However top billing still goes to the New Zealand Press Council and its wilful abuse of international accounting. This Council is wilfully determined that readers of the Dominion Post on 15 November 2005 and 5 April 2006, and all readers of case 1051 on its website, should receive and retain a radically false impression of comparative exports per capita of New Zealand, Australia and the United States of America. As such the council members are puppets for a newspaper industry determined to mislead the ordinary public on financial matters, we believe in order that they might be led to give up their wealth to foreign corporations, such as has occurred from the subscribing to the May 2004 Feltex Carpets offer, a matter we consider further.

Readers are invited to check for themselves the facts of this exports per capita case.

A business page article in the Dominion Post on 15 November proclaimed that NZ's exports per capita were "almost half that of Australia and 2 1/2 times less than that of the United States". The Press Council says that the statement was inaccurate and should have been corrected, but most stubbornly will not give the correct comparison of exports per capita between these countries in its narrative on the matter, nor require the Dominion Post to do so. The narrative implies that the correct exports comparison is very similar to that proclaimed by the Dominion Post. This is because:

(a)it is stated that Mr Kerry McDonald, in support of who's views the comparison was published, had not suggested that the published comparison was wrong, nor had anyone else other than one complainant, and for a long time after receiving that complaint the Dominion Post claimed not to believe that it was wrong also.

(b) it is stated that the comparison as published had been obtained from an invalid source (ie a table showing each country's growth in exports over 40 years), and of course this is far more likely to happen if the inaccurate figures happen to be in the ball park of what the correct ones are believed to be.

The overwhelming conclusion of readers of The Press Council's determination will be that NZ's exports per capita are much lower than that of Australia and the USA although the degree to which this is so differs from that stated in Dominion Post. There was no discussion of any harm likely to have done by the "inaccuracy", which is usually the central issue of any complaint, and little or no indication of whether the country's relative exports had been understated or overstated. This is despite a 700 word narrative. The complainant was portrayed as a technocrat who said "this figure is wrong" (he in fact used no such expression) and readers continue to be left thinking that the accuracy was just outside the Council's acceptable range, in one direction or the other.

The complainant advised the Dominion Post of the inaccuracy by citing World Trade Organisation data available on the Internet. This was not mentioned by the Press Council.

The only piece of information that might be interpreted as indicating that the country's relative exports had been understated would be reference to the complainant attributing the incorrect information to "an attempt by The Dominion Post to get on board in decrying the country's level of exporting.". But it could also be interpreted that the complainant disliked the countries export level being run down as was getting back at the Dominion Post in any way he could.

In short; it was brought to the Press Council's attention that tens of thousands of readers have been grossly misled about NZ's exports per capita in comparison to Australia and the US, and the Council then has immediately set out not only to maintain the resulting state of deception but to further spread it as much as possible. This was by way of a narrative that implies that the comparison was roughly true, which was fed to a different set of Dominion Post readers on 5 April 2006 and soon after to browsers of the Council's web site where the narration remains posted. The complaint was declared to be upheld in this narrative in order to create more interest in the matter and so improve the deception yield. It has also ensured that the deception would not be effectively challenged by allowing it to be proclaimed that the complainant has a feather in his cap and hence no cause for grievance.

We herewith hang out the names of the current members of the NZ Press that they might tarnish, with a high level of black pigment. It is a sorry state that an ex High Court judge should be amongst them: Barry Paterson (Chairman), Lynn Scott, Aroha Puata, Penny Harding, Ruth Buddicom, Denis McLean, Terry Snow, Alan Samson, Keith Lees, Clive Lind, and John Gardner.

The New Zealand statistics department publishes exports per capita data from its website page http://www.stats.govt.nz/products-and-services/nz-in-the-oecd/international-trade.htm The exports referred to are of commodities only, not services and so differs a little from what the above complainant referred to. We think it reasonable to reproduce the table results here. NZ, Aust, and the US, all fall below the OECD average although in trade terms the states of the European Union can probably no more justify a separate listing than the states of the USA which of course do not do so. Removal of inter-European trade would change the table considerably. Such trade is less difficult from geographic and approvals standpoints.

However it can be seen that NZ's exports are some 18% above that of Australia and 80% above that of the USA which compares with the 250% less than the USA which the Dominion Post asserted. The word "inaccurate" is not acceptable to describe such a huge difference.

The above illustrates the power of the overseas owned press to collude to milk the country dry in economic terms. New Zealanders the above councillors might be by birth but traitors they are by action. They want to see some elite countrypeople who attend university business courses and a majority class who are slaves to whatever the press wishes to feed them as it strives to get every dollar out of their pocket into overseas coffers.