Who watches the watchmen? The slow death of New Zealand investigative journalism — and the industry that could bring it back
- Grant McLachlan
- 52 minutes ago
- 13 min read
There is a phrase that used to strike genuine fear into the hearts of dodgy tradespeople, corrupt officials, and fly-by-night merchants the length of New Zealand: “We’re from Fair Go.”
Not the Police. Not the Serious Fraud Office. Not the Ombudsman. A television crew. A camera. A reporter with a notepad and the public’s undivided attention on a Tuesday night. For nearly five decades, that threat — the threat of being named, on screen, in front of a million New Zealanders — was one of the most effective accountability mechanisms this country possessed. It cost no taxpayer money to operate. It required no judicial warrant. It carried no bureaucratic delay. It simply shone a light.
That light has now been switched off. And New Zealand is paying for it in ways it has not yet fully counted.
Contents
The shows that kept Kiwis honest
The Fourth Estate and the balance of power
How others do it: Australia, the UK, and Canada
The business case: why industry should sponsor accountability
The editorial independence problem — and its solution
Ratings, revenue, and the lie of the lifestyle show
The shows that kept Kiwis honest
Fair Go began in 1977, the creation of presenter Brian Edwards and producer Peter Morritt. At the time, it was genuinely radical. As Edwards recalled, most broadcasters of the era refused to name names. Fair Go tore that veil away. It named names. It confronted subjects on camera. It told viewers, in plain language, who had ripped whom off and why it mattered. [1]
The producers hired lawyers to check every word of every script. They expected lawsuits. They never came. What came instead was ratings, trust, and a quiet but powerful social compact: Behave yourself in New Zealand, or end up on the telly.
Over 47 years, Fair Go became what its creators intended — a rolling, televised small-claims court for the ordinary citizen. Sunday, which launched in 2002, occupied the longer-form end of the same spectrum: The programme investigated the 2008 Chinese poisoned milk scandal; it exposed conditions at Porirua Hospital; it broke the story of Rotorua’s emergency motels that triggered a reckoning for the then-Labour government. It won Best Current Affairs Programme at the Voyager Media Awards and the New Zealand Television Awards the very year it was cancelled. [2]
Then, in March 2024, it was over. TVNZ announced it was axing both Sunday and Fair Go, along with its midday and late-night news bulletins — up to 68 jobs in total, roughly 35 of them in news and current affairs. The decision came just a week after Warner Bros. Discovery announced the closure of Newshub. In the space of a fortnight, New Zealand lost the bulk of its primetime investigative and consumer journalism. [3]
The Spinoff’s headline said it plainly: “It’s a great day to be a bad guy.” [4]
The economics of abdication
TVNZ’s stated reason for the cuts was blunt: A “big drop in traditional TV advertising revenue as audiences move to digital platforms.” This is a real and global trend, but it does not tell the whole story — and it entirely obscures who fills the void.
The 2024 TVNZ programming slate, announced just months before the axing of Sunday and Fair Go, was described by critics as “absolutely heaving with houses”: New Zealand’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer, Love It or List It NZ, My Dream Green Home, Grand Designs NZ, Country House Hunters NZ, Moving Houses. The property genre, in other words, did not simply survive the media crisis — it colonised the space vacated by accountability journalism. [5]
This is not coincidence. It is economics, and it reflects a particular kind of institutional cowardice. Property programming is cheap to produce relative to investigative journalism, carries no legal risk, and appeals to sponsors from the financial sector — the same sector that underwrites much of the property speculation economy.
When Seven Sharp replaced the harder-edged Close Up in 2013, media commentators noted that TVNZ had traded “current affairs for a mess of pottage.” Seven Sharp — itself once introduced as a current affairs programme — gradually evolved into a lifestyle and human interest show. Its primary sponsor is a major bank. [6]
The connection between financial sector sponsorship, property programming, and the retreat from accountability journalism is not conspiratorial; it is simply the logical outcome of letting the market decide what gets made. The market, left to itself, does not fund inconvenient questions about its own conduct.
The cost of the silence
If the closure of Fair Go, Sunday, and Target were simply a cultural loss — a sadness, a nostalgia — they would be worth lamenting but not arguing about. They are something more costly than that. The absence of the Fourth Estate has a measurable price, and New Zealand’s watchdog agencies are now paying it.
The numbers are stark. In 2023-24, the Chief Ombudsman completed 6,269 complaints — the highest number ever — eight percent above the previous year and 58 percent above the five-year pre-pandemic average. Protected disclosures (whistleblower reports) increased by 159 percent in a single year. The Chief Ombudsman has described this sustained elevation as “the new normal.” [7]
Whistleblowing reports to the Ombudsman rose from 71 in 2021-22 to 128 in 2022-23 — an 80 percent increase — and then to 206 in 2023-24, a further 61 percent jump. The themes are consistent: Financial mismanagement, unsafe work practices, sexual harassment, and a systemic lack of organisational response. [8]
These are not abstract statistics. They represent people who, in an earlier era, might have picked up the phone and rung Fair Go. They now have nowhere to go except a government office with statutory powers but finite resources, operating under the Solicitor-General’s Guidelines for Prosecutions, which require cases to meet evidential sufficiency and public interest thresholds before proceeding. Many complaints are screened out. Many misconduct patterns never accumulate into actionable cases.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Corruption Perceptions Index score has declined from 91 in 2015 to 81 in 2025 — a full ten-point fall over a decade. The country has slipped from co-equal first (alongside Denmark) to fourth globally. Transparency International New Zealand notes that “the decline started in 2015 and, whilst it recovered briefly in 2020-21, it now appears to be in more rapid decline.” Their 2024 research identified growing problems in public procurement and contracting, immigration and border services, exploitation of migrants, inadequate identification of politically exposed persons, rapid increases in fraud, and insufficient transparency in political lobbying and financing. [9]
The Insurance Fraud Bureau estimated $1.2 billion in fraudulent claims blocked in the four years to 2023, with a 22 percent spike in 2023 alone — estimated at $880 million. The Crime and Victims Survey of 2024 found that fraud is the fastest-growing crime in New Zealand, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all crimes. [10][11]
None of this proves a direct causal link to the axing of investigative television. But the correlation is not trivial. Societies where misconduct is routinely, publicly exposed — where the bad actor’s face appears on a screen watched by a million people — are societies where misconduct is self-regulating in ways that courts, police, and regulators cannot replicate. The camera in a Fair Go crew’s hand was not just journalism. It was deterrence.
The Fourth Estate and the balance of power
Democratic societies operate on a system of interlocking tensions. The executive governs; Parliament legislates; the judiciary adjudicates; the civil service administers; and the Fourth Estate — an independent press — reports, investigates, and holds all of the above to account. Remove any single element and the system tilts. Remove the Fourth Estate and the rest of the machinery is left to oversee itself.
This is not a theoretical concern in New Zealand in 2025. The Ombudsman, Auditor-General, Serious Fraud Office, Privacy Commissioner, and Police are all finite institutions with finite budgets and strict legislative mandates. They can only pursue what they can prove. They can only prove what they can fund. And they operate, necessarily, after the fact — investigating misconduct that has already occurred, harmed someone, been reported, been screened, been assessed, and been found to meet the threshold for action.
Investigative journalism operates differently. It can reveal patterns before they become crimes. It can expose a contractor’s repeated failures before a third family loses their savings. It can name a finance company’s practices before a fourth investor loses their retirement fund. It can do what no regulator can — it can act on public interest alone, without needing a prosecution threshold.
When Sunday and Fair Go closed, it was a great day to be a bad guy. Not because the law changed. Because the light went out.
How others do it: Australia, the UK, and Canada
New Zealand’s situation is not inevitable. Other comparable democracies have found ways to sustain serious accountability journalism, and some have done so through exactly the kind of cross-sector funding model this column proposes.
Australia
Australia has never let the genre die. 60 Minutes on Channel Nine has aired since 1979 and remains the country’s top-rated current affairs programme, reaching 39 percent of all Australians in 2024. Its advertiser pitch explicitly notes that its audience has a household income of $100,000-plus and is “willing to pay extra for products” — the premium demographic that investigative journalism attracts. In 2019, its report on organised crime infiltration of gaming giant Crown Resorts was awarded a Walkley Award and led to two Royal Commissions. [12][13]
Meanwhile, A Current Affair continues to combine consumer protection stories with investigative segments — demonstrating that the format is commercially viable when properly resourced and editorially committed. [14]
United Kingdom
The UK has institutionalised the model further. Channel 4’s Dispatches, running since 1987, has driven parliamentary debates, departmental reviews, and legislative change through undercover investigations into corporate misconduct and government failures. The BBC’s Panorama operates within a public charter that explicitly mandates public interest journalism. Beyond the broadcasters, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — founded in 2010 — operates as a non-profit collaborating with Panorama, Channel 4 News, the Financial Times, and The Sunday Times. A hybrid model in which philanthropic and foundation funding subsidises editorial independence. [15][16]
Canada
Canada’s Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) has gone furthest in articulating the economic rationale. It describes itself as “a key part of the infrastructure that protects Canadian democracy from threats like misinformation, accountability failures and declining trust,” and operates through media partnerships with CBC, CTV, the National Post, The Walrus, and multiple regional outlets. The model separates funding from editorial control — sponsors cannot direct investigations — while ensuring that accountability journalism is treated as infrastructure rather than expenditure. [17]
The business case: why industry should sponsor accountability
The argument for industry-sponsored investigative journalism is not philanthropic. It is actuarial.
Consider what the insurance sector spends because misconduct goes undetected. The Insurance Fraud Bureau’s estimate of $880 million in fraudulent claims in 2023 — with a 22 percent year-on-year spike — represents a direct cost to the industry that flows through to every New Zealander’s premiums. Professional indemnity funds pay out on claims for negligence, misrepresentation, and professional misconduct that, in many cases, a proactive programme of media exposure could have prevented entirely.
The deterrence value of a Fair Go investigation is not zero. It is, in fact, substantial and quantifiable. When a rogue tradesperson is exposed on national television, the reputational damage is immediate, total, and costless to enforce. No litigation. No court fees. No years of discovery. A camera crew, a reporter, and a production budget.
Industry estimates for a weekly half-hour consumer affairs programme run to approximately $1–2 million per year in New Zealand’s market. A 10-episode investigative series on the Sunday model might cost $3–5 million fully produced. These sums are fractional relative to the insurance, legal, and regulatory costs generated by the misconduct such programmes deter.
A consortium of insurers, professional indemnity providers, and major trade associations funding a revived accountability programme — with a strict editorial independence charter — would be making, in effect, a loss-prevention investment. If such a programme prevents even a handful of major fraud cases per year, prevents a construction scandal triggering class-action litigation, or deters a financial adviser from misappropriating client funds, it pays for itself many times over.
The editorial independence problem — and its solution
The obvious objection to industry-sponsored journalism is the editorial one. Can a programme investigating building fraud be credibly independent if its sponsor is an insurer that underwrites builders?
These concerns are legitimate, and they are not insurmountable. The solutions are structural.
A trust model — as used by the Guardian Media Group in the UK and the IJF in Canada — separates funding from editorial decisions. Sponsors contribute to a ring-fenced fund administered by an independent editorial board. The board commissions and approves investigations without reference to sponsors. Sponsors have no editorial access. Their return is not control; it is the deterrence effect of public accountability, and the reputational benefit of being seen to support it.
New Zealand has existing institutional frameworks that could support this model. NZ On Air already funds public interest media. The Broadcasting Standards Authority provides a regulatory framework. What is missing is the commercial architecture — the willingness of the industries that suffer most from misconduct to invest in the mechanism that prevents it.
The legal sector, the construction sector, the financial advice industry, the real estate profession, the medical profession — every licensed, regulated profession in New Zealand pays into indemnity and disciplinary mechanisms. Every one of them would benefit from a media environment in which public exposure is a credible threat to bad actors.
Ratings, revenue, and the lie of the lifestyle show
It is worth addressing the commercial argument directly, because it is used to justify the status quo.
The argument runs: Investigative journalism rates poorly; lifestyle and property programming rates well; therefore commercial broadcasters must pursue property shows. This argument contains a kernel of truth wrapped in a significant falsehood.
Fair Go consistently rated in the top ten New Zealand programmes of any given week. Sunday won Best Current Affairs Programme in its final year on air. These were not marginal, vanity projects kept alive by public funding. They were commercially successful programmes that attracted premium audiences — educated, civically engaged, and economically active viewers who are precisely the demographic advertisers pay most to reach.
The problem was not that investigative journalism doesn’t rate. It rates well. The problem is that it costs more to produce, carries more legal risk, requires more institutional support, and attracts advertising from sectors that sometimes prefer not to be investigated. A property developer is happy to advertise on a property show. They are not happy to advertise on a programme that might one day investigate a property developer.
Lifestyle television is not merely filling a vacuum; it is actively sustaining the conditions in which the vacuum exists.
What needs to happen
New Zealand needs to treat investigative journalism as infrastructure, not entertainment. This requires several things simultaneously:
First, a formal acknowledgement that the Fourth Estate is not a luxury but a component of democratic governance — as essential as the Ombudsman, the Auditor-General, or the courts.
Second, the creation of an industry-funded investigative journalism trust — modelled on the Canadian IJF and the UK Bureau of Investigative Journalism — with ring-fenced editorial independence, administered by a board that includes former journalists, legal practitioners, and public interest advocates. Contributing industries would include insurance, professional indemnity, construction, legal, financial services, and real estate. Contributions would be tax-deductible as a business expense connected to loss prevention.
Third, a revised mandate for NZ On Air that explicitly prioritises long-form accountability journalism alongside its existing cultural and diversity commitments.
Fourth, a willingness on the part of TVNZ — as a state-owned enterprise with a public interest mandate — to re-examine what “commercially sustainable” means in the context of its statutory obligations. A broadcaster that axes its accountability journalism while expanding its property programming has answered a commercial question. It has not answered the constitutional one.
Fifth, and most fundamentally: An honest national conversation about what kind of country New Zealand wants to be. For nearly five decades, Fair Go was the answer to that question. It said: We are a country where you cannot rip people off with impunity. Where the small person has recourse. Where a camera will find you.
That was not just good television. It was a statement of national character.
Postscript: A note on who benefits from the silence
It would be remiss not to name the obvious.
The cancellation of Sunday and Fair Go occurred under a government whose coalition partners have close relationships with the financial and property sectors that dominate the replacement programming. The advertisers who sponsor current property shows include major banks, real estate platforms, and property finance companies. These are not organisations that benefit from robust consumer journalism.
This does not require a conspiracy theory. It requires only an understanding of incentives. When the light goes out, those who were most afraid of the light are the primary beneficiaries of the darkness.
The insurance industry, the professional indemnity sector, the licensed professions, and the ordinary New Zealand consumer are, in this analysis, on the same side: They all benefit from a media environment in which misconduct is exposed, deterred, and punished.
A Fair Go camera is cheaper than a court case.
A Sunday investigation is cheaper than a royal commission.
An investigative journalist is cheaper than a regulator — and in many ways, more effective.
New Zealand cannot afford to keep paying for the absence of its watchdogs. It is time to bring them back, and to build the funding model that ensures they never disappear again.
References & sources
Fair Go — Wikipedia (programme history, naming names) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Go
TVNZ looks to axe Fair Go, Sunday, midday and night news — RNZ News, March 2024 rnz.co.nz — TVNZ axing Fair Go, Sunday
TVNZ job cuts: Sunday, Fair Go, news bulletins all to be axed — NZ Herald, March 2024 nzherald.co.nz — TVNZ job cuts
It’s a great day to be a bad guy — The Spinoff, March 2024 thespinoff.co.nz — great day to be a bad guy
The 10 most exciting shows coming to TVNZ in 2024 (property programming slate) — The Spinoff thespinoff.co.nz — TVNZ 2024 season
Seven Sharp — Wikipedia (sponsorship, evolution from current affairs) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sharp
More and more people are turning to the Ombudsman for help — Office of the Ombudsman, 2024 ombudsman.parliament.nz — annual report 2023/24
OECD Anti-Bribery Convention Phase 4 Report on New Zealand — OECD, December 2024 oecd.org — Phase 4 Report on New Zealand
New Zealand slides again in 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index — Transparency International NZ transparency.org.nz — CPI 2024 NZ analysis
10% of claims fraudulent: Insurance Fraud Bureau — NZ Herald, 2025 nzherald.co.nz — Insurance Fraud Bureau
NZ Insurance fraud is on the rise — VigilantPay, 2024 vigilantpay.com — NZ insurance fraud trends
60 Minutes — Nine for Brands (audience & sponsorship data) nineforbrands.com.au — 60 Minutes
60 Minutes (Australian TV program) — Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_(Australian_TV_program)
A Current Affair (Australian TV program) — Grokipedia grokipedia.com — A Current Affair
Dispatches (TV programme) — Grokipedia grokipedia.com — Dispatches
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism — Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Investigative_Journalism
About the Investigative Journalism Foundation — IJF Canada theijf.org — About IJF
Corruption Perceptions Index — Transparency International NZ (2025 score) transparency.org.nz — CPI New Zealand
Chief Ombudsman’s Annual Report 2023/2024 — Office of the Ombudsman ombudsman.parliament.nz — Annual Report 2023/24
TVNZ’s Sunday: The end of primetime investigative journalism — NZ Herald nzherald.co.nz — End of primetime investigative journalism
Follow the Money — TINZ Corruption Scan, March 2025 transparency.org.nz — Follow the Money, March 2025
Serious Fraud Office Annual Report 2023–2024 — SFO New Zealand sfo.govt.nz — Annual Report 2023-24
