By Callum Purves

The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is calling for the Ministry of Youth Development and Minister Priyanca Radhakrishnan to explain exactly what the purpose was of three 60-second anime videos they paid $299,500.00 for.

“The two videos that have been released already have unclear messages at best,” Taxpayers’ Union Campaigns Manager, Callum Purves, says.

“The first seems to warn teens about the dangers of using Google to find information before juxtaposing this with the Prime Minister at a Covid-19 press conference as the source of truth. If this is a video meant to warn against misinformation it seems odd that the world’s most used search engine should be the target. It isn’t exactly 4Chan.”

“The second video has an even less clear objective, appearing to simply be encouraging young people to hang out with their friends. A nice message, but probably one that didn’t need approximately $100,000.00 of taxpayer funds spent on it.”

“On Facebook and YouTube, the videos have very few likes and views. In fact, most of the views now come from people in the Taxpayers’ Union office. The cost per like or click is astronomical at this point.”

“The Ministry did communicate that the first video had done well on TikTok, garnering approximately 70,000 views, but when we investigated this the video was unable to be located, nor was an account for the Ministry of Youth Development.”

The first episode can be found on the Taxpayers’ Union Facebook page.

The second will be posted tomorrow. They are both currently on the Ministry of Youth Development Facebook page.

Taxpayers’ Union