Jeremy Wells’ Mike Hosking rant on Radio Hauraki: Today, another week of being the most in demand broadcaster in the country
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
EXCLUSIVE: Te Tai Tokerau independent poll (44% Hone-27% Kelvin) vs Maori TV poll (38% Hone – 37% Kelvin)
The Te Tai Tokerau Maori TV poll on Monday this week painted a bleak picture for Internet MANA supporters, and it’s results have been seized upon by Labour, NZ First and even the Maori Party (who seem set once again to throw another Maori Party candidate under a bus for utu) to attack Hone and kill off MANA.
With so many political forces lining up to take Te Tai Tokerau’s mana from the voters of Te Tai Tokerau, it’s interesting what an independent poll taken at the same time as the Maori TV poll had to say when online Te Tai Tokerau voters are mixed in with landline voters.
Over 30% of Maori don’t have landlines so using landline polling creates immense distortions. The last landline poll for the electorate during the 2011 by-election had the same result as Maori TVs and claimed Hone was only ahead of Kelvin by 1%, Hone ended up beating Kelvin by 9%.
Maori electorates are far poorer than general electorate seats so the landline bias, which the Maori TV Poll was generated from, is far greater, that’s apparent in the Independent Poll results I’ve managed to get a copy of.
Here are the results of the independent poll using a mix of landline and online polling…
…when the methodology is opened up, it produces a result far more in favour of Hone with a 44% lead over Kelvin’s 27%.
The media focus to date has been the Maori TV landline poll and that has led to a perception Hone’s position is under threat, this independent poll tells a very different story.
The mainstream media have been very wrong about a great deal of things this election, Hone losing his seat is but one of them.
UPDATE: Sanctimonious Labour Party arsehole, Rob Salmond has posted a bitchy and petty blog on his ill read and poorly visited vanity project, ‘Polity.co.nz’…
…the Maori TV poll was started in July, the Independent Poll was taken in July. Rob Salmond’s need to stay relevant has descended into slagging me off. I don’t bother posting your comments on this site Rob because you an arsehole Labour Party Troll that I don’t bother feeding. You didn’t even read the bloody blog properly before you started putting the boot in.
Now bugger off clown.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
The time for TPPA weasel words is over
Almost every day of the election campaign there has been a policy announcement that would potentially run foul of what I understand is currently in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA): more constraints on foreign investment or investors … regulation of mining practices … stronger health and safety laws for mining and forestry that are backed by effective penalties … subsidise reopening of Hillside workshop … replace the ETS with a more effective climate change strategy … stop the big banks and insurers rorting their customers … make polluters pay … and many more.
I do understand that this was an election campaign. The fine print of New Zealand’s existing obligations in a free trade or investment treaty should be allowed to not get in the way of promoting a platform that voters will support, let alone an agreement we have not yet signed.
But after the election political parties will need to confront reality: if they are serious about carrying through with their policies, they cannot support the TPPA. When negotiating a post-election coalition deal New Zealand First, the Greens, Internet Mana, the Maori Party and Labour must make the rejection of the TPPA, or at the very least renegotiation of the current text, a non-negotiable bottom line. If Phil Goff can’t swallow that position, he should not be made Labour’s spokesperson for trade.
The time for weasel words about weighing up the costs and benefits has gone. The outrageous US practice of unilateral certification that I exposed in my last blog means they will effectively rewrite the deal if Congress and its corporates don’t like what the governments signed up to.
The US will simply refuse to certify compliance, and bring the deal into force in relation to New Zealand, unless we change our laws to meet their expectations of our obligations, even if that obligation is not in the text itself. Based on past practice, the US may demand to review proposed laws before they are introduced, offer to help draft them, send their officials to Wellington to oversee the process. Forget “finessing” the enabling legislation to make use of ambiguities in the final text of the agreement; forget creative interpretations of the text. It is the US’s interpretation that will rule them all.
Couldn’t happen for New Zealand? Just remember what Glenn Greenwald told us about the NSA and GCSB waiting for the passage of the GCSB bill last year, so they could proceed with ‘phase two’ of Project Speargun to access the undersea cable that carries New Zealand’s Internet traffic.
In other words, the TPPA will only reflect New Zealand’s national interest to the extent that it coincides with the national interest of the USA. Dealing with this reality is not something that Labour can defer in the hope it may never happen.
The final push is on to conclude the TPPA by November. Rumours are firming up that each country’s top trade negotiators and ministers will meet in October, possibly in Sydney, and again later in the month or early November to deliver the outcome Obama wants when the leaders meet around the 13th of November.
If they can pull this off, they won’t be able to get a final text before mid-2015. But the political decisions would have been made and the officials ordered to convert them into legalese.
That outcome hinges on Japan and the US agreeing on agriculture, before mid-term elections in the US that are expected to increase the political power of the Republicans. There is a 50/50 chance they achieve that, which is why a national day of action has been called for 8 November across a number of TPPA countries.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
MELTDOWN – Maori Party turns on their own Te Tai Tokerau candidate – again
The tensions are building in Te Tai Tokerau with the Maori Party on the verge of meltdown.
Days out from the election, the Maori Party Executive has tried to heavy their own Te Tai Tokerau Electoral Committee and their own candidate, Te Hira Paenga, to tell his supporters to get behind Labour’s Kelvin Davis to oust Harawira.
It seems everyone from the Maori Party to NZ First to Labour want to try and shut MANA down this election. The less said about Kelvin Davis’ own nasty attempt at dirty politics (which had the whiff of Simon Lusk about it) the better.
To his credit, Paenga told the Maori Party Executive to go to hell. Rumours are that things got so heated, Te Hira hopped on a plane to Rotorua and confronted Te Ururoa Flavell before his appearance on the Maori radio election debate, Te Wero, hosted by Willie Jackson.
This sad little episode is a case of history repeating itself. Back in the 2011 by-election for Te Tai Tokerau, the Maori Party entered a candidate to try and split the vote with Harawira so that Davis could become the MP for Te Tai Tokerau. When they found out that they hadn’t put enough of a dent into Harawira’s support, they then turned on their candidate, Solomon Tipene, and shafted him in an attempt to tell voters to support Davis. Behind the move was Harawira’s old foe, Te Ururoa Flavell. In the past many Maori voters have wanted to bring the Mana Movement and the Maori Party together, to stand united. Hone has never made any secret of the fact that he remains open to unifying the two political factions but every time the offer of reconciliation is made, Flavell’s contempt for Harawira gets in the way.
Getting back to the “Kill Harawira” campaign for the current election, the Maori Party asked their dinner speaker drawcard, John Key, to tell Maori voters to vote for Kelvin Davis. Key thought it was a great idea to eliminate the one Maori MP that poses the biggest threat to another term as PM and went on camera to tell Te Tai Tokerau voters that a vote for Kelvin Davis is the way to go. When John Key, David Farrar and Cameron Slater are your biggest supporters, Kelvin can’t be that much of a win.
It’s fine for Te Ururoa to continue his obsession of trying to kill off Hone, but to drag his own candidate into this mud seems a slap in the face to Paenga’s mana.
These last desperate acts by the Maori Party are the very reason they have fallen on such hard times after so much promise.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
We Can Change this Government
We Can Change this Government – Mike Treen at the First Union stop work election meeting
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
Election 2014: For and Against
With the general election tomorrow, we have had a very noisy campaign but little sign that the electorate wishes for a fundamental change of governmental direction. This reflects in part the fact that the economic cycle is close to its decadal peak, and reflects the fact that the Key government has been driven as much by pragmatism as by ideology.
Yet it is likely that the percentage of vote going to the smaller parties – a percentage that generally rises substantially as the undecided decide – will be even greater than usual. This reflects the perception that, to use the expression John Key applied to David Cunliffe, the leadership of both National and Labour have been “tricky” in their approaches to politics.
For
Although we don’t have a two-party system any more, we still tend to divide into camp left and camp right, and expect our government to be of one camp or the other. This is at odds with what happens in Germany, where the equivalent of grand National-Labour coalitions are not uncommon.
My tribal instincts have always been with Labour. Indeed my parents were, independently, solid supporters of the left. Yet Mum and Dad (both middle children) were each politically dissonant with respect to their parents and siblings. School teachers, they were in their twenties when they met (doing country service), and I think that independence of thought attracted them to each other.
Yet, despite those Labour instincts, in forty years of voting I’ve only voted Labour once (National twice). Under MMP, however, more often than not I have voted for Labour electoral candidates (and I expect to this time), but never for the Labour Party. Too often Labour is a party of many good people, but with bad policies; policies that do deceptively little for the people whose votes they rely on. In 1984, following the ousting of their A-team in favour of the fish and chip cabal, the chemistry on the hustings between Labour and the New Zealand Party should have served as a warning for what was to come. That year I voted Social Credit. Then 1987 became the one year I didn’t vote; I disliked every option equally. And living in one of the safest Labour electorates in the country (Island Bay) meant my vote was never going to matter.
I don’t think a National-Labour coalition is viable at present; and the overt austerity of both parties chills me. (What eases my mind, however, is a degree of covert unausterity – otherwise known as pragmatism – within National.) Yet I do like the idea of a government that bridges the left and the right; yang and yin, if you will.
What I would like to see, for the next three years, is a National-Green-Maori coalition (or governing arrangement). I believe such an accommodation is possible, and without the Greens selling their soul. Yes, it would be like the present United Kingdom government; and the Liberal Democrats have been on the electoral skids. The Green Party would have to communicate the benefits of such a bridging arrangement better perhaps than the Maori Party has done in the past.
A National-Green-Maori government would be a change of government, even if there was no change of Prime Minister. I can see two scenarios where it might come about. The first scenario is that New Zealand First has the traditional balance of power between the left and the right. Conventional analysis would be that Winston Peters would thus be the kingmaker, and that the Greens would passively accept whatever Labour could negotiate for them; or the Greens would passively accept another three years in Opposition.
The Greens could circumvent that process by negotiating directly with National, undermining New Zealand First’s bargaining position. (Further, both myself, and I’m sure John Key, would feel that prospective Green Ministers – all experienced parliamentarians – will be much less likely to be incompetent in office than the inexperienced MPs that will come in on Winston’s list.)
A second option is that a National-Conservative-Act-United combination has enough votes (just) to form a government. Now let’s look at this situation from the point of view of Green voters. If the Greens could start talking with National, then we could be up for the following binary choice:
Choice 1: National-Conservative-Act-United
Choice 2: National-Green-Maori
If I was a Green voter (and I may be!) then I know that I would prefer Choice 2 to Choice 1.
National voters might be evenly split about these two options. But National’s leadership team might prefer Choice 2 to Choice 1. First, it would mean not having to include the Conservatives and Act in his government. Second, it would be a shift towards the centre, which I sense is the direction that Messrs Key, English and Joyce would favour. Most of the more ideological National stuff that the Greens couldn’t countenance has already been done.
There would be potential long-term benefits (as well as risks) for both National and Green. A pragmatic National-Green-Maori government gives John Key an opportunity to initiate a new phase of clean politics, and hence raise his party’s chance of success in 2017. And the Greens would come to be seen as a natural part of any future government, rather than being a party perpetually on the sidelines. Indeed I quite like the idea of future alternating (maybe every six years, on average) National-Green-Maori governments, and Labour-Green-Maori governments; a nice balance of change and continuity. Certainly I would like all our governments to be green.
One good policy that I would suggest of a National-Green-Maori government would be for the government to sell its shares in Mighty River Power and buy Genesis back into 100% public ownership. Genesis would then become the Kiwibank of the power industry.
Another policy that I believe both parties could subscribe to, would be the tax scale (option 3) that I suggested for National in an earlier posting. This three-step scale (top rate of 33%) is consistent with all of the tax principles that National stands for. Yet it gives a tax cut of $660 per annum to low-income workers, while giving nothing to persons earning more than $70,000. Jam today; that’s what low-income workers need. Not only would this alleviate child-poverty; it would also alleviate non-child poverty.
Note that the bridging principle, with a leftish party teaming up with a rightish party is not that novel. It is regularly used within large parties, with Cabinet positions being carefully allocated to both the left factions and the right factions of large established parties.
Against
As I have written in other recent blogs, and despite my tribal instincts, I want Labour to go back into Opposition, to rethink its economic policies. It needs to draw inspiration from the First Labour Government (NZ, not UK [see end of this post]), and its commitment in the late 1930s to the formation of the universal welfare state. It needs to drop its commitment to the ethics of thrift, paid work, and economic growth as ends in themselves. Labour needs to abandon its policy to create its crock pot of gold, now to be given the formal title of New Zealand Inc.
(Presently, NZ Inc. is a nice expression for the New Zealand economy taken as a whole; an expression that Russel Norman for example likes to use. It would certainly be sad if this useful concept were to be hijacked by a Labour administration to be used as a specific label for its money hoard.)
New Zealand already has a sovereign wealth fund; known as the Super Fund or the Cullen Fund. Quite rightly, the present government does not borrow to put money into it. Labour wants to run ongoing surpluses so that it can build a fund, ostensibly to buy back power companies, but in reality a fund with no real purpose; jam on the never-never, no jam today for needy New Zealanders.
Peter Lyons, writing in the NZ Herald (‘Is NZ’s prosperity real?’, 10 September), says:
Most of us have a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right. Even those on middle incomes are finding it harder to pay the bills. Often the blame is laid on those further down the income ladder for being bludgers.
While I do not agree with all of Lyons’ analysis, I think this point is especially pertinent. New Zealand is a lucky country with a lucky economy. While we are a prosperous country, now, we have far too many people who are not prosperous; and too many of the rest of us content ourselves that poverty is self-inflicted, or is inflicted on those in the middle by the indolence of the poor.
There are simple things we can do now to share our prosperity. But Labour just says work more, and save more through their compulsory savings scheme. Labour offers a capital gains tax which is unlikely to make rental housing affordable, but is intended to draw off revenue into New Zealand Inc.
Sovereign wealth funds are good for countries like Norway and Saudi Arabia that earn huge profits from a finite resource. (At a personal level; professional rugby players likewise need to build up a pot of money to ensure their well-being after a very finite career.) But even then, sovereign wealth funds, along with private hedge funds and the like, serve as the principal destabilising force in the global economy. The fund managers buy and sell financial assets for both interest and capital gain. These pots of gold represent a huge part of the world’s itinerant money; money that creates real estate, sharemarket and commodity price bubbles in its restless quest for even more money.
I will finish with two quotes from John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’:
The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. … For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality. [Keynes]
The miser always strives to add to his pot of gold, as an end in itself. He or she cannot endure it to be spent. But when conditions change sufficiently to move a miser, each miser seeks to liquidate his fund at the same time, only to find that it becomes as worthless as an Icelandic bank deposit in 2008.
The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. [Keynes]
At the time Keynes published his essay (1930), the British Chancellor of the Exchequer was a very “purposive” man indeed. Philip Snowden was UK Labour’s first finance minister, an austere socialist; he held to a rigid policy of ‘sound money’ and balanced budgets, as Britain rapidly slid into its worst ever financial crisis. This Snowden is not a good role model for the left in New Zealand.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
Eye To Eye Uploaded: Martyn ‘Bomber’ Bradbury
This interview was filmed a couple of weeks ago between Willie Jackson and myself, I was a tad off with my prediction of NZ First.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
EXCLUSIVE: The Donghua Liu Affair – how the NZ Herald played their part in #dirtypolitics
.
.
– Special investigation by Frank Macskasy & ‘Hercules‘
Speculation that the Beehive office of Immigration Minister, Michael Woodhouse, was behind the release of a letter linking Labour leader, David Cunliffe, with controversial Chinese businessman, Donghua Liu, is supported by Twitter chatter linking Herald editor, Shayne Currie, with Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil blog.
“Nothing to see here” Currie’s boss, Tim Murphy, tweeted on 19 June in response to questions about Immigration NZ’s speedy release the previous day of the now infamous Cunliffe-Donghua Liu 2003 letter to his investigations editor, Jared Savage.
“We seek info, public service tells govt and denies us info. We refine request and get letters. We publish. Pretty standard.”
But there was nothing “standard” about the handling of this OIA request. Made at lunchtime on Monday June 16 it produced a response — which usually takes at least 20 working days — within 48 hours. Plucked from a file and previously withheld on privacy grounds, the 11-year-old letter was immediately put to use by National’s frontbenchers in the debating chamber and by the Parliamentary press gallery in the corridors to discredit Cunliffe and undermine his leadership of Labour’s caucus.
Although just a routine check on progress being made on Donghua Liu’s residency application, signed by Cunliffe as New Lynn MP in March 2003, the letter was touted as evidence of support and advocacy for the controversial Chinese businessman.
For the Herald, it lent credibility to its investigation into allegations that Liu had made big donations to the Labour Party.
Jared Savage’s investigation had included a request on May 8 for all information that Immigration NZ held on Donghua Liu. After taking three weeks to decide to withhold everything on his file on privacy grounds, the ministry sat on that decision for another three weeks before suddenly agreeing to release it to Mr Savage at 8.59AM on Monday 16 June.
Although no explanation was given for the sudden u-turn it is most likely that the potential for extracting maximum political advantage from releasing the Cunliffe/Donghua Liu letter became apparent over the preceding weekend.
The resignation of ACT leader John Banks as an MP had taken effect on the Friday (13 June). The filling of the vacancy created in Epsom required a special debate on whether to hold a by- election or wait for the general election on September 20. Gerry Brownlee decided to get it over with, scheduling it for Wednesday afternoon following the weekly General Debate. That meant National faced a torrid afternoon on Wednesday 18 June as Opposition parties combined to hang the Government’s dirty washing all around the debating chamber.
A diversion would be handy.
First, the response to Mr Savage’s May 8 OIA request had to be cleared away and replaced by a fresh request targeted more precisely at the Cunliffe/Donghua Liu letter. Mr Savage obliged with an email seeking “any correspondence, including emails, letters or queries, from an Members of Parliament in regards to Donghua Liu’s immigration status prior to 2005.” The email was sent at 1.04pm on the Monday and asked for the request to be treated urgently because of “the public interest in this case.”
Just over an hour later, at 2.11pm, a remarkably similar request arrived from TV3’s political reporter, Brook Sabin;
“We’d like to know if any Labour MPs lobbied for Donghua Liu’s residency back in 2005 . . . Cheers.”
A growing army of managers, business advisors, comms people and consultants went straight to work on co-ordinating responses to the two requests. Ironically, although TV3 lodged their request sixty seven minutes after the Herald, Sabin was to scoop Savage by three minutes when the 2003 Cunliffe letter was released just under forty eight hours later at 12.49PM on Wednesday 18 June.
Twitter chatter in the hour leading up to the letter’s release reveals a small network of journalists and right-wing bloggers who knew it was coming. They had their stories already written and were waiting impatiently to hit “send”.
12.10pm: Herald editor, Shayne Currie, starts the count down on Twitter: “Tick, tick, tick . . . keep an eye on @nzherald #scoop.”
.
.
The 2003 Cunliffe-Liu letter has not yet been released at this point. No one outside of Immigration NZ and Minister Woodhouse are supposedly aware of it’s existence. It would not be released for another thirty nine minutes.
At exactly the same moment, an unidentified staff member in the Immigration Minister’s Beehive office in Wellington emails across the Parliamentary complex to Cunliffe’s office with a heads-up. Two documents, Cunliffe’s 2003 letter and a similar one sent five months earlier from Labour’s Te Atatu MP, Chris Carter, are to be released to the media “around 1pm”.
12.12pm: Meanwhile, “Pete” is getting impatient. Described in his Twitter profile as “a fluffer, researcher, reporter, journalist, moderator and deputy editor” for Whale Oil Beef Hooked, “Pete” tweets back at Currie: “We’ve been waiting. Get on with it. #bloodyembargoes.”
.
.
12.23pm “Pete” is missing lunch. He asks @Inventory2 [Wanganui right-wing blogger and National Party member, Tony Stuart] and Currie if he has enough time to make himself a sandwich;
.
.
12.28pm: Currie tells sandwich-seeking “Pete” to “Take your Herald mobile app.”
.
.
12.30pm: Back in Wellington, ministry staff are racing to get the letters to the minister’s office. An area manager in Visa Services emails 10 colleagues with the news that a copy of the OIA response to Sabin’s request has been sent to the minister’s office.
12.39pm: The Visa Services area manager reports that he’s “just been advised that the Ministerial consultation has been completed so we will proceed to release.”
12.42pm: The same area manager then emails 10 colleagues to report that the consultation process has been completed and the letters are being released. “I have also asked . . . when we can release the Brook Sabin OIA.”
12.49pm: A business advisor in the ministry’s “Operations Support” team emails scans of the signed response and the two letters to Jared Savage at the Herald. At this point the 2003 Cunliffe and 2002 Carter letters ‘officially’ become public.
12.53pm: Sabin posts a scan of the Cunliffe letter on TV3’s website with a story quoting extensively from it. His story appear four minutes after ImmigrationNZ release the 2003 Cunliffe and 2002 Carter letters to Savage.
12.55pm: “Pete” checks in. He’s had lunch and he’s hot to post the story he’s already written after hearing from Whale Oil. Currie gets the green light and, obviously unaware that the Herald has already been scooped by TV3, tweets “Big political story breaking now . . . what David Cunliffe knew and said about Donghua Liu.”
.
.
.
12.57pm: Cameron Slater posts excerpts from Savage’s story on his Whale Oil blog along with a transcript from a media briefing the previous day on Labour’s KiwiSaver policy when Sabin’s TV3 colleague, Tova O’Brien, asked Cunliffe four questions about Donghua Liu.
12.59pm: Blogger Keith Ng posts the Question and Answer transcript on Twitter, describing it as a “wicked sick burn.”
1.00pm: The Herald’s veteran political correspondent, John Armstrong, posts a comment on the Herald’s website saying Cunliffe “is in deep political trouble. So deep that his resignation as Labour’s leader may now be very much in order”. Armstrong’s column is written and published on-line eleven minutes after Savage is emailed the 2003 Cunliffe and 2002 Carter letters.
1.46pm: Parliamentary Press Gallery accuse Cunliffe of lying and and being a hypocrite in 8-minute “stand-up” on his way into the debating chamber.
2.00pm: Cunliffe arrives in chamber, met by jeering from National benches. Ministers use the 2003 Cunliffe-Liu letter to attack the Labour leader’s credibility. Two of them (English and Woodhouse) quote directly from TV3’s Question and Answer transcript from the previous day.
On the following day, Thursday 19 June . . .
8.04pm: Herald political editor, Audrey Young, in New York with the prime minister, reports that Key admitted knowledge of the Cunliffe/Donghua Liu letter for some weeks. She says Cunliffe’s denials that he wrote “any such letter” has “thrown his leadership into crisis.”
5.14pm: Herald deputy political editor, Claire Trevett, and political reporter, Adam Bennett, report that Woodhouse had confirmed that his office had informed the prime minister’s office of the letter’s existence within a few days of learning of it on 9 May, the day after Savage lodged his first OIA request — the first of three conflicting accounts from Woodhouse.
Four conclusions
1. This was no ordinary scoop. This was a political dirty trick with journalists as willing participants when they should have been exposing it for what it was. Links between political operatives, bloggers and journalists are inevitable and revealed. Ultimately the credibility of mainstream news depends on its objectivity, independence and accuracy.
2. While the last-minute scramble to publish the letter before 1pm on the Wednesday depended on its release to the Herald’s investigations editor at 12.49pm, there is no record of its release to TV3’s political reporter. There is no paper trail, except a few references in internal emails. If it didn’t come from the ministry, it must have come from the minister.
3. The production and circulation of the Question and Answer transcript, required to support the — false — claim that Cunliffe had lied or suffered serious memory loss, remains a mystery. Blogger Keith Ng’s instant judgment on it as a “wicked sick burn” is more than just a smart turn of phrase.
4. Nicky Hager’s chapter on the Cunliffe/Donghua letter in ‘Dirty Politics’ refers to a blogger called “Barnsley Bill”, who – on the day before the Cunliffe-Liu story “broke” on 18 June in the Herald – made this cryptic remark on Danyl McLauchlan’s blog, “The Dim Post“;
Within 24 hours the poll are going to be the least of David Cunliffes problems.
Keep an eye on the herald website, we are about to see pledge card theft relegated to second place as the biggest labour funding scandal.Comment by Barnsley Bill — June 17, 2014 @ 10:21 am
Followed the next day with this;
Pascals Bookie..
There ya go. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11276510
Boom.
Now wait for the 100k bottle of wine to dropComment by Barnsley Bill — June 18, 2014 @ 1:02 pm
“Barnsley Bill’s” reference to “the 100k bottle of wine” was made before the Herald published allegations of Liu spending $100,000 on a bottle of wine to the Labour Party. (Allegations which have since been re-tracted by the Herald.)
Subsequent questions put to “Barnsley Bill” have yielded no sensible answers, and his/her responses have been evasive. (Ref.)(Ref.)(Ref.)(Ref.)
Maintaining his cryptic game-playing, “Barnsley Bill” referred on “The Daily Blog” to “look to Kerikeri for the leak” – which he pointedly repeated. Kerikeri is in the Northland Electorate. Northland is National MP, Mike Sabin’s electorate.
Mike Sabin is TV3 journalist, Brook Sabin’s father.
These are the people who knew about the 2003 Cunliffe letter before it was made public under OIA requests on 18 June. Those OIA requests were ‘smoke-screens’ as TV3, NZ Herald, and Whaleoil already had the documents, or had been informed of their content.
Those letters were provided by the Office of the Minister for Immigration.
Under Savage’s OIA request there was a deliberate, pointed paper-trail trail by Ministry officials. No doubt the civil servants involved had an idea what their Minister was up to, and wanted plausible deniability in case any investigation resulted. By contrast, no such paper trail exists to explain how Brook Sabin obtained his copy of the 2003 Cunliffe letter. Minister Woodhouse was clumsy.
This could have come directly from the Minister’s office.
As the Twitter discussion and “Barnsley Bill’s” cryptic, prescient, comments indicate, there were several people “in the loop” to what was clearly a calculated, planned, – if rushed – political trap and public smear campaign. Clearly, these people did not expect anyone to notice their public conversation.
Organised from a Minister’s office; with involvement by Cameron Slater, and with TV3 and NZ Herald complicity, David Cunliffe walked into that trap.
The truth is only now coming out.
Put the whole Twitter conversation together, and it is abundantly obvious that those involved knew that the story was coming out prior to the Ministry releasing the 2003 Cunliffe and 2002 Carter letters.
Herald Editor, Shane Currie certainly had fore-warning.
.
.
.
.
.
Acknowledgement
Appreciation to ‘Hercules‘ for providing information and filling in the gaps. Without your in-put, this story would never have come it.
.
References
Wikipedia: Shayne Curry
Document Cloud: David Cunliffe-Liu-Immigration NZ 2003 letter
Document Cache: Jared Savage OIA request 16 June 2014
Document Cache: Jared Savage OIA request declined 8 May 2014
Parliament Hansards: Daily debates – Volume 699, Week 75 – Wednesday, 18 June 2014
TV3: Cunliffe’s links to Liu (see video)
NZ Herald: Businessman gifts $150k to Labour Party
Document Cache: Jared Savage OIA request extension-approved 16 June 2014 8.59AM
Radio NZ: John Banks to resign from Parliament
Document Cache: Jared Savage – Immigration NZ – new OIA request – 16 June 1.04PM
Document Cache: Brook Sabin – TV3 – Immigration NZ – OIA request – 16 June 2.11PM
NZ Herald: David Cunliffe wrote letter supporting Liu’s residency bid
Document Cache: Release of OIA to Jared Savage – covering email – 18 June 2014 – 12.49PM
Document Cache: Chris Carter – letter – 3 October 2002
Twitter: Pete – 12.12PM
Twitter: Pete – 12.23PM
Twitter: Shayne Currie – 12.28PM
Wanganui Chronicle: Wanganui man outed in Hager’s book
Document Cache: ImmigrationNZ Area Manager to 10 colleagues – 12.30PM
Document Cache: Immigration NZ – 18 June – 12.39PM
Document Cache: Immigration NZ – 18 June – 12.42PM
Twitter: Pete – 12.55PM
Twitter: Shayne Curry – 12.55PM
Twitter: Shayne Currie @ShayneCurrieNZH
Whaleoil: BREAKING – David Cunliffe’s career, such as it was, is over [ UPDATED ]
TV3: Tova O’Brien’s four questions to David Cunliffe, 17 June
Twitter: Keith Ng –
NZ Herald: John Armstrong: Cunliffe’s resignation may be in order
NZ Herald: Key on Liu-Labour Link – More to come
NZ Herald: National denies dirty tricks campaign against Cunliffe
The Dim Post: June Polls – Barnsley Bill
The Dim Post: Entities – Barnsley Bill
NZ Herald: Donghua Liu’s new statement on Labour donations
The Daily Blog: EXCLUSIVE: Was the Donghua Liu Affair another example of Dirty Politics?
Previous related blogposts
The Donghua Liu Affair: Damn lies, dirty tricks, and a docile media
The Donghua Liu Affair threatens to unravel – PM and NZ Herald caught up in a dirty trick campaign?
The Donghua Liu Affair: the impending final act and curtain-fall in this smear-campaign
The Donghua Liu Affair: The first step to a complaint to the Press Council
The Donghua Liu Affair: Evidence of Collusion between the NZ Herald and Immigration NZ?
The Donghua Liu Affair: the Press Council’s decision
The Donghua Liu Affair: The OIA Gambit
.
Above image acknowledgment: Francis Owen/Lurch Left Memes
.
= fs =
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
As if you needed another reason to boycott Telecom/Spark – they sold NZ down the river
It should read ‘never stop spying’.
As if you needed another reason to boycott Telecom/Spark – they sold us down the river to the US by allowing the Southern Cross cable to be tapped…
The ability for US intelligence agencies to access internet data was used as a bargaining tool by a Telecom-owned company trying to keep down the cost of the undersea cable from New Zealand.
Lawyers acting for Southern Cross Cable quoted a former CIA and NSA director who urged the Senate to “exploit” access to data for an intelligence edge.
The value of intercepted communications to the US was raised during negotiations last year which could increase internet costs 15 per cent.
…so while those extremely expensive Spark rebranding adverts with their hipster fucktards imploring you to ‘start’, this very same company was flogging our privacy off to the NSA so they could keep their own costs down.
This is the clause Telecom use to explain how they just screwed every Telecom user…
A Telecom spokesman cited the company’s contract with residential customers, which tells them it will pass on their information without permission if it believes it is legally required to do so or if it is necessary “to help maintain the law”.
…we have a Prime Minister who has lied to us about mass surveillance and private companies secretly exploiting our privacy.
Right after you cancel your Telecom account, go and vote out National.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
The NZ First-Labour Party attack strategy against Internet MANA better work
The final days of the campaign are ticking down and Labour and NZ First are manoeuvring to kill off the Internet MANA Party by both backing Kelvin Davis for Te Tai Tokerau. It’s a risky gambit that they better pray to Christ works for them.
NZ First and Labour are already quietly plotting to screw the Greens with a Labour-NZ First Government that would limit the Greens to Ministerial positions outside Cabinet so as to reduce real Green change, that’s bad enough, but to try and slice the throat of a real Left party like internet MANA carry’s a lot of risk if it’s not successful.
As someone who helped set MANA up and supported the Internet MANA coalition so that NZ First didn’t hold progressives hostage, the resulting Labour-NZ First Government brings me little joy, but if it’s a case of Labour-NZ First or a National-Conservative Party Government I know what I would prefer. That said, to screw the Greens in the manner they are about to, on top of screwing Internet MANA? Well, let’s hope for their sake it works, because if it doesn’t and internet MANA does get into office, expect nothing less than years of attack by the Left against the Labour-NZ First Government.
Years and years and years of attack. 3 to be precise. If Labour think they can cuddle up to NZ First and walk away from the Left for a centrist political position, they have another thing coming.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
Bill English’s latest insult to beneficiaries – apparently they are like crack addicts
National’s hatred towards the poor continues unabated as National desperately try to throw raw meat to their reactionary voter base in the hope to inspire enough hate and loathing to win back their redneck voters from the Conservative Party and from apathy.
Because National can’t use Kiwiblog or Whaleoil in the wake of Dirty Politics, MPs are having to sling their own mud and yesterday Bill English backed up Paula’s plan to throw another 25% of people off welfare by astoundingly comparing beneficiaries to crack cocaine addicts…
Deputy Prime Minister Bill English has compared some long-term beneficiaries to crack addicts, sparking criticism.
Mr English made the comment while speaking to about 100 voters at a meeting at Club Mount Maunganui yesterday in his final push to Tauranga voters ahead of Saturday’s election.
“Getting stuck on a benefit (long-term) is like crack cocaine, it’s really hard once you’ve started to come off it …”
…comparing the most vulnerable in society to drug addicts is the sort of hate politics National can get away with on their hate blogs, but to have the Minister of Finance stoop to this kind of redneck pandering is an indictment on National and the style of dirty politics they just can’t help themselves from engaging in.
Vote these toxic, vile people out of office.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
Final prediction on election result 2014
What an election campaign. The character assassination of David Cunliffe kicked things off with the Herald on Sunday falsely claiming $100 000 bottles of wine, $15 000 books and $150 000 in donations from a donor that turned out to be all fantasy. Then we had claims of hate politics in the form of burning effigies and so called ‘Nazi chants’ which all paled into insignificance the second investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s explosive Dirty Politics allegations highlighted the disgusting matrix of true hate politics operating between Slater & Co, the mainstream media and the National Party.
The allegations covered blackmailing Rodney Hide into standing down as leader of ACT, hacking the Labour Party server and downloading their entire database, trawling brothels for sleaze on journalists, gaining Secret Intelligence Service information to embarrass a political opponent, rigging candidate selections, moving a prisoner to a far off prison they then attempted a suicide at for a ‘friend’, publicly crucifying a public servant and of course attempting a hit on the head of the Serious Fraud Office. You would think that would be would enough madness, but it wasn’t. Judith Collins then resigned all the while Key told the country ‘nothing to see here’.
When your Justice Minister has to resign because she’s been alleged to to be part of a plan to take down her own head of the SFO, things aren’t going well.
We then had serious allegations of mass surveillance from Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange where the PMs story changed daily. First it was ‘no middle ground’ and ‘I’m right, they’re wrong’. Then it was childish name calling, then the release of declassified documents that had nothing to do with the issues being challenged and then finally Key had to admit that yes, maybe there was mass surveillance occurring but played semantics by claiming it wasn’t really the GCSB, just the NSA programs that the GCSB use.
Those revelations were ignored as journalists took turns tearing strips off Kim Dotcom for deciding to take his evidence to Parliament rather than present it at the Moment of Truth. Such demented journalistic priorities proved why the meeting should have been held as close to the election as it was.
Then we had Eminem hilariously suing the Government for using his song illegally…
…and this morning Mr Christian Family Values, Colin Craig had his Press Secretary resigning saying she thought Colin was a very manipulative man.
Cough, cough. God won’t be happy.
Throughout it all, the mainstream media held onto their bias in favour of Key and showed how very disconnected the Press Gallery view from Wellington had become. Their flawed landline opinion polls of the last 3 years intended to manipulate opinion rather than reflect it will be a challenge to explain on election night, I’m looking forward to some squirming. If Key is the captain of the Titanic and Slater the iceberg, then Hosking, Plunket and Henry are the band playing on the deck as the National Party slowly sinks. The bias and narrow viewpoints allowed in the mainstream media, especially in light of the Dirty Politics scandal, should stain and taint them all forever. That 3rd Degree was as late as this week still using Whaleoil for story ideas to attack Kim Dotcom should embarrass all involved, pity they couldn’t put the kind of journalistic skills to track down workers in the Philippines on tracking down Jason Ede instead.
So after the most vicious election campaign in living memory – what will actually happen? The backdrop of an incredible surge in early voting and the real anger on the ground from Dirty Politics isn’t showing in the mainstream media’s version of events and I think that will cause real surprises on election night.
Here is my call
ACT – wiped out, will not win Epsom after a calculated campaign by Labour & Green voters to strategically vote Goldsmith in. Wasted party vote.
Maori Party – wiped out, will not win any electorates. Their relationship with National has burned them, even if they manage to hold onto one seat, they won’t generate enough Party vote to pull anyone else in with them.
United Future – Dunne may hold on, but it will be close.
NZ First – God damn it, I thought this election it would be over for Winnie, but Cunliffe’s ‘sorry for being a man’ comment revealed the deep seated conservatism and anti-feminist mind set of a lot of older male Labour Party voters who have all walked off to Winnie – 6-8% for NZ First.
Internet MANA – have had speed wobble issues as they moved from crawling to sprinting. Needed far better internal discipline than occurred. Will win Te Tai Tokerau, will win Waiariki will win 4-5% of vote. Would have won 7% if their full employment and free education policies hadn’t been sidelined by ill timed attacks on the media.
Greens – sterling campaign, one of the best in the election will win 13-15% of party vote. Their time to be taken seriously and be at the table has come, will burn a lot of credibility if they do end up helping National out with policy. Looks likely to be snookered however by Labour & NZ First.
Conservative Party – Mr Christian Family Values has some issues with his Press Secretary resigning 2 days out from the election after calling Colin Craig a manipulative man. Will not get over 5% now – wasted vote.
National Party – Despite the media supporting Key and playing down every allegation, Dirty Politics has hurt National badly and the impact will be their supporters staying at home this time and undecided voters voting specifically to get them out. Expect National to get 43-45%
Labour Party – Cunliffe won all the debates, he has a vision but a deeply divided Caucus who seemed hell bent on being off message a lot of the time. The saving grace of Labour is their massive election machine on the day being able to do far more than National’s can – this will lift them out of the poll doldrums – expect anything between 27%-30% on election night.
I think we will see a Labour-NZ First Government with a supply and confidence arrangement with the Greens.
Despite the mainstream media polls that have screamed National will win by a 50% landslide for 3 years, this election was always going to go right down to the wire, and it will.
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com
Live blog: Bainimarama takes commanding lead in Fiji elections
Livestreaming with Repúblika editor Ricardo Morris and Pacific Scoop’s Mads Anneberg.
PACIFIC SCOOP TEAM
By Ricardo Morris, Mads Anneberg, Alistar Kata and Biutoka Kacimaiwai in Suva
WHILE the results are provisional at this stage, it is clear today that the people of Fiji have given coup leader Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama a democratic mandate.
His Fiji First party was polling way ahead of the opposition Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) at 6am this morning when counting was suspended until later today.
With 1244 of the 2025 polling stations tallied by the Fijian Elections Centre, Fiji First with a multicultural policy of “Fiji for all” had 233,094 votes, or 60.2 percent of the total vote – more than double the indigenous party SODELPA, which represents the political group ousted in the 2006 military coup.
Repúblika editor Ricardo Morris writes:
What do the results mean for Fiji? A clear majority of the population have embraced Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s vision and ideals for Fiji, rejecting discrimination and the “politics of the past” to give him and his party a democratic mandate after nearly eight years of military-led rule.
Bainimarama’s restructuring of the psyche of Fijian society has been given the stamp of approval by Fiji’s voters.
Now he will operate within the mechanisms of a parliamentary system that he and his right-hand man Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum have crafted for Fiji.
The results show Fiji First way ahead of its main rival SODELPA, with a landslide towards Bainimarama.
SODELPA leader Ro Teimumu Kepa will most likely be the leader of the opposition.
“It’s a great day for Fiji,” said People’s Democratic Party president Lynda Tabuya earlier yesterday, after she cast her vote at the polling station at Tamavua Village Hall.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said an emotional Tabuya, who is also contesting the elections.
“I think we should all celebrate this day, no matter what the outcome. And I’m just really grateful for a beautiful morning, and for being able to finally exercise my right to vote.”
After visiting several polling stations in the Suva and Nasinu areas, Tabuya described the overall mood of polling day as one of seriousness – a stark difference from Fiji’s past general elections.
She said it was more of a sombre mood, “like one of silent solidarity”.
“Rather than one of lots of noise and lots of laughter, I think people are taking this day very seriously,” said the former University of the South Pacific law lecturer.
The Pacific Media Centre student journalist team covering the Fiji elections are supervised by David Robie, who also blogs at Cafe Pacific. Alistar Kata’s live blog is below:
TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com