In a year dominated by politics, New Zealand's toughest public relations challenge for 2017 has been named as the fallout from Metiria Turei's benefit fraud confession.
The annual ranking issued by BlacklandPR found the former Green Party co-leader's confession, the Wiri pipeline breakage, and Labour's first 100 days to be the nation's toughest PR challenges of the year.
It was the first time in the annual list that three issues were tied at the top. In a tie-breaker, it was determined that the emotions sparked by Turei made it the most challenging PR job.
Turei stepped down from her co-leader position after revealing she had committed benefit fraud 20 years ago.
"Turei's confession stands apart because it tapped into deeply dividing views on fairness and justice," Blackland PR director Mark Blackham said.
"It evoked strong emotions and had high levels of 'talkability'. Everybody had a position on it. That makes managing such an issue incredibly hard."
BlacklandPR uses a scoring system that ranks issues out of 10 in four factors – Impact (how many people are consciously affected directly or indirectly), Profile (media coverage and 'talkability' in everyday life), Emotion (the intensity of emotional reaction), and Complexity (complications and technicalities of the issue).
In previous years the PR Challenges list has been headed by issues such as housing, Roastbusters, vegetable recalls and the Fonterra botulism issue.
"The Wiri pipeline breakage was complex because of the blurring of responsibility between the large number of organisations and people involved. But it was made harder to resolve from a PR perspective because of public figures speaking about the issue, and speculation by media".
Political issues on this year's list were comparatively less complex, but still ranked highly because of national profile, impact on people's lives, and emotions stirred, Blackham said.
"We grouped the coalition's policy plans into the single issue of the 'first 100-days'. The reputational challenge was hardest not from any single policy promise, but because of the intensity of public scrutiny, and complexity of getting the policies started."
The list's assessment team separated the end of education system "National Standards" from the coalition's 100-days because the policy reversal would place high communication demands on the Ministry of Education, and the impact was still to play out for tens of thousands of parents.
