where they spend their time and money,” Boucher says.

Quick fires

Google, Meta, or TikTok: What is the bigger threat to local news? “All three, because they're all extractive in different ways and evolving their business model around becoming AI companies that are extracting everybody's information and creating products within their own ecosystems”.

What was scarier: buying Stuff for $1, or realizing you had to run it? “That second one. It all happened in two weeks and then I thought ‘Oh, okay. Now what?”

Should more Kiwis go into business? “I never, ever thought I would be a business owner. I always thought I'd be an employee, and it has been just the best. I love it. I love being a business owner. I love not having to ask anyone for permission to do anything”.

Print or Digital: If you had to kill one tomorrow to save the other, which goes? “I don't have to choose because all I care about is that we can deliver the journalism. Print is still a really big part of our business. It's a profitable part of our business, and people who are subscribers to print love it”.

What’s a better feeling: breaking a massive government scandal, or seeing your traffic beat the NZ Herald? “Breaking the scandal. I love it when we break a great story, and we do that all the time. I don't watch our traffic beating the Herald because we beat them all the time - every day, all day long”.

Which is easier, owning a business or running a business? “They go hand in hand. I can't separate them out because I run it like an owner”.

Which city is better: Auckland or Wellington? “I'm going to choose Wellington, because it's where my home is. But I do love Auckland. I spend a lot of time up here”.

Least favourite corporate buzz word or phrase? “I don’t like ‘going forward’, and one of my most loathed topics is ‘pre-planning’ - that means it's just planned”

A word that should be banned from headlines? “I think you've got to be really careful about words like ‘plunging’ when you're talking about share markets. Also one of the things that I really, really hate is when people talk about ‘communities coming together in a time of crisis’, because when do they never?”