The Ministry of Pacific Peoples has defended spending $200,000 of public money on a documentary about a politician from Fiji, after people questioned whether that was a good use of New Zealand taxpayer funds.

The documentary, Algorithm of Shame: In the Village, Everybody Knows, came out in May 2025. It looks at how online shaming and social media affect tight-knit communities. The film focuses on two people: Lynda Tabuya, a Fijian politician who was sacked from Fiji's Cabinet in December 2024 and brought back in August 2025, and a trans woman named Rhonda, who lost a friend to online abuse (RNZ).

The $200,000 came through the Moana Reo Media Fund, which is run by the Pacific Media Network. A Ministry of Pacific Peoples spokesperson said the funding decision was made independently of the Ministry, through an established process, and that the New Zealand Government did not influence what went into the film. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) said the same thing, with a spokesperson calling the documentary "independently produced and independently selected through an established funding process" (RNZ).

Pacific Peoples Minister Paul Goldsmith and Foreign Minister Winston Peters both declined to comment.

Tabuya's story gives the film a backdrop that goes beyond one person. She was dismissed as Fiji's Minister for Women, Children and Social Protection on Boxing Day 2024 by Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, after a leaked nude video of her spread widely on Christmas Eve. Rabuka brought her back into Cabinet as Minister of Information in August 2025 (RNZ).

The fact that both Goldsmith and Peters stayed quiet is worth paying attention to. Normally, when a government agency's spending comes under question, the minister in charge is the first person asked to respond. Ministers are expected to front up for their portfolios in Parliament and to journalists, even if they were not personally involved in a specific decision. Two ministers declining to comment leaves the ministries themselves to carry the response, which is a thinner layer of accountability than what usually happens when MPs get to question ministers directly.

The funding was set up through the Moana Reo Media Fund, run by the Pacific Media Network. That puts the decision at arm's length from both the Ministry of Pacific Peoples and MFAT. Both ministries stressed that independence. This is a common approach in New Zealand, where government-funded bodies make their own decisions about what to fund without ministers telling them what to do. But whether that approach works well enough when the subject of a film is a sitting minister in another country's government is a question neither minister was willing to answer.

The reason the funding is getting scrutiny is that the documentary focuses on Tabuya specifically, rather than online shaming as a general issue for Pacific communities. Tabuya is not a New Zealand public figure. She is a Cabinet minister in a Pacific nation that New Zealand has a diplomatic relationship with, and MFAT's involvement in the statement suggests the documentary touches on sensitive diplomatic ground. Domestic cultural funding, foreign political content, and the relationship with Fiji all meet here — and both ministers have so far declined to engage with any of it.

The broader context here is that the current coalition government has been taking a closer look at Pacific community funding. Goldsmith, as Pacific Peoples Minister, has overseen reviews of ministry programmes and spending, and the government has said it wants tighter expectations around what funded projects actually deliver. A $200,000 documentary about a Fijian politician's experience with online shaming is the kind of spending that invites questions about whether it fits the government's priorities. The silence from the two ministers who could speak to that only makes those questions sharper.

What we still do not know is whether either ministry raised concerns about the documentary's subject matter at any point during the funding process, or whether the arm's-length setup meant the decision went through without ministers ever seeing it. The statements from both ministries talk about editorial independence but do not say whether anyone flagged, reviewed, or questioned the decision before or after it was approved. That gap is where further questioning — through written questions to Parliament or closer examination by MPs — is likely to focus.