Public Address - Hard News (Home)

How Bizarre | Sep 21, 2006 11:40

Are you ready for the OMC revival? Alan Jansson and Havindar Singh are launching a record label called Newco, whose first signing is OMC, ie: Alan Jansson and Pauly Fuemana. They'll look to re-connect with some of the four million people who bought OMC records. They're also working on a Proud-style compilation of female vocalists.

That's one bit of information I can actually remember from the APRA Silver Scrolls last night. I may possibly have received other important information that became lost in the merriment that traditionally accompanies this annual gathering of the creative clans. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a wee bit of a hangover.

So congratulations to Don McGlashan for winning the Silver Scroll for 'Bathe in the River'. His well-deserved award was presented by the Prime Minister. I said hello to her as she left.

"Interesting week in politics," I said.

"There's more to come," she said.

I don't doubt it.

Clark's commentary this week has been part spin and part genuine fury over the whispering campaign against her husband. The spin is part of a consciously hard-assed response to a line of attack from National that Labour was finding irksome and damaging. Labour couldn't afford to cower on the ropes any longer: the decision was made to come out swinging.

In some respects, it's fair enough. As even Rodney Hide says in Keith's fascinating chat interview:

It was a big call for National to label Helen Clark and her ministers corrupt. Not in a throwaway line but consistently. Politicians don't like being called corrupt ...

The AG's report doesn't show corruption. If it did National would be corrupt too. They were found to have misspent 10k. They would be corrupt too – just not as successful! I could see it was going to get ugly once the Nats went down the tactic of consistently labeling Labour corrupt. I also saw it as diminishing Don Brash's image of being above politics and talking about the real issues that confront the nation.

The problem with charging out and throwing haymakers is that haymakers tend to miss sometimes. Clark said Trevor Mallard's Parliamentary barracking of Brash on his personal life "wasn't part of our script" and "wasn't part of our strategy," which may well be true, but her own description of Brash yesterday as "corrosive and cancerous" was ill-advised.

She might want to attack the political culture around Brash, or the people around him, but calling someone personally "cancerous" shows poor judgement. Apart from anything else, it limits Clark's ability to take the high ground over the things she complained about on Morning Report today: to wit, the stupid and insulting stuff about her personally (and her appearance in particular) that appears on the Young Nationals website. The lame "I am your lesbian father" mock-up of Clark that earned scathing comment on the Greens' FrogBlog during last year's election campaign is still there (weirdly) on the Young Nats' "about us" page. (Update: Brash has ordered the image, which has been there at least a year, be removed.)

She's had to endure a lot of this sort of bollocks over the years, along with the likes of Judith Collins' shitty little dig at her lack of children (if there was an emoticon for a nasty smirk, it would fit well into that press release).

So Clark has a grievance. But her allegations on Monday about being tailed by a private detective haven't been supported by the police, who say there was someone following her and her husband, but it was someone from a media organisation. The anonymous sources backing up her claims about National spreading the slime on her husband are wearing a bit thin too, although I strongly suspect her comments about the circles in which said gossip fermented are accurate.

So what's she up to? Bomber reckons that attacking Brash
a plot of machiavellian genius aimed at forcing his caucus to assemble behind him. Or … maybe she's struggling to control her own potty-mouth.

I don't have a lot of time for the sanctimony washing around parts of the local blogosphere though. Basically, the nastier side of that blogosphere has seeped over into real-world politics in the past 18 months, and the blogosphere has got nastier to match. The comments threads on Kiwiblog in the past week have been pointless and poisonous in a way I don't think I've seen before. I popped in there to register a correction to yesterday's Hard News (see below), but I won't be bothering to post anything else. What's going on there at the moment isn't really debate.

Anyway, I get the feeling that there's at least one major plot twist to come - Clark hinted about something with respect to the Brethren on Morning Report - and I'm really not sure who'll be holding the moral high ground afterwards. I'm over it for now.

Meanwhile, Fran O'Sullivan was in touch on the issue of the supposed rumour of an MP having sex with goats: she made it up for her column, and it was a joke, or more precisely, "a rhetorical device designed to ensure readers get the point [that] I put the 'offshore pederasty' and other such nasties in the 'fanciful' category."

Which was how I took it until I heard Bob Jones discussing it with Graeme Hill on Radio Live the next day, and assumed it was a genuinely live, if very silly, rumour.

Fran says she and her Herald colleagues "debated it at some length" as to whether it was an appropriate device "but [I] didn't for one moment expect Jones et al would buy into this." Understandably so. It seems you've got to be careful even as to what you joke about at the moment …

NB: For a couple of hours until I fixed it, yesterday's post said that Ian Wishart had written last year that the company that prints Investigate was owned by the Exclusive Brethren. This was wrong. I passed on something from a reader that I didn't directly verify, and it was garbled. What Wishart actually wrote last year was that his printer also produced one of the EB pamphlets and that he was surprised no one had made an issue of it. So, apologies all round.

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Lying for the Lord? | Sep 20, 2006 11:18

Does it say somewhere in the Exclusive Brethren manual that church members should lie as they see fit? You have to wonder. Everyone's favourite secretive patriarchal sect has popped up again across the Tasman, this time denying a meeting between four of its representatives and the leader of the Victorian branch of the Australian National Party Peter Ryan - a meeting Ryan has already acknowledged took place.

Ryan has wisely backed off accepting money, but it seems that the sect will be funding a characteristically negative and deceptive pamphlet campaign in Australia. The leadership's line, as usual, is that it has no control over individual members who might get involved in political action. No one seriously believes this.

The New Zealand branch of the sect made the same claim when it emerged that the mysterious 'Green Delusion' pamphlet distributed last year was the Brethren's handiwork, and then that sect members had participated directly in the National Party campaign, erecting National billboards and distributing National's pamphlets alongside the Brethren's own, as well as having the children conduct clumsy push-polls on National's behaviour. Oh, and having a series of meetings that it took Dr Brash a few days to remember. It eventually emerged that the Brethren spent $1.2 million backing National, and only shrank from including a picture of Don Brash in a pamphlet when electoral authorities told them they couldn't do so without National having to declare the money as campaign expenditure.

The sect used a false address on one of the pamphlets to try and cover its tracks. One of its leaders told the press that the 'Green Delusion' pamphlets were entirely locally-generated and had no international connection - that turned out to be a lie too, when it became clear that the New Zealand pamphlets were a knock-off of those created to attack the Green Party in Tasmanian elections.

As Michael Carney pointed out on his blog, private individuals and organisations have every right to advocate in elections, and no law should abridge that right to speech. But I am also firmly of the opinion that the public has the right to know who's speaking.

I thought Chris Trotter had it right in this column earlier this month:

It's astounding how many New Zealanders have been falling over themselves to condemn the Labour Party for funding Helen Clark's pledge card out of the party leader's budget (as it has done in every election campaign since 1999) while brushing aside the Exclusive Brethren's extraordinary intervention as "yesterday's news", or - even worse - "trivial".

There is nothing trivial about a privately funded campaign budget of $1.2 million. The sum is without precedent in New Zealand political history. The campaign contributions of Labour's trade union affiliates pale into insignificance when placed alongside a war chest the size of the Exclusive Brethren's.

The largest affiliated union, the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union, kicked in the princely sum of $60,000 for the 2005 campaign - the smaller affiliates, about half that.

All up, the trade unions would be lucky to have donated more than a tenth of the amount invested by the Brethren in making Don Brash New Zealand's next prime minister.

Nor should we ignore that the trade unions have never made a secret of their support for Labour. The money they donate is identified in their annual accounts. And the material they distribute on Labour's behalf (all of which is included in Labour's election return) carries the name and address of the union, or unions, responsible.

Recall how difficult it was to track down the identity of the people responsible for producing those pamphlets attacking Labour and the Greens during the election. Remember the security guard who greeted Jeanette Fitzsimons when she turned up at the address of the supposed authorising agent?

The "group of Christian businessmen" did not want to be known, and, had it not been for the public-spirited efforts of a handful of former members of the Exclusive Brethren Church, it is doubtful whether they could have been identified before election day.

These men had been very careful to hide their tracks - but that's not all they were very careful to do. As early as June 2005, they were in contact with David Henry, the chief electoral officer, seeking to discover how they could achieve their goal of "getting party votes for National".

National's spin on the Brethren, initially very defensive (Nick Smith forgot all about once describing the Brethren as "sinister" and "brutal" in Parliament and Chris Finlayson memorably ventured that political criticism of the Brethren was "rather like the pogroms launched by the Tsarist government against the Jews in Russia in the late nineteenth century") has moved on to a "we didn't want them anyway" message. But all the shouting about lies and corruption over the pledge card (and, once again, I think Labour needs to stop arguing with the referee and find a way to repay the spending) should be set against the ham-fisted but odious efforts at covert action on the other side.

In other Brethren news, No Right Turn has a post on the (covert, of course) intervention of the British-based Plymouth Brethren (who, it should be noted, are not quite the same thing as the EB, but have creepy views about the status of women and other things) in this week's elections in Sweden with a smear campaign. A Brethren member has admitted writing a letter to the Dom Post alluding to the Peter Davis slime. And … guess who owns the company that prints Investigate magazine? The Exclusive Brethren! Ian Wishart actually revealed as much himself in an editorial last year, so we should at least give him credit for that. I expect he gets a pretty good rate from his printers ... NB: Ian Wishart has been in touch (politely I might add) to say that his printing company is not EB-owned. My apologies, and my bad for not independently verifying something I was told by a reader. Consider the error corrected.

In the end, I don't think this is about the Brethren as much as it's about a fairly new conservative political axis in New Zealand - one by no means widely welcome even on the centre-right - that I'd like to know a bit more about. Who's in? How does it work? And who writes the cheques?

PS: Speaking of "corruption", Jordan Carter notes a fairly bizarre claim by Gerry Brownlee that National had never accused the Labour government of lying or corruption, and links to a speech last month in which Dr Brash said that "Helen Clark's Labour Government is quite simply the most corrupt government in New Zealand history." He also has Brash saying "I have never, to my knowledge, misled the New Zealand public," set against the news story in which Brash, having recovered his memory of the Brethren said "I certainly have to apologise for misleading the public." Not a scandal, but pretty funny.

PPS: If you are minded to send me an email telling me off for picking on decent religious folk, please read this story that ran in a Tasmanian paper last month. It's about a man called Mark Humber who left the Brethren (whose rules forbade him from, among other things, playing a musical instrument in a concert band) and whose access to his own family is now at the whim of church leaders. There are many more stories of abuse at Peebs.net. These people are bastards.

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It's not catching, you know | Sep 18, 2006 10:20

I'm familiar with the Peter Davis rumour, in all its various locations - San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pakistan, Hagley Park; a public toilet, a taxi, an airport - and with its different supporting actors: MFAT, the police and the Diplomatic Protection Squad. The sheer range of flavours available ought to signal to any sensible person that the story is apocryphal. Furthermore, I am given to understand that as a simple matter of record, the story cannot be true.

Ian Wishart is not, of course, a sensible person. In his wretched magazine, Investigate, Wishart tried to stand up the rumours about what he calls "the Peter Davis case", naturally failed to manage it, and had to resort to a bit of lame innuendo around some well-worn pictures of a man embracing the Prime Minister's husband on election night last year: "Smoking Gun Issue ... Peter Davis & mystery man. Captured on candid camera."

As is the way of these things, Wishart's story gave licence to the Sunday Star Times to run the story, and the paper was immediately able to identify the "mystery man". He's party member, and friend of the Clark-Davises, Ian Scott, who is in fact gay. You and I might think that men touching each other in moments of celebration is hardly unusual these days. Look at the All Blacks, for goodness sake. And those of us with gay male friends will know that they're sometimes moved to plant a kiss on the lips of man or woman alike. It's not catching, you know.

Wishart was the subject of a hilarious interview on the "case" on Morning Report, where Sean Plunket put it to him that the "case" was an urban myth. Wishart blathered about multiple sources and overseas investigations and then seemed to admit that his strongest lead was that the PM's office looked at him funny when it answered his questions. Plunket suggested that if he'd been working on it since June and hadn't been able to get any kind of story, perhaps there just wasn't one. The response surely qualifies as an all-time classic:

"How long did to take Bernstein and Woodward to break Watergate?" Wishart yelped. "Months!"

Yeah. Right.

For all the hilarity, this represents probably the nastiest whispering campaign about an MP's spouse in our political history. We do expect members and party leaders to take a bit more fire - and remember, Wishart has already devoted a lengthy cover story to the claim that Helen Clark is a secret lesbian directing the country on behalf of some gay mafia - but a private and capable man who is not part of the Parliamentary-media scrum, and has already sacrificed a good deal for his wife's career should not be expected to suffer this kind of attack.

It seems some Labour ministers thought so too. Two different Weekend Herald stories claimed that Trevor Mallard and other MPs went on the warpath against Brash because they thought National had been pushing the Davis story to the media, after Clark had the story put to her on camera by a TVNZ reporter.

First, Phil Taylor's story included this passage:

Clark's resolve may have been hardened after she was questioned by TVNZ on her way to the caucus meeting about a malicious rumour regarding her husband, Peter Davis. Labour suspects National Party involvement in spreading the rumour. Mallard upped the ante the day after slinging his innuendoes, telling the house he'd had "a gutsful" of having his integrity impugned and being called corrupt (regarding the pledge card spending). "If members opposite, or National Party members outside tell lies about us, we will tell the truth about them," he threatened.

It is likely Labour's goal was no more than to put National off its attack but a chain of events beyond the Government's control then took over.

Then Ruth Berry's column had a little more:

A malevolent rumour about Helen Clark's husband Peter Davis had for weeks infected the body politic, repeatedly flaring sub-surface.

When a television reporter with a camera put it to her Tuesday a week ago to get the firm rebuttals emanating from Clark's office on the record and out of her mouth, Labour determined National was driving it. The retaliatory attack was launched by Trevor Mallard in the House just hours later with sufficient reference to the "Foreman affair" to leave those already familiar with the rumours gasping.

It prompted a late night call from worried National trouble-shooter Murray McCully to Mallard, with assurances MPs in his party had nothing to do with promulgating the Davis rumours.

The media remained at bay until Connell challenged Brash about the affair at Tuesday's caucus after he sought to reassure them that despite marriage troubles, things were under control.

By these accounts, then, Mallard only - to use the lovely British tabloid parlance for such matters - pulled the chain on the Brash story because he thought that National had moved first.

So did National try and shop the Davis rumour to the press? Probably not. I'm sure National MPs gossiped about it, but that's not the same thing. I think it's more a symptom of the present environment.

Bridget Saunders noted yesterday that a man named Chuck Bird - a homophobe and member of the nutty wing of the mens' rights movement from way back, and a regular customer at Wishart's blog - has been emailing MPs with allusions to "the man in the blue suit". The same sorry individual has also been leaving his droppings on Kiwiblog, here and here.

When a rumour so stupid as the claim that a major-party MP has sex with goats can get mainstream media acknowledgement - as it did twice to my knowledge over the weekend - you have to wonder where we're at.

I don't think the Davis and Brash stories are quite the same thing though: the latter is not entirely fictional, for a start. And I do think Brash's public actions and the day jobs of the people involved have some relevance (ask yourself how the story of a liaison with a prominent lobbyist might have travelled had Brash actually been Prime Minister). It was certainly of enough concern to Brash's own colleagues for at least one of them to have leaked caucus proceedings to the press, and for a number of them to have talked off the record after the story broke. And, of course, there's the matter of the leaked emails that underpin it (Deborah Coddington seems to have a suspect in mind in her column).

My purely personal response (to which I don't expect anyone else to subscribe) is that it's not the sex that's a reflection on character (I don't care what consenting adults do), but the apparently prolonged deception of a loved one, and I'm a little surprised at the way that's been normalised. There's been more opprobrium about the way John Tamihere treated his cats than the way Don Brash treated his wife. None of my business? Quite possibly. But that's how I feel.

But I don't regard philandering as a disqualification for leadership. Most of us think Bill Clinton looks pretty good compared to the present POTUS. And on the September 12 Daily Show, one of the best in a long time (torrent here), there was an interview with Gary Hart. Older readers will recall that Hart lost any chance in the 1988 Democratic primaries because his extramarital affairs hit the headlines. He came across on the Daily Show as a good-humoured, decent and visionary man. He would have been a much more interesting presidential candidate than Dukakis, but squandered his chance to maker a greater contribution because he couldn't keep it in his pants. Polls suggested the American public thought Hart had been unfairly pursued, but punished him anyway.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the SST, National Party insider Matthew Hooton continues to lose the plot. This week he's declaring that "It is not too strong to describe Labour's behaviour as quasi-fascist." Yes, Matthew, it is. It's a stupid thing to say. And perhaps you, too, should keep it in your pants. Rhetorically speaking.

PS: Wow! Huge response to the Flying Nun thing. I'll try and knock the responses into some sort of shape for the blog, and compile them for my fellow codgers. Also, Paul Brislen would like to thank everyone who responded to his guest post about living with cancer. He thinks you're a lovely bunch. Of course you are!

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Rock 'n' roll stuff | Sep 15, 2006 10:19

I'm due to convene with a bunch of codgers later today to perform an exercise related to this year's 25th anniversary of Flying Nun Records. The exercise will involve arguing over a list of the best releases to have come from the label, which I guess is an issue on which a few of you will have a view.

So feel free to hit the "reply" button below and give me your list, with an argument if you wish. Keep it to a Top Five. Represent.

In a similar vein, I met Eldred Stebbing and his son Robert at the recent event to announce the technical winners and main-category finalists in the New Zealand Music Awards. They had some news: they're reviving the famous Stebbing studio label, Zodiac.

The label will issue both archive and new releases. So, I said, you'll be doing limited-edition 7" vinyl singles with the original label art?

"Do you think there'd be a market for that?" said Robert, looking surprised.

Dude. Are there crazy German completists in the world?

Barbara Ward and I cooked him up a launch strategy on the spot: collectable 7"s, perhaps with one classic side and one new artist. Joint media opportunities with the old and new artists. It'll be huge. And if it is, Barbara and I claim our free drinks.

I passed up on a Rockstar: Supernova final viewing party last night ("Private room big-screen action at the PR Bar, followed immediately by karaoke. Wastedness is not compulsory, but suggested ...") because my darling is not long out of hospital with a script for the drugs that killed Ol' Dirty Bastard (not the cocaine, actually), and I wanted to share this special television moment with her. Interesting result. I never felt Toby was the real thing, and Magni's a family guy and all, so it came down to Dilana and Lukas. Guess Lukas researched better with the MySpace generation. Plus, Dilana can't write songs very well.

Dilana's MySpace fans are disappointed but excited. Still waiting for Jo from Hubris to pronounce. Meanwhile, there's dilana.co.nz. They're rug dealers.

Ticketbooth has compiled a list of Spike Lee joints on YouTube, including When the Levees Broke, which some poor sod has uploaded in 26 parts. Notable: an extended video for Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power'.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Universal Music gets all nasty on YouTube and MySpace, and declares that it won't be like when MTV "built a multibillion-dollar company on our (music) ... for virtually nothing. We learned a hard lesson." Yes, of course. MTV was so bad for the music industry. Guess it's back to bribing radio stations to play your music then.

While yesterday's Herald editorial calls the proposed waterfront stadium a super idea, today's Rudman declares it to be a madcap scheme. Rudman makes some sound points, but his solution for a public stadium - sell Eden Park for housing and put the money into a super-stadium at Mt Smart - sucks. For a start, Eden Park is controlled by a trust that would hardly play along. Would rugby share a stadium with the Warriors? And there's just nothing there: no hotels or restaurants, and only a pretty ropey sort of bar.

The principal problem with the waterfront stadium proposal seems to be that it would interrupt the business of the Port of Auckland. But if it would really only cost $30 million more than the Eden Park redevelopment (and it's actually most unclear where the money is coming from for either project) then it must be worth investigating. Yes, it'll block sightlines, but we lost that battle a long time ago. And I can't help but think how cool it would be to have a stadium that could host not only sports events but stadium shows right in the middle of the city …

PS: Chumby on Monday. The boy and I need to compare notes before I blog it.

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