Our 2023 Awards

Craig Shearer - 27 November 2023

Bent Spoon

As it’s an election year this year, there’s been no lack of misinformation and nonsense being pushed at New Zealanders. Our runner up for the Bent Spoon award this year decided, apparently reluctantly, to start a new political party, called NZ Loyal. Liz Gunn, once a high-profile TV presenter, turned herself into a political leader and asked the conspiracy theorists of New Zealand to vote for her. Worryingly, given some of her extreme views, she received 1.2% of all votes, and she’s already preparing her party for the next election. Next time round she might actually manage to submit the paperwork properly and have more than two candidates standing for election. We will be keeping a close eye on her.

This year’s Bent Spoon winner is an interesting one, so bear with me for a few minutes. Over the years we have used the Bent Spoon award to highlight damaging misinformation and gullibility, awarding the prize to local councils, media organisations and personalities, academics and even government ministers. Looking back at the history of the award, although we stand by almost all of the decisions, over the last few years the committee has become concerned about one in particular, from 1995.

In 1995 the Bent Spoon award was given to the Ministry of Justice, for a report they commissioned which looked into domestic violence against women, titled “Hitting Home”. The report interviewed men about their views on abuse, and attempted to uncover some statistics about the prevalence of different kinds of abuse in New Zealand. As far as we can tell, the report was well researched and written, and seems to have received a mostly positive reception both locally and internationally, with some notable dissent (mainly from men’s rights groups).

However, the NZ Skeptics took issue with some of the conclusions of the report, claiming that it “trivialises the real domestic violence that goes on in New Zealand” and pointing out what were considered to be shortcomings. These supposed shortcomings included the way in which the report defined abuse, which included not just physical but also psychological abuse. However, careful reading of the report shows that the authors were well aware of these potential issues, and were careful to let the readers know of the factors that needed to be borne in mind when reading the report. Indeed, in retrospect the report appears to have been somewhat ahead of its time.

At the time the award was announced, there was pushback from some members of the Skeptics, so a subcommittee was formed to accept feedback from members and come to a decision as to whether to rescind the award. In the end, a decision was made to keep the award in place, in part because a majority of the 16 people who responded to the subcommittee stood behind it.

Hugh Young, long time NZ Skeptics member and vocal opponent of the award said:

“We should graciously acknowledge our mistake, withdraw the “award” and publicly and unconditionally apologise to the authors of “Hitting Home”. This would be a good example of the kind of rational and adaptable behaviour we try to encourage in others.”

We will not be withdrawing the award. It was awarded by the committee at the time, and we would rather let the decision stand as evidence that, as skeptics, we’re just as prone to getting things wrong as everyone else.

The current committee is in unanimous agreement that the award was not justified. As such, we would like to apologise to the authors of the report. And, as a way to publicly hold ourselves to account, the 2023 Bent Spoon is awarded to ourselves - the NZ Skeptics - for our “lack of critical thinking” when it came to the Hitting Home report.

What we can learn from this is that we, more than most organisations, need to be careful about criticising others when we don’t have the expertise to be able to make a properly considered judgement. We’re on fairly safe ground when we go after conspiracy theories and “alternative” therapies, but we need to tread carefully when we, as laypeople, think that the experts in the room have got something wrong. As a committee we will strive to do better.

I’ll wrap up with a something the Chair of the Skeptics said back in 1995 that myself and the current committee are happy to stand behind:

“that we are able to have major differences of opinion, yet remain willing to argue rationally and reasonably, is, I believe, a reaffirmation of the sorts of principles for which the Skeptics stand and makes me, for one, proud to be a member”

Bravos

At NZ Skeptics, we don’t just hand out brickbats, but also call out people when they do good work.These are our Bravo awards.

In previous years, we’ve reserved the Bravo awards for journalists who write for traditional media outlets, but this year we’ve decided to broaden the awards to anybody doing good journalistic work. We’ve chosen to highlight three entities producing NZ-based skeptical content online. These are, in no particular order,

Debunking Conspiracies Aotearoa - a Facebook-based group that posts short videos highlighting conspiracy theories popping up in our country

Skeptical Kiwi - another Facebook-based presence promoting general skeptical content

New Zealand Conspiracy Loons - a satirical YouTube channel doing good work calling out some weird NZ conspiracy content.

We will be contacting these groups and letting them know they’ve earned our respect.

Skeptic of the Year

Now we come to our Skeptic of the Year award.

The Denis Dutton Award for New Zealand Skeptic of the Year is given to the skeptic who has had the most impact within New Zealand skepticism. The award comes with a year’s free membership to the NZ Skeptics and $250 prize money.

For those a little younger than me, Denis Dutton was one of the founding members of NZ Skeptics back in the 1980s, and was an active skeptic based at the University of Canterbury. He passed away in 2010, but his spirit lives on in the Skeptic of the Year award.

We reserve the award for people who are doing any sort of skeptical activism, but aren’t on the NZ Skeptics committee. We want to encourage people to participate in skeptical activism projects, whatever form they may take.

This year we’ve decided to give the award to Kelvin Morgan. Kelvin is an activist on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Kelvin has been a great source of NZ-based skeptical content on Twitter, and regularly provides quality content documenting some of the worst parts of conspiracy belief in New Zealand, gleaned from a variety of sources.

You can follow Kelvin: @kelvin_morganNZ

We congratulate Kelvin on the award!