From Fifa sleaze to anti-GM scaremongering: A short history of mistrust
Saturday, 11 July 2026
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular opinion contributor. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.
OPINION: Here’s one for the sliver of the Venn diagram comprising readers of this column, English football fans and history buffs: the World Cup has the feel of ’66 about it. No, not 1966; 1066, when King Harry’s England scraped a win over Norway only to be thrashed by the French.
Sport is a branch of the entertainment business. Dastardly deeds push the plot along. The mixture of power-plays and corruption is a captivating subplot at the Fifa fiesta.
No one is surprised that Fifa is sleazy, so when it corruptly overturns a red card to pacify a sordid US presidency, many American fans shrug and think we may as well make the corrupt system work for us. They feel the same about the country. The economy is corrupt so I might as well get what I can out of it, like the wealthy and powerful do, instead of supporting principle and the greater good.
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Just as no one in the UK is surprised when Nigel Farage is dodgy, or in France when Marine Le Pen stands for president wearing an ankle bracelet, once trust in the system is gone, citizens think ethics are naive.
Falsehoods and mistrust result in corruption and sleaze as surely as goals follow passes to Messi.
Trust comes up in the genetic modification episode of Mike Munro’s new memoir. Mike was Helen Clark’s chief press secretary when I was a junior Beehive press secretary.
I re-watched the video of a furious Helen being ambushed with claims that imported seeds contained GM content. “Contamination” was used to convey a sense of poison rather than its real meaning to describe a contested purity standard.
A quarter of a century on, the scandal is that the Greens have not recanted or apologised for scaremongering. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been in food for decades. The number of resulting calamities, worldwide, is none.
Meanwhile, millions of lives have been saved. Genetic engineering produced Covid vaccines. More productive cropping combined with fertiliser (Greens want to ban that too) led to the largest poverty reduction in history.
There are false claims about GE dangers if you look in the sewers of social media. The trick behind their repetition is that most of us have difficulty sorting science from unproven claims and lies.
In the science publications, claims of GMO dangers are de-bunked without exception. Even the Royal Society, which seldom deviates from the Green-left party line, accepts there is no evidence that a crop is dangerous to eat because it is GM. “Since the first widespread commercialisation of GM produce 18 years ago there has been no evidence of ill effects linked to the consumption of any approved GM crop,” it says.
There is a bill currently before Parliament to modernise regulation of gene technology. The Greens’ call to make New Zealand “GE-free” is less visible today, though it still wants exclusion of GMO production to be a “valuable point of difference in a global marketplace”.
Positioning in the global marketplace would have more force if the Greens did not also tell us to eat locally and vote against every trade deal.
If you’re going to say we should follow the science on climate, then we should also follow the science on GMOs. When I write that sentence I know I risk the editor being swamped with letters making contentious claims about the science. Fifteen-thousand people made submissions to Parliament opposing the gene tech bill.
I can see the case for GE-labelling as a matter of consumer choice. If you are a vegan or follow a religious diet, you want to know what you are eating. That’s not the same as spreading mischief and mistrust about supposed dangers.
Claims of a cover up, bees cross-pollinating crops and risks to the public should never have gone so far in 2002 and are not at all credible now. Those who were loudest in 2002 have the strongest obligation to concede the science today.
Author and scientist Steven Pinker writes that humans evolved a conspiratorial mindset for good reason. Those who were not a little suspicious got selected out of our, ummm, gene pool.
Today we allow our suspicions partly through a consultative society. Political processes, such as approving a new GM crop, are subject to layers of checks, controls and consultations, which all favour the status quo. Objectors rarely have to defend the failure to do something new. They merely have to create doubt about change.
The reason for our consult-and-veto society is that checks help to restrain corrupt politicians. Giving us a stake in our community is meant to build trust.
That logic only works if the people who stop things happening are held to account when they are wrong, as much as those who promote development.
The opponents of science in 2002 have never been held to account. Once trust in our politics is gone, you might as well get a hard man to tilt the playing field in your favour.