Nekhrimah

It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".

RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].

In case you didn't pick it up, Don't Look Up is a callout to a recent movie [1]. I imagine that in this context it's more of a comment on the appetite of the population at large to undergo the temporary inconvenience of proactively taking the power-grid, and thus the vulnerable transformers, offline prior to the arrival of the event. We know the scientists will be looking up; it's the convincing of the population at large via a capitalist captured media that's the hard part.