June 2011

Finally, someone has got off their arse and decided to challenge the hegemony of MMP.

The shouters and vested interests didn’t want a debate, they wanted this referendum to be uncontested, well that isn’t going to happen now.

A campaign against MMP was launched today, aiming to persuade voters to opt for change in the referendum that is going to be held at the same time as the November 26 general election.

The referendum will ask voters whether they want to change to another electoral system, and to tick a preferred alternative from a list of options including the old first-past-the-post system.

If a majority want a change, a second referendum will be held alongside the 2014 general election which will run off MMP against the alternative that gets the most ticks.

“Vote for Change wants a system that restores more certainty, that allows voters to easily hold governments to account and kick rascals out of Parliament”, said the organisation’s spokesman Jordan Williams, a Wellington lawyer.

“The current system lets party bosses sneak MPs who have been dismissed by their local electorates back into Parliament on party lists.”

Mr Williams said many people had high hopes that MMP would create a new era of consensus politics but instead “small groups and party bosses can now hold the rest to ransom”.

Some people are already suggesting that MMP should be reformed but that is not the question in this referendum. What we are being asked to do is choose MMP warts and all as it currently stands, or vote for change. If we vote for change then we can choose one of four other systems.

If you like MMP just as it is then vote for that option, if you like anything else, including a changed MMP system then Vote for Change.

I’m glad we will now be having a debate, something that the supporters of MMP didn’t want and have gone out of their to avoid by abusing those who would speak differently.

This stinks, just because Labour does it doesn’t mean ACT and National should do it. It is public funding of political parties by stealth.

National and Act, the parties that kicked up a stink in Opposition about Labour’s taxpayer-funded election advertising, are engaging in their own taxpayer-funded binge this month.

The aim is to spend all the money they are entitled to before the financial year ends on Thursday.

But while Act is being up-front about its estimated $50,000 spending on a one-week campaign to reinstate youth rates, National is keeping the details of its publicity burst secret.

Under Parliament’s rules, party leaders are entitled to funding according to their number of MPs, but if they don’t use all their money, they cannot carry the balance over to the next financial year.

So National is spending up big time around the country, producing leaflets, in the names of MPs, on last month’s Budget, with a survey attached.

The survey is clearly intended as an election tool. Its questions include asking voters which party they support and it tries to ascertain if they are swing voters.

National is refusing to say how many leaflets have gone out or how

This nothing by public funding of political parties by stealth and yet another reason why parliamentary services should be busted open via the Official Information Act.

Just as it was appalling that Labour flew up heaps of MPs for their losing campaign in the Te Tai Tokerau by-election it is likewise appalling that public funding is being used for campaigning.

The politicians won’t change the rules though, they truly are the foxes in charge of the hen house.

Thakur Ranjit Singh writes:

Sean Plunket is a former Radio New Zealand broadcaster and one on New Zealand’s most celebrated, informed, seasoned and award-winning journalists known for his sharp and probing questions. He has many feathers in his journalism cap where he has ‘demolished’ many a politicians. He heads the current affairs programme, The Nation on TV 3 in New Zealand. Therefore when it was known that he was going to interview Aiyaz Saiyed-Khaiyum, Fiji’s controversial Attorney General, made famous by the utterances of former military fugitive Ratu Tevita Mara, it was anticipated that he was going to have another “killing” and another feather in his cap.

However those who saw the interview were pleasantly surprised at the performance of Aiyaz. Plunket appeared lost, rattled and defensive in front of a well-prepared and a composed Attorney General, who not only appeared to be at ease with the feared Plunket, but had occasions to even show smiles during the course of the interview.

When questioned about democracy devoid of fair and free elections, Khaiyum gave a third world lesson on democracy. “Hitler came to power through elections. What a government does after it is elected also matters. Just because it’s been elected it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly democratic; what they do with the power is essential, “he said.

When accused that Fiji was engaging more strongly or more proactively with countries like China, Khaiyum retorted that Fiji had not discriminated against any government.  “In fact we are fully engaging with anybody who wants to engage with us. Just treat us as equals. You need to understand what the Fijian situation is. We are engaging with all the countries in the world, except Australia and New Zealand from their side, but they’re not willing to listen to us. They don’t even want to sit down at the same table,” he complained.

A much awaited confirmation was the election date. Khaiyum announced that to be in or before September, 2014. Plunket did well to cover many diverse subjects in the fifteen minute segment from the ‘horse’s mouth’, so to speak, for New Zealand audience which had been starved of the information on Fiji. Aiyaz filled this vacuum on the election date, relations with China, Ratu Tevita Mara, corruption, Fiji’s judiciary, NZ Law Society allegations, military repression, emergency regulations, land and vision for Fiji.

Before Plunket could successfully accuse Fiji of any wrongdoing, Khaiyum has special ammunition reserved for New Zealand media. When questioned by Plunket whether Fiji or Fijians were sophisticated to live with the level of freedom and democracy that New Zealanders and other countries had, Khaiyum retorted with an attack on NZ media.

“I would argue that at the moment the way your journalism is taking place in your country, lacks sophistication. In fact it’s very rudimentary, the sort of questions we get asked, the sort of answers that are formulated even beforehand,” he said. It would appear the attack on media was not without reason. The panel selected by Plunket and TV3 to deliberate on the interview lacked proper understanding and appreciation on Fiji.

Matthew Hooton, National Business Review Columnist, echoed sentiments about double standards of New Zealand that had been earlier cited by this author. Hooton said that the problem in Fiji had been going on for some decades with little headway. This indicated that either New Zealand and Australian policies have been irrelevant or they have failed. “New Zealand deals with many countries that are not democratic and does not have free press; we have signed world’s first free trade agreement with China, we deal with Thailand as an economic partner in APEC. Thailand is a country where the military plays a very big role,” he said.

Simon Wilson, Editor of Metro Magazine supported a long-term stability in Fiji. “It is very hard to see how that can happen until there is a period of long-term democratic government.” The information that Simon appeared to lack is that Fiji had a long-term democracy for seventeen years after its independence in 1970 under the leadership of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara of the Alliance Party. No sooner had Mara’ Alliance Party and the eastern Chiefs lost power to Timoci Bavadra’s Labour Party in 1987, than it was declared by the Fijian nationalist elements that democracy was a foreign flower in Fiji. As long as Mara and the eastern Fijian Chiefs were in political control, the 1970 Constitution and democracy were acceptable. When they lost power, it became unsuitable and a ‘foreign’ imposition on the indigenous people. Fiji had lost the ultimate test of democracy: its inability to change leaders and governments in a democratic fashion. This deficiency was exposed both in 1987 and later in 2000.

Barry Soper, Political Editor of Newstalk ZB appeared equally misinformed on Fiji, by brandishing the race card. Twice in his comments he said that the reason coup was carried against Timoci Bavadra’s government in 1987 was that Bavadra had too many Indians in his Cabinet. What he failed to tell was that the party was led by a Fijian, had equal, if not majority ethnic representation but saw indigenous power shift to Western part of Fiji. The coup was meant to wrest political control and pass the power back to the “right” Fijian group, which ultimately eventuated, with Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara and the Eastern chiefs back in power.  The 1987 coup had more to do with intra-ethnic Fijian issues rather than inter Indian-Fijian issues. Soper again displays his lack of knowledge on Fiji by saying that it was Khaiyum who was pushing for one equal vote for everyone. “Timothy Bavadra included too many Indians in his cabinet and this man [Aiyaz Khaiyum], obviously an Indian; he says he wants one vote for everyone. That’s not gonna happen because the Fijians in the villages are not going to be happy with the Indians in control.”  This electoral change is the initiative of the indigenous Bainimarama and not the Indo-Fijian Khaiyum. Indo-Fijians comprise some 35 per cent of Fiji population. With military 99.5 % indigenous, and indigenous domination at all levels of government bureaucracy, it defies logic how Soper sees that Indo-Fijians would again be in control.

It appears TV3 need to realise that with lack of diversity in NZ media, any and all Anglo Saxon journalists are not necessarily experts in Fiji. Mere journalism degrees and NZ experience does not bestow that expertise. They need to pick those who understand the Pacific politics and history and are rooted in the Pacific, particularly in Fiji. All the commentators failed this bill though Matthew Hooton appeared to be the most logical and lateral thinker.

Such blinkered versions on Fiji echoed by the mainstream media, distorts Fiji’s understanding by the Kiwis, and its foreign policy appears to mirror the media commentators. Nevertheless, kudos to Sean Plunket and TV3 for this initiative in providing an interview that should be a lesson for NZ Foreign office on Fiji issues.

E-mail: thakurji[at]@xtra.co.nz

[Thakur Ranjit Singh is a political commentator and has been through Rabuka’s and Speight’s coups in 1987 and 2000 respectively. During the latter, he was the publisher of Fiji’s Daily Post newspaper. He was Auckland University of Technology/ Pacific Islands Media Association (AUT/PIMA) Pasifika postgraduate scholar in 2009/10]

Hone Harawira’s left wing bandwagon got rolling at the weekend and there is no surprise that they are going after Labour’s voters.

The Mana Party is threatening to take votes off both theMaori Party and Labour at the general election later this year.

Buoyed by Hone Harawira’s success in the Tai Tokerau by-election over the weekend, the Mana Party held its founding conference in a school near Whangarei yesterday.

They discussed core policy issues including the cost of living, employment, education and not putting a deadline on Treaty settlements.

Mana was not solely concerned with the Maori vote, it was also going after the young and the poor, Labour’s traditional strong-hold.

“The issues are pretty simple; people in the land of milk and honey are starving. Somebody’s got to change that. It’s not going to be National and it sure don’t look like it’s going to be Labour,” Harawira said.

This makes it cartain now that a vote for Phil Goff is a vote for Hone Harawira plus whatever assorted motley losers he can drag in with him under MMP. Just like ACT is mocked for rorting the MMP system so too can we add the Mana party to the groups to mock for rorting MMP.

Labour leader Phil Goff said his party’s candidate had done well to narrow Harawira’s majority to 867 and would be campaigning hard in Tai Tokerau in November.

“Kelvin was able to take a Maori seat with one of the largest majorities, and make it a marginal Maori seat we can win at the next election. That is an amazing achievement.”

What is amazing is that Phil Goff can’t get his facts straight when he had 5 weeks to get spin lined up for losing. Te Tai Tokerau was the 4th largest majority int he Maori seats. If you can’t run a website or get basic facts right then you can’t run a country.

Labour’s already thin vote is going to get thinner. The only wonder now is when it wills tart showing in the polls.

Deborah Coddington has an article in the Herald on Sunday following up my posts on National’s diversity problem. She starts off whining about the demise of Heather Roy.

Another strong woman MP bites the dust. Act’s Heather Roy is leaving Parliament while she still has a life. Her triumph is the party’s loss.

An even greater loss, though, is the urban liberal gap that won’t be filled on the right of the House. The seat she vacates, and others around her’s, are increasingly being sought by deeply conservative, hand-wringing, recycled men.

She is wrong about Heather Roy being a strong woman. She would cry at the drop of a hat, and she was a 5 time loser in the coup stakes. In the end ACT had to get a bloke to roll Rodney because this so-called tough woman couldn’t muster the courage to actually roll Rodney Hide. She preferred instead to white-ant and leak to the media. She also hardly fits the urban liberal description, being married with children. Being sexually liberal does not equate to being urban liberal.

Now Heather is dispensed with, I expect Rodney Hide and David Garrett will tango back to Act’s list. But Act doesn’t hold a monopoly on shabby treatment of women MPs.

She got that wrong too. I seriously doubt that either will be on the list. They may well stay involved in other capacities as is their democratic right but they won’t be on the list.

And so now onto the National party. She has good sources here and her accuracy improves considerably.

If stories filtering back to media are anything to go by, National should hang its head in shame. In the past few months, female candidates have been dismissed in a cavalier and sexist manner by National’s selection process.

Why is it acceptable, in the 21st century, to ask women with children what childcare arrangements they have should they be chosen to represent their electorates?

And ask childless women if they will be “doing a Ruth Richardson or a Katherine Rich” and having babies while in the House?

Peter Osborne (fails rule 12) and others in the Northern and Central North Island regions should hang their heads in shame over those comments. I know of three women candidates across those regions who have been asked those exact same questions. It is retro-grade and shows that the old gray men still control National.

National doesn’t need this, but the sexist and misogynist attitudes prevail, which is why, led by a current board member and by a couple of regional chairs there is a quiet campaign underway to white-ant a sitting female MP.

Coddington then starts talking about Maori diversity:

One of the former Act Party’s best policies was media access to everything. Sadly that free spirit of a party – where bright women MPs were promoted – is history and Roy’s departure is another nail in Act’s coffin.

Leader Don Brash insists Maori special treatment is racist but, at a Masterton meeting this week, said: “I’m confident of getting at least one Maori candidate high up on the Act Party list.” Tokenism?

Don Brash should ditch that idea. Maori don’t vote ACT, they never have and never will. Having a Maori candidate didn’t work for them last time aso why should it work for them again. Coddington is right, it is tokenism. ACT would be far better to treat maori the same way maori treat them, blissful ignorance. Don’t speak of them, don’t talk about Maori issues, just maintain a silence. Speak to the people who vote for you by all means but that is not maori and so a healthy silence should prevail.

Coddington started off appallingly, hit her mark in the middle of the article and then dribbled off into irrelevance at the end. Not one of her better articles. Perhaps Colin was away and couldn’t contribute.

The Labour party and their leader can’t take a trick.

Seven months out from the election and Maori voters have said they prefer Hone Harawira over Phil Goff and Labour.

They are hopeless losers, they couldn’t even beat Hone Harawira’s motley crew of the indigent with their much vaunted but hopeless “get out the vote” machine.

Then to top off losing to Hone Harawira, Phil Goff goes and makes a great victory speech that is so full of errors as to be embarrassing.

So due to Labour’s incompetence they now face a resurgent hard left with hangers on like Sue Bradford, Matt McCarten and John minto eating into their thin support.

Now all of New Zealand knows that a vote for Phil Goff is a vote for Hone Harawira and who ever he brings to parliament with him. If Helen Clark thought the Maori party were the least cab off the rank and “haters and wreckers” then one can only imagine what Phil Goff must think about having to deal with Hone Harawira now.

It’s a pity though because Kelvin Davis is a good guy who has genuinely achieved in his area of expertise. He will be ruing taking Phil Goff on the election trail with him. The man is the reverse Midas.

Tracy Watkins has a very good article in today’s Dompost about the subterfuge that political parties will go through to find out how you are thinking.

There was a time when the ultimate political put-down was to call your rival a poll-driven fruit cake, the phrase coined by former prime minister David Lange. You don’t hear it much these days. It’s a pot, kettle thing.

There isn’t a nook or cranny of Parliament that isn’t inhabited by poll-driven fruit cakes. Finding ways to gauge what you or I think about any given issue is what politicians do now in lieu of playing pool, propping up the bar and smoking cigarettes.

Both National and Labour are certainly poll-driven fruit-cakes. Helen Clark focus grouped everything, John Key and Steven Joyce do the same.

The pity is that politics has become cerebral rather that guts. The left-wing dominate in cerebral politics, though they have had some goo gut -feel politicians. The last though were Lange and Mike Moore. Trevor Mallard would be a gut-feel politician but he has an anger problem which clouds his judgment.

These days they have many more insidious and intrusive ways of gauging public opinion than the old-fashioned method of hiring a polling company to phone you during your dinner and ask if you have 40 minutes to answer “a few” questions.

There is still plenty of phone polling being done  and of an increasingly sophisticated nature  but at least you have the option of slamming down the phone after shouting some obscenities.

Polling is still the most effective way to gauge support, luckily the politicians have excluded that from any scrutiny by hiding it inside Parliamentary Services. When Labour had money they used UMR, I wonder if they have started up their own polling company like they used to have and if they are running it from parliament like they used to. Their dramatic shortage of money may mean they are doing just that.

They do have other ways of connecting though.

Other methods are used by political parties to discover what presses your buttons and the odds are that you won’t even realise you’ve just been probed.

The recent security breach of Labour’s website lifted a corner of the curtain into some of these ways. Blogger Cameron Slater, aka Whaleoil, revealed that Labour had effectively left the door open to its website and was able to download 18,000 names of donors and people whose names Labour had entered on to a database.

It turned out many of those email addresses were unwittingly supplied by people who had no idea that their details were destined for a Labour Party database. That was because they responded to a postcard campaign run by the teachers’ union the NZEI that was supposedly destined for Prime Minister John Key’s desk.

Instead, those postcards ended up in the hands of Labour MP Sue Moroney  and their names were loaded on to the party’s database.
Anecdotally, it has sparked many dozens of angry phone calls.

I hope it has sparked some complaints to the Privacy Commissioner. Labour were caught red-handed and they are still to explain properly their illegal activities.

The explanation from Labour and the NZEI as to why this happened seems pretty flimsy; in an age where lists of names and email addresses can be traded and haggled over for significant sums of money it’s not too big a stretch to assume that one of the intended spin-offs of the campaign was to expand Labour’s database.

How many of the myriad other Facebook campaigns, blogs, petitions and single-issue lobby groups with web pages that require you to register and sign in are used to harvest your email address for similar political purposes?

Who knows. But you can bet the answer is “plenty”. There are other more upfront ways of electronic campaigning. These days most politicians will tweet. Those who haven’t managed to find any other form of gainful employment for themselves after nearly three years in Parliament seem to be the most enthusiastic adopters.

Ouch… nice stab by Watkins on Mallard, Henare and Curran. I think she is perhaps being a bit harsh on Clare because she is doing some good work in the communications sector and even maybe Trevor, he is crippled after all and so must do something to fill the time when he is not chasing skirt like he normally does. He does seem to have some competition from David Parker though who is working his way through the caucus.

On a more concerning note, it is how politicians use our email addresses to tailor their campaign messages that we should all be questioning.

For instance, Labour’s IT programs allow it to track what happens to emails once they are delivered to people on their database. They know whether you opened the email or deleted it without getting past the subject field, and whether you forwarded it to anyone else.

You are being polled by email, in other words, and you don’t even know it. If only 5 per cent of emails are opened then the party knows it is on to a dud and it will go back to the drawing board on how to better tailor the message. If 80 per cent of emails are opened then it knows it is on to a winner.

Labour has been quietly confident for months that its programme to stop asset sales struck a chord with voters and that is probably one of the reasons why.

Yes they were confident, that is until I busted their systems wide open. There is plenty more to come too BTW, I’m just biding my time.

The only notable thing about the incident is that the database became publicly available through sloppy IT procedures  not that it existed. It’s a sure bet that National also has a database with names garnered from campaigns that are not obviously email-harvesting exercises.

In fact, National has Labour’s database for good measure as well. National’s explanation is that it was just seeing if it could download the material after learning about the security flaw exposed by Slater  but now that it has the database it refuses to destroy it, ostensibly because it needs to take legal advice first.

This is the first I have heard of this, but it makes sense. There is plenty in the files and it takes a huge amount of time to go through it all. If I was National I would have kept it too. Of course there are my several copies in existence around the globe and on a few Ironkey’s.

The point about Whaleleaks was though, that Labour placed a heavy reliance on IT, Social Media and email systems and that avenue has now largely been busted for them.

The rest of Tracy’s article focuses on polling and messaging in and around the issue in Christchurch. I will cover that in a separate post tomorrow.