Guyon Espiner’s interview on Radio NZ today, exposes the moral failings of John Key’s leadership -as Key attempts to divert, & justify the dirty game that NZ politics has become under his watch. Partial transcript of the interview: to be continued Updated: Transcript completed
Andrea Vance has reported that as late as last week Jason Ede still had access to the Beehive. And Key’s replies to her questions concerning this suggest that there is a lot that he does not know. It makes you wonder why he can be so insistent that Nicky Hager’s allegations are wrong when he has such little information.
Metiria Turei’s speech at the Green’s launch. There is a lot of interesting material in there that I will write on later.
In spite of what John Key & some of the media claim, Labour & the Greens have continued to campaign positively on policies and values throughout the week. The Greens officially launch their campaign tomorrow.
Judith Collins naming the eponymous Simon Pleasants to Cameron Slater as the suspect in a document leak is unconscionable. She cannot remain a Minister, otherwise Key’s claim to a high standard when it comes to Ministerial behaviour is in tatters. This time the John Banks defence “I haven’t read it” and “I have taken his/her word” will not do.
The Herald is reporting that the first of Key’s denials about the allegations in Dirty Politics has been refuted. National did hack Labour’s crippled server in 2011 and even apologised for it but Key claims National had no involvement.
Over at The Ruminator there is a post corroborates the Judith Collins and Cameron Slater mutual back-scratching in private vendettas. It appears to me that there has been rather a lot of fiddling of the OIAs in recent years. In particular I’m thinking about the OIA requests on Liu for TV3.
Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics tells of the “two track strategy” of John Key’s leadership of the National Party & the country: a smiley nice front, & vicious, covert black ops behind the scenes. Key has overseen one of the darkest, nastiest periods in NZ politics. Vote Left for necessary, democratic change, for people-centred governance.
Some interesting comments on Hager’s book by John Armstrong and Danyl McLaughlan and the nagging question of who is responsible remains …
BLip comments on John Armstrong’s article yesterday. Then he updates his “Honest Man” list about John Key and his limited understanding of the truth.
Two days after Nicky Hager’s book has been released and National’s response has been interesting. They are doing everything from attacking the author to the means of obtaining the information, to saying that it is politics as usual and Labour does it too. But John Key’s recent response to TV3 looked desperate. And the veracity of what he said needs to be checked.
The intention of this post is to examine the similarities and differences between the hacking of Cameron Slater’s communications on the one hand, and the hacking of the Labour Party donor database on the other. There are two important issues to determine in both cases and I will cover them separately. The first is the legality of the hacking and the second is the ethics of using the resulting information regardless of whether the obtaining of the information in the first instance was unlawful.
There has been a bit of pestering of authors by media in the last few days and some inadvisable waffling by fools ignorant of the blogging world about this site. I’ve had to bestir myself to talk about it. I’m not too happy about the time wasting. But on a happier note, the site is performing superbly under load..
Cameron Slater expresses his thoughts on Christchurch and the effects of the second Christchurch Earthquake. John Key thinks that he is a “pretty colourful character”. What do you think?
Usually all lights are off. But not last night. I wonder what they were talking about on the 9th floor of the Beehive last night? That is John Keys office.
National’s standard response is to ridicule – other political parties, Jon Stephenson, scientists etc have all had it. It slots nicely with Cameron Slater’s style. Now they’re ridiculing Nicky Hager, but they need to be taken up on each allegation.
The use of clandestine SIS files as a weapon of partisan politics is needs to be investigated. John Key or his office discovered classified SIS files that were embarrassing to Phil Goff, got them declassified, then immediately told a right-wing blogger to seek those same newly-declassified files under the OIA, all as a means of smearing a political opponent.
I have foolishly never taken Cameron Slater very seriously except when his attacks have been obviously for the benefit of the National Party. I actually believed that the misinformed and bigoted viewpoints that prevail in his posts were his genuine opinions. It fits his character to drone on about “The Breastapo” “Sucking on the Taxpayers’ Tit”. To discover that such posts were actually written and paid for on behalf of Fonterra actually shocked me.
I think I know someone who 5 weeks out from an election who thinks he has just had a few percent tacked on to his parties votes. After all remember the “cup of tea” in Epsom last election. And he may have read some parts of the book?
So the book is an expose of the Slater-Ede-Key Dirty Politics machine, based on data acquired and leaked to Hager. Will Update: Update: Hager to be on Campbell Live tonight.
Nicky Hager has certainly got the attention of political circles in NZ, by announcing his (untitled) book launch today at 5.15pm. J[update: 3 news Livestream of book launch] Update: Title “Dirty Politics” – on attack politics – implicates John key & Slater]
What the hell? This isn’t an election advertisement. This is someone expressing their views in music and video. This judgement by the Electoral Commission doesn’t appear to have any real basis behind it. Quite simply they are wrong.
Steven Joyce is asking about how Labour can afford their policies. Half of the money is what National is planning to spend unwisely. The rest is from documented increases in revenue in a fiscal plan. Unlike National’s mythic surplus, these are solid values. They will produce a solid surplus to pay down National’s debt.
A great campaign launch from Labour on the weekend, a couple of bad weeks for National and suddenly there is a chance that David Cunliffe may be our next Prime Minister. But how does he succeed and what can progressives do to help?
There’s much to discuss on the two election-focused TV debates conducted over the last 24 hours. Prime TV’s new show: Prime Time with Sean Plunket – Bennett & Turei on poverty/inequality (Prime TV Fridays 9.30pm): TV 3’s The Nation: Saturday 9.30am
Just over six weeks to go until the next election and we have our first major campaign issue. Not what some young people said about John Key but foreign ownership of our land.
A video setting out John Key’s various memory lapses.
There are sobering & harrowing stories coming out of AAAP’s Action Impact at Mangere this week. It exposes the vast inequalities & poverty existing in NZ. Vote to end this destruction of humanity & democracy! Vote for compassion, caring & sharing! VOTE LEFT!
Rob Salmond looks at the recent shifts in media opinion pieces. Perhaps the National strategy of getting the house to rise too early has backfired. It appears to be giving opposition parties more room to showcase their policy, more room for National to showcase its arrogance, and more time for the polls to close.
It’s been an interesting few days in the battle for Te Tai Tokerau. Never mind the bollocks, people. The question for Labour isn’t should we stand aside for Hone in the north or Mana/IP anywhere else. The question is ‘do we need ’em?’. The answer is looking more and more like no.
John Key has agreed to attend one local meet the candidates meeting this year. The rules are however that there will be no debate, questions will be screened and candidates will only be able to refer to each other once. And silence will be demanded. What happened to the good old fashioned election political meeting?
Rob Salmond has noticed recently that National likes to talk a lot about everyone else’s ideas, but it prefers not to discuss its own.
The Green Party is launching their “election priority for students” at Auckland University today from 2-3pm in the Auckland University Quad. Russel Norman and Metiria Turei announced a student Green Card for off peak public transport. Updated
Tracey has submitted a series of OIA’s in order to get information about the stats Bill English referred to in relation to the government having reduced the numbers of single mothers. So far…. nothing helpful.
Power has been concentrated into the figure of one man – a man who has in recent weeks shown that he thinks he is above the rule of law. You might think your one vote doesn’t make much of a difference – but it is everything to us here. Another three years of National and Brownlee, and we might not have a vote at a local level at all.
Other than fixing child poverty, there’s probably no more important policy than this. Labour will commit $183 million to a comprehensive Youth Employment Package designed to reach 24,000 young New Zealanders.
