April 2009

Lynne (the guy with the girls name) at The Standard thinks that candidates aren’t important. Worse he thinks candidates are “there largely for the debates and baby-kissing”. Well that’s his spin on the fact that Labour is campaigning to hold M Albert already despite not having selected a candidate. Why a resident of Auckland Central gets so het up about Mt Albert is beyond me unless f course the links to Labour and Helen Clark are a lot closer than the lap-bloggers admit to.

As an aside, you may remember the fools at the offshore lap-blog banning anyone who said “the Standard said”…..Lynne (the guy with the girls name) would pontificate that The Standard is a collection of programs and hardware and as such doesn’t have a voice……..except now the collection of programs and hardware has now found its voice with new posts sometimes appearing as written by The Standard……wow technically advanced the offshore lap-blog is now…it can write its own blog posts.

Just two weeks ago Bob Harvey was attempting to protray himself as the great conciliator when he appeared on Close up with the Clown of Campbells Bay, Andrew Williams. Since then though Bob Harvey has become the Wally of Waitakere and now Whaleoil can reveal to readers the utter mendacity of Bob Harvey.

He has been playing for all to see the role of conciliator all the while in the background at council meetings exhorting  people to revolt. Arriving in the Whaleoil Tipoff Inbox was the Notes on the Extraordinary Council Meeting of 17 April. This meeting occured just 4 days after he appeared on Close Up playing Mr Nice Guy and clearly lying to Rodney Hide.

These notes show Bob Harvey making a speech where he;

• Accuses the media of dumping on him
• describes himself as acting wise and as a mediator
• says a new council comprised of Remuera and Paritai Drive people must be stopped
• describes the role of Local Boards as nonesense
• says the Auckland Bill is being written by boffins in Wellington
• describes the battle against the proposals as “a war that needs to be taken to the streets” and “Maori need to take to the streets also”
• he is investigating legal options for redress

Those don’t sound like the actions or words of a wise man nor of a conciliator. They sound more like someone on a warpath. Other speakers at the council meeting were;

Tony Mayow – Chair of Community Waitakere, who is upset that all the work of making Waitakere an Eco-City would be for nothing and that “Rodney Hide has gutted the report”. He “Fears Rod Deane as he is for privatisation” and asks that people bombard MPs with email.

Vanessa Neeson says she would march and take a pitchfork if she had one.

Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse also thinks the council should fight and suggests all councillors become activists.

Richard Northey an Auckland City Councillor was also at the meeting to agitate.

Goff thinks fresh face has winning edge – Labour leader Phil Goff says his party’s bid to keep the Mt Albert seat in the coming byelection will be stronger with fresh faces. He made the comment yesterday after the eight Labour candidates vying for Labour selection this… [NZ Herald Politics]

Goff is absolutely right, a new fresh face is exactly what is needed and that is why Meg Bates should be selected for Mt Albert and someone should roll Goff while they are at it.

David Shearer is hardly a fresh face, he is a school mate of Goff’s so that makes him nearly sixty, Glenda Fryer has a face you can break bottles on and the others are all never weres or has beens like Hamish What’s-his-face from the North Shore.

The one that really takes the cake is so-called “Lesbian Muslim” Farida Sultana. Qur’anic verses and hadith condemn sexual acts between members of the same sex.There can really be no way that she is Muslim and Lesbian the two are mutually exclusive.

Same-sex intercourse officially carries the death penalty in several Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Sudan, and Yemen. It formerly carried the death penalty in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The legal situation in the United Arab Emirates is unclear. In many Muslim nations, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Algeria and the Maldives, homosexuality is punished with jail time, fines, or corporal punishment. In some Muslim-majority nations, such as Turkey, Jordan, Indonesia or Mali, same-sex intercourse is not specifically forbidden by law. In Egypt, openly gay men have been prosecuted under general public morality laws.

I wonder what Ashraf Choudray thinks of Farida Sultana and whether she should be stoned for her unchaste behaviour?

Phil Goff is still failing to make a dent and Labour is still dog-tucker in the latest 3News Poll.

National 56% down 4
Labour 30% up 3
Greens 6.1% down 1
Maori 2.9%
ACT 2.1%

John Key 51.1%
Helen Clark 11.5%
Phil Goff 9.1%

And a massive 80% think that John Key is doing a good job.

When you read letters to the editor in your local rag or in the Herald in coming weeks complaining about the Super City proposal for Auckland, know one thing, that it is an orchestrated and coordinated campaign by the Labour Party to drown out support for the proposals.

This is ironic considering that it was Labour that set the terms of reference for the Royal Commission, it was Labour that setup the Royal Commission and Labur that appointed their patsy commissioners and now it appears that Labour doesn’t want a bar of the Super City proposal. The very same Royal Commission that reccomended against a referendum.

Whaleoil has received via the Tipoff email the following email from former MP Jenny Kirk exhorting Labour supporters to start the campaign.

From: Jenny Kirk

To: undisclosed-recipients:

Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2009 1:06 PM

Subject: SUPERCity letters needed]

I reckon its about time Labour people started up a new topic in the Herald and SST letters – what don’t you like about the Super City proposals ? ? ?

Please get some letters in soonest. Not only to the Herald and SST but also into ALL your local community newspapers – the North Shore Times, Western Leader, South Auckland Courier, and whatever …………..
—————————————————————————–

[WOBH: snipped out NZPA article]

My personal comment : The Mayors of Auckland are NOT the Auckland region’s residents and ratepayers ! Nor can they speak for the whole region and its diverse and varied communities.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————–
A few suggestions to start off your letter-writing :

The National-Act Government should seek a mandate from Aucklanders before fundamentally restructuring local government in Auckland.

Section 49 of the Local Government Act 2002 provides for a poll of electors to be held before reorganisation of local government occurs.

If the National-Act Government has the courage of its convictions, it will seek a mandate for what they are proposing rather than simply ramming changes through by special legislation.

National promised in its election manifesto that it would consult with Aucklanders when the recommendations of the Royal Commission were known. It has not honoured that promise.

The Royal Commission consulted widely and undertook extensive analysis over 18 months before making its recommendations. These were changed fundamentally by National in a week without further analysis or consultation, even with key players in local government.

A referendum would force Mr Key and Mr Hide to consider the acceptability to Aucklanders of all their recommendations, rather than just forcing them through.

The reorganisation has been estimated to cost every Aucklander $550 extra in rates, yet those who are expected to pay aren’t even being consulted about the changes.

It should be a case of no taxation without representation.

Aucklanders have the legal right to have their voice heard by referendum. That should be respected by National and Act rather than subjecting Aucklanders to their bullying tactics.

We have one chance to get Auckland’s new governance structure right. That means taking the time it needs for Aucklanders to participate in the process, have their voices heard and for a reasonable level of consensus to be achieved.

For many Aucklanders, the current proposals look like a jack up between National and Act leaders, Mayor John Banks and a small but powerful business elite.

Under the law, Aucklanders have the democratic right to voice their opinions over major changes to their city that they will be required to pay for.

This should not be overridden by central government arrogantly legislating that right out of existence.

No referendum on ‘super city’, says Hide – Local Government Minister Rodney Hide wants Aucklanders to have “maximum input” into the Government’s super city proposals but he has ruled out holding a referendum. Labour leader Phil Goff today called for a referendum to give… [NZ Herald Politics]

Phil Goff, who today launched the Labour campaign without a candidate in mt Albert has called for a referendum on the Super City. Predictably and simultaneous the paid off-shore lap-bloggers have also called for a referendum.

All of these calls for referenda remind me of a quote from Edmund Burke in 1774;

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), Speech to the electors of Bristol. 3 Nov. 1774

With this quote we can see that National and Rodney Hide are taking the principled decision over a referendum of such a complex issue. Make no mistake this issue is actuially far too complex for a referendum. I note that in Phil Goff’s call for a referendum he doesn’t suggest a suitable question. Gooner at No Minister does have a go at just such a question and a fine effort it is.

Any politician who stands for public office and then every time a tough question arises suggests a referendum is a coward and doesn’t deserve his pay. Matt McCarten has already called Goff a coward and now so dies Whaleoil. Grow some balls Goff. You used to have balls when you were chucking paint and burning flags and hanging communist flags on the cenotaph…what has happened in the interveneing years? Gone soft? I think so.

Guido Fawkes has outed the nasty smear machine in the UK and brought down a top Downing Street advisor and Michael Bassett has an article about the links between UK Labour and NZ Labour and the existance of a similar smear machine here in New Zealand.

Those with memories might recall the parade of dirty tricks used by the beleaguered Labour Party prior to the last election to smear their opponents. First there was the hacking into Don Brash’s computer and the stealing of a selection of emails that found their way to the egregious Nicky Hager. He spun a tissue of fabrications worthy of the Holocaust denier, David Irving. Labour’s leaders had a very good idea about who was the culprit, but they sat back and smiled while calumny was heaped on the opposition leader, and Hager made money from the book he published based on stolen goods. For myself, I have always believed that someone inside the Beehive was responsible for stealing those emails in the first place. The Police’s investigation was scandalously conducted and found nothing.

What is disgusting about the Police investigation into the Brash email theft is the total disregard of Police HQ for the rule of law with regard to OIA requests. Don Brash is still waiting for his file.

Then there was the establishment of a blog called The Standard. The Labour Party ran a weekly newspaper from 1934 to 1959 that published political material. It was subject to the normal journalistic standards of the time. But the new blog version made no pretence at following even the reduced journalistic standards of modern times. Registered to an address in Helen Clark’s electorate, and operating out of the Beehive under ministerial supervision, it gave an airing to innuendo and false stories that ministers hoped might get picked up by the mainstream media. They often did. Indeed, several gullible reporters happily took their leads from the Beehive’s dirty tricks brigade. I saw an email sent by Ruth Dyson that had clearly been prepared by her apparatchiks. It denounced me, and urged her mailing list to protest to a newspaper that was running my columns. I’m told that the apparatchiks watched the news, made it their business to pick up material, true or false, and fed lines to people like Brian Rudman of the Herald. The same dirty tricksters fabricated a story about John Key that had Mike Williams rushing to Melbourne to check records, only to return empty handed, and red-faced, just before the election.

Yes the H-fee smear, led by “Batman” and Clinton Smith at The Standard attempted to smear John Key. When you look back across The Standard and look at the endless posts about shares, share parcels etc and then look at the parliamentary questions for the same time you can clearly see the colusion. The H-Fee smear backfired ultimately on Labour and on The Standard. Also don’t forget the orchestration with TV3 over the secret recordings, yet another link to Labour and the Standard.

Whilst we on the right are largely self employed the leftist lap-bloggers are by and large publicly funded.

The significance of all this is that New Zealand’s Labour dirty tricksters were all on the public payroll. They operated mostly from the Prime Minister’s Office where Helen Clark appeared to operate a kind of training school for younger versions of herself: people with degrees and absolutely no experience of life. Graduates of student politics, they regarded possession of the reins of power as some form of divine right. Mostly in their 20s, they were designated “advisers to the Prime Minister”. Since they had little general knowledge, and consequently nothing to advise with, they were paid good money, and put to work on dirty tricks. Several are now on Labour’s backbenches, where they are still being supported by the taxpayer. The Standard still exists, but it has been hollowed out by the end of the Beehive’s funding. It would be interesting to know whether, in its current withered state, it is being funded from Phil Goff’s office.

The full information of how The Standard operated is yet to emerge but slowly but surely the leaks are flowing, eating awway at the facade of their indepdence.

Yesterday Spanish Bride was the victim of a hit and run accident. She was stopped at a pedestrian crossing on Edmonton Road in Te Atatu when a young fool and his girl-friend came around the corner and smacked straight into her car.

The Pod, thankfully, were not that injured, whiplash, sore arms etc. The fine German machinery that protected the pod however is a write off. The Mazda that hit our car is worse off as is the fool’s girlfriend who sustained nasty face injuries.

This young fool after smashing into our car, then attempted to drive off. He tried to drve away around the block but his car gave up the ghost. Some teenagers in a car spotted his steaming, smoking wreck and his attempt to bolt and then discovered our wreck. They stopped and gave details of the car and location.

They have now been caught.

Many local residents came to assist including a lovely Sikh gentleman complete with turban and others that came bearing blankets. There were about four or five different cultures all helping.

Spanish Bride has written a letter to the Western Leader, here it is;

Dear Sir

my two children and I were involved in a hit and run accident on ANZAC day on Edmonton Rd in Henderson.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the many people who came to our assistance when the driver who hit us from behind and shunted us into the back of another car fled the scene.

A number of different families came out of their homes and we were offered a drink, blankets for my son and even an offer to come inside one of their homes while we waited for the police.
Thank you for your kindness and concern. You all know who you are.

Also I want to mention some teenagers who went out of their way to assist us. People are always very quick to criticise the younger generation but these local teens were wonderful.
I had been unable to get the licence plate of the car that hit us.

They drove past us after the accident occured and asked us if we had got the plate of the driver that hit us. When I said no, they told us that they had come across the other car and had noted the plate number when it became clear to them that the driver was running away from an accident.

They then assisted the police and thanks to them the driver was caught.
Thank you so much. You know who you are. Your parents should be very proud.

Matt McCarten : Goff falls in challenge to show courage under bloggers’ fire – It’s ironic that in the same week we commemorate the courage of young men who died in battle, our new Labour Party leaders hoisted up the white flag in Helen Clark’s vacant seat. It’s been an open secret for some time that Phil… [NZ Herald Politics]

Without mentioning us, Matt McCarten has acknowledged that DPF and I have harpooned Phil Twyford and may yet harpoon Mt Albert as well for Labour.

Independent verification of a slaying is always most satisfying, more so than claiming the kill yourself.

McCarten accuses Phil Goff of extreme cowardice under fire, fire that was delivered via the blogs. On reflection it is hard to argue with McCarten’s analysis.

But in a stunning display of political cowardice, the Labour Party national hierarchy this week knee-capped Twyford. The political assassination of one of their best and brightest is one of the most disloyal and treacherous political acts I’ve seen.

What is disheartening is that Labour’s action wasn’t from a place of principled strategy but the result of hysteria generated by their political opponents.

I salute the right-wing bloggers, who mischievously instigated a destabilising campaign against Labour by writing that National could win Mt Albert if Twyford was the Labour Party nominee. Twyford is a current list MP. Their genius was in pointing out that if Twyford won – as was widely assumed – then Judith Tizard, as the next-highest place list candidate, would be entitled to return to Parliament to replace Twyford’s vacant list spot.

The bloggers claimed that Twyford’s campaign would be overshadowed by the furore of the supposedly unpopular Tizard slipping back into Parliament.

Privately, none of the bloggers believed that their strategy would amount to much, but were incredulous when certain media players started taking it seriously.

What gobsmacked the bloggers particularly – and fatally for Twyford – was that the Labour Party panicked. There were even some attempts to force Tizard to step down off the list, which of course she wouldn’t.

Heh…..Are we now running Labour’s strategy?

Perhaps the best line of all in the whole article is the last;

Richard Prebble once said to me that no politician can make it without courage. In this respect, Goff – in his first test as leader – has failed. If I was a Labour MP I wouldn’t volunteer to share a foxhole with Goff when the shooting starts.

Hard hats anyone?

Audrey Young : Green factor adds spice in Mt Albert – The optimistic Prime Minister John Key is being unusually downbeat about National’s prospects in the Mt Albert byelection. He emphasised at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday that he would not be over-exerting himself… [NZ Herald Politics]

Audrey Young has noticed that National isn’t quite so cock-a-hoop about Mt Albert now the Greens have announced that Russel Norman is standing. My sources also tell me that National thinks its chances have ebbed away and that the contest is now a two horse racce between the Labour and the Greens.

As is often the case in by-elections someone can become the bolter virtually overnight and it certainly looks that way with Russel Norman campaigning strongly for the Green and disaffected Labour vote.

The simple facts for National are that there just isn’t enough of a struggling middle band in Mt Albert to swing the seat their way.

What will be interesting to watch now though will be the battle between the Goff Faction and their chosen candidate (Shearer) and the Clark Faction and their candidate Meg Bates. Bates has already garnered close Clark confidants Cath Tizard, Judy Callingham and Bryan Edwards as supporters. If Goff’s chosen candidate, Shearer, is selected then it will be interesting to see if Mt Albert’s Clark loyalist roll in behind him or whether Labour president and EPMU General Secreatary Andrew “Chicken” Little will have to roll out the union troops to make up the numbers.