I am struggling to see what Labour & the Greens are trying to achieve by crucifying Peter Dunne (if Dunne did in fact leak the report).
The issue is what Dunne (if Dunne did in fact leak the report) leaked, not how or why he did it. Over 80 NZers were illegally spied on by the GCSB, THAT is the issue. We now know because of some excellent reporting by David Fisher in the Herald that the GCSB report was originally scrubbed clean, so by leaking it early, Dunne (if Dunne did in fact leak the report) halted any further censoring of the report.
Dunne (I’ll quit this now, but you get my point right – presumption of innocence and all) whistleblew and if the Greens are going to praise Assange, Manning and Snowden, it seems churlish to call for Dunne’s public humiliation and sacking.
Here are the problems with this strategy. Firstly, the Speaker of the House is unlikely to grant this going to Privileges Committee, and even if it does the Government has a majority on it to let Dunne off the hook, so the mechanics of this look like going no where.
Even if they did manage to force the media to hand over emails, how does that win make Labour and the Greens look to their progressive voting block? That they will force media to disclose their sources? That’s the sort of tactic one expects from Putin, not the next Labour-Green Government.
So let’s say, they manage to get the Speaker to say yes, they get a disclosure from Privileges via Parliamentary Services and they effectively force media to reveal their sources. Then what?
‘Best’ case scenario Dunne steps down. A by-election in Ohariu is most likely going to go National’s way unless the Greens and Labour agree to stand only one candidate, and with the ego stakes politically at such a height, that ain’t going to happen.
Even IF National lost, I’m almost certain that Brendan Horan would get made an offer he couldn’t refuse. Key limps to 2014 blaming the lefty wankiness of MMP rather than anything to do with him and he promises some harsh curtailing of MMP and gets swept to a landslide victory.
The meme that Key is propped up by flakes isn’t the problem for Key as it is when the left do it. Key just shrugs and tells NZ ‘that’s the reality of MMP’, for his voting block who hate MMP anyway, the blame is on the electoral structure, not Key’s decision to keep Dunne.
The other problem for the Greens and Labour in picking over Winston’s hitjob is that it condones NZ First leadership on this. Let’s not forget that NZ First is giving Key the votes to pass the GCSB law through Parliament so all of Winston & Key’s huff and puff at each other is pure political theatre. Winston is repositioning to the right as National’s next coalition partner and has politically murdered Dunne in broad daylight so Key has no option but select NZ First as his next party to form a Government with.
By coming late to the hit, Labour & Greens gain nothing other than strengthen Winston’s negotiating muscle by also trying to force Dunne out.
Publicly flogging Dunne is is a lose, lose, lose situation for the Greens & Labour. They lose because it won’t happen and they look impotent, they lose because winning would mean forcing media sources to be breached tainting them in the eyes of their own progressive voters and they lose because all they are doing ultimately is empowering NZ First.
In light of PRISM, Labour and the Greens should thank Dunne for whistleblowing and bringing such important issues to the publics attention and continue to hammer Key on the real issue of our complicity with US intelligence and tag NZ First in for giving Key the votes to pass the GCSB legislation.
Why aren’t Labour & the Greens asking real questions here? Like, how did David Henry, the man who investigated Dunne ‘know’ what the contents of the emails between Dunne & Vance were if he didn’t have access to the content in those emails? We know the logs he had only gave sender, recipient, date, time and subject title. The only way Henry could have known is IF the GCSB spied on the emails…anyone else feel slightly chilled by that line of reasoning? That the GCSB would be spying on MPs and Journalists emails? Something about this smells terribly rotten and our Opposition parties seem totally asleep at the wheel on this.
A majority of people voting in the next election will be on Facebook or surf the net. Their privacy concerns are real as digital citizens and if the Opposition Parties could just stop being so fucking-navel-gazingly-beltway-Wellington about this, they could see there is a far bigger issue at stake here.
You know shit is bad when whistleblowers are forced to run from the United States Orwellian surveillance state and flee to China.
Russel Norman has shown some hope by highlighting the role of odious private contractors attempting to data mine on behalf of our intelligence apparatus, but the focus still seems very much to be on Dunne.
Labour and the Greens seem to strategically be playing checkers. Problem is this is a chess game.
Thanks for saying what I’ve been thinking. Please go on saying things like this, loudly.
Is there an answer to any of those rhetorical questions that goes beyond “stupidity”?
I don’t know which would be worse, that Labour and Greens really *are* that stupid, or that they’re already so compromised that New Zealand has fallen into America’s trap of having only one party that wears different masks and stages Punch-n-Judy dramas to distract the audience from the pickpockets circulating among them.
Soo right there, respect & recognition are due to Dunne if he did, albeit inadvertently, get his foot stuck in the door before the whole thing was made to ‘go away’. Green & Labour turned slightly tealer & browner here.
“Like, how did David Henry, the man who investigated Dunne ‘know’ what the contents of the emails between Dunne & Vance were if he didn’t have access to the content in those emails? We know the logs he had only gave sender, recipient, date, time and subject title.”
Well the subject title can give everything away. e.g. “Re: Ketteridge report” or “Re: GCSB details” etc.
Martyn, if the Speaker doesn’t send Dunne to the Privileges Committee, that’s the win-win for the opposition. Carter looks like a tosser, there’s a cloud over Dunne, and you don’t have to get in a fight with the media.
The claim that being propped up by flakes isn’t a bad thing for National is pretty directly contradicted by Shipley’s experience of being propped up by flakes last time round.
It’s difficult, I know, to grasp these complicated political facts, but try, Martyn, try.
You raise some valid points there, Martyn.
I have come to the realisation that Labour and the Greens should leave this ongoing attacking and dismantling of Dunne to Peters and only participate at modest level in this. That is for their own interest. As you write, there is likely to be little gained out of banging on about Dunne, that leak of a report to be published anyway, and about what may have happened between Dunne, Vance and amongst others involved in the whole GCSB saga.
The wider public will lose interest in this, if they have even had much interest in it.
The public want to hear and see alternative policies from Labour and the Greens. The latter have been doing a better job in many respects, so Labour have a lot of catching up to do. Sadly with the present leadership they are performing below of what the public would and should expect.
Yet Labour should at least focus on developing policies, which they said they were going to do this year. Nearly half the year is over, and all we had was NZ Power, co-announced with the Greens. So Labour should bloody get cracking and deliver something smart in economics, social policy and other areas, which could convince the voters and get them votes they will need next year.
As for GCSB they should focus on what the government has pushed through in law changes and hammer that. More oversight is needed, and more control by Parliament and perhaps an independent, well qualified panel should be demanded. PRISM is a game changer, the revelations about that it is.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have for years been harvesting data from users, to encode it and sell some of it to advertisers. Now we learn that NSA has direct access to their users and account holders, and what they communicate.
I feel the many users of such internet service providers have little knowledge of what goes on, and it is time to bring this to the attention of everybody, so an awareness of privacy issues is developed.
It is urgent time to put controls in place, to stop the wide scale “harvesting” and monitoring of user data on the web, same as of smart phone and other communications, so that people can have their privacy and freedoms protected.
The internet was many years ago hailed as a revolutionary new means of communication, and for offering free access to information and exchange of this. It seems that few ever saw things come, as we are now confronted with.
Indeed we are moving towards Orwellian times, and we better take action now, before it is too damned late.
That is where Greens and Labour have to take action too, if they would bother. The first ones take it more serious, I think, and one must wonder, what does Labour stand for these days?
[…] A few days old, but Anita on Kiwipolitico asks What should I think about Dunne? I dare say quite a few bloggers are asking the same question. Interestingly, Martyn Bradbury asks a similar question on The Daily Blog; Why are Labour & the Greens crucifying Dunne (if Dunne did in fact leak the report) for whistleb… […]
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