Chris Trotter

ᔥ Bowalley Road

Labour’s civil war has spilled over into public now. Chris Trotter has joined Brian Edwards in castigating David Shearer for his gagging of David Cunliffe:

DAVID SHEARER’S DECISION to muzzle his rival, David Cunliffe, is deeply worrying. Right now, there’s nothing Labour needs more than an open debate about its future. That its leader, and the coterie of courtiers with which he has surrounded himself, was willing to go to the extraordinary lengths of preventing Labour’s spokesperson on Economic Development from appearing on The Nation reveals how ruthlessly Shearer’s faction intends to stifle all dissent.

Mr Shearer’s petty, politically self-destructive decision can only be interpreted as Mr Cunliffe’s punishment for delivering a speech to his New Lynn electorate’s Women’s Branch highly critical of Labour’s fraught, 25-year association with neoliberal economics. Clearly, the disparity between the Labour Leader’s three uninspiring “positioning” speeches, and the compellingly radical content of Mr Cunliffe’s April 29 address, had rankled.

It sure has. Moana Mackey can now add another couple to the count from what I hear.

This sort of overt factional squabbling has not been seen in the Labour Party for more than fifteen years. Throughout Helen Clark’s record-breaking reign as leader open dissent was almost always cast as treason. Such limited ideological debate as did occur was hidden deep down in the party’s organisational bowels, far from the public gaze. It was a political style more suited to breeding courtiers than comrades, and Ms Clark’s sudden departure, coupled with the effective coronation of her successor, gave the Labour Party no serious opportunity to decompress. Now it appears to have the bends.

There was no squabbling under Clark because the caucus feared Heather Simpson. No one feared Stuart Nash and no one yet fears Alistair Cameron.

Courtiers make poor campaigners. As Game of Thrones addicts know only too well, power is not always to be found among the wielders of swords. As often as not it lies in the hands of eunuchs and whoremasters: the manipulators, tricksters and casters-of-shadows who keep their daggers hidden and seldom venture beyond the palace gates.

Which is why Mr Shearer’s muzzling of Mr Cunliffe is so very worrying. Seldom has Labour been blessed with two such impressive champions. Both men should welcome the open and principled debate needed to set a new course for the party: one suited to the powerful currents in which New Zealand (and the rest of the world) now find themselves. It’s also needed to ensure that Labour is not secretly corrupted – as it was in the early-1980s – by a “Leadership Group” who were only too willing to promise one thing and then deliver its opposite.

Oh dear…Chris Trotter has called the advisors “eunuchs and whoremasters: the manipulators, tricksters and casters-of-shadows”. This is not going to play out very well at all.

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

Chris Trotter has nailed his colours firmly to Cunliffe’s mast. I can’t wait for the cat fight of Labour’s leadership to start in earnest:

The speech Cunliffe delivered to the New Lynn women’s branch addressed that peculiar political schizophrenia head-on.

“When the Right-wing party says that it’s going to cut your leg off,” Mr Cunliffe told his Labour Party audience, “voters want the Left-wing party to say that it’s not going to cut your leg off. Voters don’t want to be told that the Left-wing party is also going to cut your leg off, but cut it off a bit lower down and give you some anaesthetic.

“I think that’s a major reason that nearly one million voters deserted us at the last election. It wasn’t because we failed to communicate our policies. Quite the opposite. Those voters saw that our policies – with the exception of asset sales – were mostly the same as National’s. So we can’t really be surprised at the result.”

That, in Labour Party terms, is fighting talk.

In fact, it’s exactly the same sort of language Jim Anderton employed to attack Rogernomics more than 25 years ago.

And, just as the Labour rank-and-file applauded Jim Anderton’s defence of core Labour values in the 1980s, so too did the Labour audience gathered in the Blockhouse Bay Community Hall a couple of Sundays ago. I drove home with three conclusions:

One: the deeply cynical and self-destructive folly of Labour’s caucus in refusing to make Cunliffe their leader.

Two: the MP for New Lynn’s singular and radical understanding of the need to steer Labour into the new, fast-flowing tides of historical change.

Three: that if anyone can persuade the quiet suburbs of New Zealand to accept and embrace the need for change; it’s David Cunliffe.

Chris Trotter thinks the world is waking…he posted a nice little video about all the “uprisings around the world including Occupy…

Now watch one of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street get torn apart bey Sean Hannity.

HANNITY: I have a suggestion for you. You are 29 years old. Stop wasting your time at “Occupy Wall Street.” Here’s a novel concept, get up at 6:00 a.m., shovel some coffee down your throat.

Hit the pavement, find a job, get to work, stop whining, stop complaining, stop blaming and get your — out of bed and get to work. How does that sound?

SCHULTZ: Give me a job. I will go to work.

HANNITY: If you pound the pavement and stop hanging out at the park, you might find one.

SCHULTZ: I am online all day –

HANNITY: Go work as a cook, a dish washer, go work as a contractor. Go do something –

SCHULTZ: More menial. Would that make you happier?

HANNITY: Listen, I did it in my life and guess what?

SCHULTZ: I have done it too.

HANNITY: Go get a job. That job is beneath you?

SCHULTZ: Definitely.

HANNITY: Hanging out with rapists, drug addicts, people having sex in public is more fun.

SCHULTZ: It’s more dignity in that than it is hanging out in this show with you.

HANNITY: OK, listen, I’m glad to say goodbye. See you later.

Some interesting things have come to my attention.

Of course last week there was a nice opinion piece by David Cunliffe in the Herald.

Then this weekend he delivered a big key note speech where Chris Trotter and other commentators were specifically invited and is now being seeded nicely across the left wing blogs.

Then there are the moves by Moana Mackey who is busy trotting around visiting MPs. Of course Moana was supported in her list ranking by none other than Jordan Carter and Alistair Cameron, Shearer’s new chief of staff. I hope she can count better than the last time she ran the numbers.

Jordan Carter has burst forth on his blog again, in support of David Cunliffe’s nicely timed keynote speech.

Someone pointed out to me too that I may have been a bit wrong about Alistair Cameron’s loyalties…that they quite possibly weren’t with Grant Robertson, given his close professional and personal relationship with former president Mike Williams.

Who then pops up this morning commenting in the media today about how secure Shearer is….anyone fancy a Tui.

He told 3 News Firstline this morning, that Mr Shearer has the support of the vast majority of Labour MPs.

“I rang around some caucus members yesterday… and there’s no mood for change at the moment, I can tell you that.”

Mr Williams says if Labour does decide to change leaders, again, it must do it by the end of the year – two years out from the next general election.

As they say the Ducks are lining up…the wonder is if one particular Duck is lining up on the right side or the wrong side.

With Shearer off being entertained by corporate lobbyists on the weekend instead of shoring up his support, things are looking dodgy for him to continue much longer.

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

On the left of politics you know you are rooted when Vernon Small calls time on you. He doesn’t actually use the words but what he does is simply repeat all the comments on the slow and careful death of David Shearer’s leadership. Normally he would write about something else.

Labour leader David Shearer is under mounting pressure as some prominent Left-wing commentators say his leadership is doomed.

Party sources yesterday rubbished any talk of a leadership coup.

Deputy leader Grant Robertson has said there is not even a grain of truth in suggestions, run on political blogs, that he is positioning himself for a tilt at the top job.

That speculation was fuelled by the appointment of Wellington-based lawyer Alastair Cameron as chief of staff in Mr Shearer’s office.

But speculation is widespread in the party that a change of approach is needed if Mr Shearer is to lift his profile and cash in on the Government’s problems as Finance Minister Bill English struggles to get the books back into the black.

Left-leaning commentator Chris Trotter wrote in yesterday’s Dominion Post that he had been wrong to back Mr Shearer. “Let’s face it, he ain’t anybody’s kind of leader.”

Unlike former prime minister David Lange, Mr Shearer could “barely string 10 words together”.

“It’s time for the Labour caucus to put an end to `the unfortunate experiment’ and begin a new one,” he said,

ᔥ Dominion Post

The forces are now marshaling for the Labour party civil war. Chris Trotter has been drafted:

Confession, they say, is good for the soul, so I have a confession to make. I was wrong about David Shearer. I made the mistake of believing that a politician with a brilliant back-story couldn’t fail to give us an equally brilliant front-story.

Well, as Sportin’ Life tells the true believers in Porgy & Bess: “It ain’t necessarily so.”

And, now I (and I suspect you) know it ain’t so. David Shearer is a thoroughly likeable, decent bloke, and his record at the United Nations is truly inspirational but, come on, let’s face it: he ain’t anybody’s kind of leader.

David Shearer, like David Lange, is a creature of the factional and personal animosities dividing the Labour caucus.

Bluntly: he was put there by an unholy alliance of Right and Left-wing MPs to prevent the Labour Party’s choice, David Cunliffe, from taking the top job.

David Lange, however, had one thing going for him that David Shearer does not – a gift for oratory.

When David Lange opened his mouth the words flowed out in gorgeous, highly ornamented and persuasive profusion. His soaring rhetoric had the power to transport entire audiences to the vivid world of the Langean imagination. “I see a country”, he would say, and within a few inspirational sentences, we could see it too.

David Shearer, by contrast, can barely string 10 words together. And, when he says “I see a country”, he means Finland.

Chris Trotter then gives us a rose tinted view of the Lange years and then returns to the present:

If the first David story was a tragedy, the second is pure farce, and everybody can see it. In certain Labour circles his elevation to the leadership was hailed as “the experiment”. In those same circles, it is now being described as “the unfortunate experiment”.

That kind of vicious, stiletto thrust might have been avoided if David Shearer had made up for what he lacked as a speaker, with what he offered as a thinker. If only, in his two, much ballyhooed, “direction-setting” speeches he had given the country some juicy, red, ideological meat to chew on.

If only he had been able to plainly set forth an overarching philosophical framework from which later, more specific, Labour policies could be hung, then none of the muttering and stuttering would have mattered.

But those two speeches showed not the slightest trace of “big picture” thinking. On the contrary, they showed every sign of having been inspired by an Auckland-based focus-group, and composed by a Wellington-based committee.

The only picture they painted was one that revealed Labour’s deficiencies. That not only did the party lack leadership, but it also lacked ideas. Oh, that Labour possessed speechwriters like The West Wing‘s Toby Ziegler and Sam Seaborne.

Then the summary, making it clear that though he has been drafted to help knife David Shearer, he isn’t yet in Team Grant:

So, what have we learned from this debacle? What has Labour learned?

If by “Labour” you mean its caucus, I would say absolutely nothing. If you’re talking about the party itself, nothing it didn’t know already: that caucus picked the wrong guy.

It’s time for the Labour caucus to put an end to “the unfortunate experiment” and begin a new one. They could call it “democracy” – and stop taking their party for Grant-ed.

Chris Trotter isn’t pleased with me for telling the truth about a unionist who was…let’s say economical with the truth.

Now, I have a lot of respect for Chris Trotter, I certianly respect his opinion and he is a genuine guy with some obvious concerns. But are they valid?

What do the readers think of his comment?

The right of citizens to voice their political views without the threat of gross invasions of their personal privacy is something which all democrats – including, I am pleased to observe, the NZ Herald – are determined to protect.

That your ethical sense is so poorly developed that you cannot even understand (let alone acknowledge) that what you did was wrong will elicit the pity of the compassionate. But it will also, I suspect, inspire the retribution of the just.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap, Cam.

So shall ye reap.

Is there an implied union threat there with the comment about retribution…and will the retribution actually be just or just more partisan tit for tat?

Certainly the death threats, the intimidation and hundreds of txts and phone calls last time didn’t seem particularly just from my end.

Another “Ghost Ship” is at Fergusson Wharf and is being discharged.

Despite the strong words from Garry Parsloe that not a single ship would be worked, that the port would be shut down. Despite the words of Chris Trotter that ships would pass Auckland by and despite the words of Helen Kelly….the ships just keep on coming. Since they made the claims that they would shut down the port 18 ships have docked at Fergusson Wharf and been processed.

The latest arrival is Amazon River. Once again union claims that ships were turning off AIS systems are proven false. The AIS data clearly shows the arrival and docking of Amazon River at Fergusson Wharf.

And not a single union worker is back on the wharf. Crane rates are up.

The “Ghost Ships” just keep on arriving and being processed despite the assertions of Garry Parsloe and Chris Trotter and Helen Kelly.

Alongside Fergusson Wharf is ER Malmo.

There is still not a single union worker on the wharf, they sit outside the gates staring at other people earning the big bucks. At least today they will get some cash to take their missus shopping.

Another “Ghost Ship” has arrived at Ports of Auckland

Garry Parsloe said that not a single ship would be discharged at Fergusson wharf. Chris Trotter said the ships will pass Auckland by and Helen Kelly said that Maersk had stopped sending ships to Auckland.

The Maersk Radford docked this morning and is discharging cargo now and not a single union worker is on the port.

Contrary to another Parsloe and Kelly lie this Maersk ship shows up on the AIS data too.