Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, October 14th, 2012 - 10 comments
There are only 2 people protecting us from illegal spying: the Inspector-General with his staff of 1, and the Prime Minister. Therefore it is vital that the Prime Minister knows the law they are meant to be enforcing. They can’t know what they aren’t told, but when the GCSB tells him they were spying on a famous NZ resident, the PM should know that that’s illegal and act on it. Not wait to be briefed on the affair 7 months later.
Written By: - Date published: 9:46 am, October 13th, 2012 - 157 comments
The strange case of what was or was not said on February 29th by Key to GCSB staff regarding Kim Dotcom. In the Shearer Key face-off I know who I think the public will believe – surprise surprise it’s David Shearer. Here’s why…
Written By: - Date published: 6:47 am, October 12th, 2012 - 74 comments
If I were in Labour, I would be looking at the polls and thinking that a small target strategy is best: preserve your credibility at all costs, keep your head down, pick up the votes as National self-destructs – it worked for Key in 2008. Instead, Shearer seems to be trying to shoot the moon with a knock out blow to Key (interesting parallel to Norman’s export policy there).
Written By: - Date published: 9:21 pm, October 11th, 2012 - 144 comments
“So what?” says Key as allegations emerge from within GCSB that Key cracked jokes about the spooks’ (illegal) involvement in the Dotcom raid when he was briefed by them on February 29th. It either means you realised their spying and are incompetent for not questioning its legality or that you knew all about the illegal spying and didn’t care – that’s what.
Written By: - Date published: 6:39 pm, October 11th, 2012 - 103 comments
Apparently there’s a tape of Key mentioning Dotcom on February 29th. Another bit of Key’s story collapses? Watch Campbell Live at 7 for more…
Written By: - Date published: 9:45 am, October 11th, 2012 - 18 comments
Why is John Key backing the flagging tourist industry as a major export earner for NZ’s future? His trip to Hollywood was partly about using the Hobbit to promote NZ as a tourist destination. Why is the government so fixated on attracting more US tourists?
Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, October 10th, 2012 - 29 comments
People don’t just vote for politicians because they like their policies. Just as important are trust and perceived competence. Key’s policies were never popular. He won on the other two – particularly trust. That’s why the Dotcom saga is so ruining for him. As more details of what Key knew or should have known come out day by day, perceptions of Key’s competence and trust in him plummet.
Written By: - Date published: 1:41 pm, October 9th, 2012 - 60 comments
When foreign companies want hand outs, John Key says ‘ how much?’ But there’s no such concern for Kiwi workers.
Young people need work – National gives them a pay cut.
40,0000 manufacturing jobs lost – Key turns a blind eye.
Written By: - Date published: 7:51 am, October 9th, 2012 - 32 comments
No wonder Key’s losing his credibility. He just keeps on getting it wrong.
Written By: - Date published: 6:37 am, October 9th, 2012 - 99 comments
National promised us an “unrelenting focus on jobs” and delivered record highs in unemployment and emigration. Now Key is refusing to even attend a Union jobs summit, because on Planet Key everything is just fine. The unwillingness to admit that anything is wrong is just blind arrogance.
Written By: - Date published: 11:10 am, October 8th, 2012 - 76 comments
In another slippery John Key u-turn, after his mission to Hollywood ‘sweeteners’ are now on the table. Key is bending over to let US-based conglomerates extend their dominance in NZ, in support of their own interests and values.
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, October 6th, 2012 - 49 comments
The narrative that the Government has tried to sell, and which has been largely accepted to date, is that the GCSB’s illegal spying on Dotcom was a cock-up. They claimed that Key wasn’t briefed, when he was. The Nats also claimed only a change in immigration law in 2009 protected Dotcom. Now, we know that’s rubbish. Cover-up it is.
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, October 5th, 2012 - 18 comments
It’s now clear that National are unfit for office anywhere but Planet Key. Which is unfortunate, because here on Planet Earth, things aren’t going so well. We need new ideas, we need action, we need results. We aren’t going to get them from National.
Written By: - Date published: 10:19 am, October 4th, 2012 - 23 comments
Call me cynical but I just don’t think it’s credible that it took over two weeks after Key supposedly learned of the GCSB’s involvement in the Dotcom raid before they realised he given a presentation featuring Dotcom by GCSB a month after the raid. They’re amateur, they’re not that amateur. No, I think the ‘presentation on a laptop screen’ is a red herring.
Written By: - Date published: 8:17 am, October 4th, 2012 - 66 comments
As Key heads off to the US to promote the NZ film industry, I look back at the Hobbit union-busting case and the issues it raised. Will Key’s latest mission to Hollywood, boost the economy, increase jobs and provide benefits to the NZ film industry? Or will it actually undermine the NZ’s economy and democracy, further Americanising NZ’s culture along with it?
Written By: - Date published: 7:35 am, October 4th, 2012 - 115 comments
Watch this video of John Key being interviewed by the media on January 24th. 1: Key is clearly well-briefed on Dotcom. 2: he knows that Dotcom is a resident, so why didn’t he raise that a month later with GCSB? 3: How did Key know that Dotcom was a resident and GCSB didn’t? 4: Banks has told media he had dined at the mansion with Dotcom – months before denying remembering that meeting.
Written By: - Date published: 5:50 pm, October 3rd, 2012 - 21 comments
Key is trying to subtly rewrite history on his denials re Dotcom. Unfortunately for Key his categorical denial is on record.
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, October 3rd, 2012 - 115 comments
What can one say to the latest. No Right Turn says…..
“So, having told everyone that he wasn’t briefed about the Kim Dotcom spying fiasco until September, it now turns out that John Key was told about it back in February. ” … “That whistling noise is the PM’s credibility shrinking even further. His amnesia is just too convenient here to be believed”
Updated: Added links to his next two posts.
Written By: - Date published: 8:37 am, October 2nd, 2012 - 23 comments
Key says that we would all be very scared if he had control over the GCSB. That’s wrong. Key is the only democratic control on our spies and he has extraordinary oversight. Every warrant the spooks need has to be approved by Key. Is he exercising that role properly, or is he just signing whatever the GCSB puts under his nose?
Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, October 2nd, 2012 - 71 comments
Last week, Key tried to tell us that the illegal spying on Kim Dotcom – which he, the minister, we’re supposed to believe wasn’t told about for 8 months – was down to one agent’s ‘brain fade’. Uh huh. So, why has he now appointed a senior public servant to review and reform GCSB? You don’t do that when the problem was one person’s human error.
[Update: Lol at Key. Police are launching a high powered inquiry after he said there was no need for one]
Written By: - Date published: 3:02 am, October 2nd, 2012 - 33 comments
I’ll be in Manchester tomorrow to hear Ed Miliband speak at the UK Labour Party conference. Labour are ahead in the polls, and Miliband’s leadership is more secure than Cameron’s or Clegg’s. Ed Miliband has surprised those who thought Labour chose the wrong brother. Ed is receiving plenty of free advice about what he should say; I suspect he will continue to be himself. Interesting parallels to New Zealand; I’m looking forward to it.
Written By: - Date published: 2:52 pm, October 1st, 2012 - 22 comments
The speed with which Planet Key caught on is a measure of the public recognition that the Nats have lost the plot.
Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, September 30th, 2012 - 87 comments
John Key refuses to accept any responsibility for what his spies get up to. The only point of democratic responsibility for our spies doesn’t monitor them and won’t take the blame for failing to do so. He won’t fire a corrupt, lying minister, either. The rot is spreading to the public service. There has been not one resignation, not a single one, due to the Dotcom debacle.
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, September 30th, 2012 - 17 comments
My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. This week: Obama the Tory, fish, Planet Key and the UK’s hit political single.
Written By: - Date published: 9:23 am, September 29th, 2012 - 83 comments
Labour has written to Key calling for a much wider-ranging investigation into the Dotcom spying affair than Neazor’s narrow, tell-us-nothing-we-don’t-already-know report. They would have been better to go straight to the Auditor-General. The Greens have gone for the established illegality and called in the cops on the GCSB – cleverly citing the same offence Key claimed in the teapot tapes.
Written By: - Date published: 8:41 pm, September 27th, 2012 - 87 comments
Our government’s spies are overseen by two people – the Prime Minister and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The former asked the latter to investigate he found out the GCSB had been illegally spying on two Kiwis. And, guess what, the report blamed underlings. It didn’t even investigate the question of oversight.
Written By: - Date published: 9:21 am, September 27th, 2012 - 50 comments
John “power at any cost” Key isn’t ruling out a deal with Peters in 2014. Peters isn’t ruling it out either. Deputy PM Peters anyone?
Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, September 27th, 2012 - 138 comments
John Key put on a display of incompetence in the House yesterday over the Dotcom spying affair. He claimed not to know a laundry list of basic facts that, if he didn’t know them before, he bloody well ought to have been briefed on by now. In some instances, his memory failed him over Dotcom. Yet he then showed he could recall exchange rates from 20 years ago. I think he’s lying. The alternative is too scary.
Written By: - Date published: 10:11 pm, September 26th, 2012 - 16 comments
There’s a lot of it about in right-wing parties at the moment. For John Key, John Banks and David Cameron it appears to be becoming the strategy of choice. It’s not working very well for any of them.
Written By: - Date published: 9:54 am, September 26th, 2012 - 43 comments
“Ignorance gets us nowhere”, it’s National’s new slogan and it certainly applied with Key’s feigned ignorance in answer to questions on Banks’ corruption last week. Key’s behaviour is jeopardising our reputation as a democracy that doesn’t tolerate corruption. And he’s got a lot of questions still to answer. Two particularly interesting angles are what exactly […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:50 pm, September 25th, 2012 - 51 comments
Key has failed to uphold high ethical standards for himself, his Ministers, or his government. The GCSB illegal spying fiasco is just the latest example.
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