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Just making it up | Aug 30, 2005 10:24
So the Maori Trustee Office enjoys a reprieve, apparently. In yesterday's Herald lead story, which was presumably based on somebody's actual statement, the trustee's office was one of those over which Don Brash's "knife" was said to be hovering. But it didn't go on the block in yesterday's speech. The official agency deathwatch now consists of Te Puni Kokiri, Te Mangai Paho, the Maori Land Court, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Treaty Settlements.
So was it a mistake? Or did someone twig what Winston Peters, of all people, had to point out in a press release yesterday? The relevant part:
But most alarming, is the National Party's reference in today's New Zealand Herald to abolition of the Maori Trustee Office. The Maori Trustee is a Corporate Sole, established in 1920, with over 112,000 beneficiaries, with Maori and not taxpayer money. This outburst by Dr Brash is just one more excuse for Maori radicalism.
Why would you attack what is essentially a private trust where taxpayers' money is not involved?
Surely someone in the National Party understands this and it is no wonder even the most conservative Maori are now becoming confused, concluded Mr Peters.
Who knows? It's not like National is averse to making policy on the fly on these issues. Last night on Campbell Live, Gerry Brownlee (who appeared because the programme refused to accept Don Brash's condition that those emails could not be raised in an interview) had it put to him by the host that if National was being consistent it would abolish the "race-based" Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. Brownlee fumbled around for a while and eventually suggested that perhaps that ministry could be folded into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sorry? Was that a policy, or did he just fscking make it up on live TV?
Another Herald story today points out that National actually now appears to be saying that it will keep a health subsidy system favouring regions with high Maori populations - which it attacked as "race-based" on its inception. But it's hard to tell exactly how National's health policy will work, because it, um doesn't have one. Just the usual vague promises to "review" everything up the wazoo.
Anyway, other people unravel this stuff better than I do. Frogblog links to a Jon Johansson essay on Orewa I, and No Right Turn says his piece. And David Slack stays so wonderfully calm.
So, yeah, what those guys said ...
And so finally the Maori Party stops pretending there is no difference between National and Labour and rules out support for a National government. Why did it take so long? And who put the squeeze on Tariana?
Meanwhile, Radio New Zealand Internet goes podcast, and audio from the RNZ debates is online. Windows Media only for now, unfortunately.
Noelle McCarthy's Brash interview from last week is finally online. It's the forestry debacle edition. Quite funny.
This is quite funny too: New Orleans mayor launches secret plan to get Bush to stop vacationing and fly back to DC to help on hurricane. Renames storm: Hurricane Terri.
Anyway, work to do: I'm in Wellington from tomorrow morning to do a little consultancy and deliver a paper to the libraries research conference on Saturday. I've never delivered a paper before, but I imagine it's like giving a speech, only with fewer jokes (I'll post the paper in hard News afterwards). I'll also spend some time at the Scanz conference, Putting Science on the Front Page. The upshot is that I'm not sure if I'll post again this week, although I'll try and keep the mailing list running to keep you up to date with the work of the other fine bloggers on Public Address.
What would we like you to say about us? | Aug 29, 2005 08:27
The main news angle on the Brash emails must surely be that they apparently came to light as the result of an internal National Party leak. After all, they really only confirm what was widely assumed at the time Brash took the party leadership: that he was a stalking horse for Act and its friends in the business lobby.
Perhaps those involved, including the Business Roundtable's Roger Kerr, simply had an inflated sense of their own influence on the new leader. They certainly didn't get everything they appear to have thought they might.
Even so, it's hard to read about the two and a half pages of talking points Kerr offered Brash for use any time he was asked to discuss the Business Roundtable ("What would we like you to say about us? Here are some possible lines:") and not muse on whether there is an irony in National depicting its leader as a puppet in TV ads.
The story also explains how National's campaign coffers got so fat. For two or three years, Act's main benefactor Alan Gibbs had been losing patience with the party (well, who wouldn't?) and he appears to have taken Brash's rise as a chance to back another horse. Indeed, Brash was able to tell his caucus that if he didn't get the nod, the money would dry up. It's not improper, but it's hardly helpful that it has emerged. And somebody certainly wanted it to emerge, given that the Herald on Sunday got the selfsame "exclusive".
Act blogger Andrew Falloon is running a poll on who done the leak.
Is there any more? Perhaps. On Morning Report today, Roger Douglas said that Star Times political editor Helen Bain had "a hundred pages" of emails.
Anyway, after his useful contribution on the matter of Donna Awatere Huata on Sunday last night, I guess it's too much to expect that David Young will be cleared to talk about this one.
Speaking of which, this is outrageous: according to the Maori Party's Pita Sharples and Hone Harawira, Donna Awatere Huata isn't in jail because she systematically stole money meant to go into a children's reading programme, but because New Zealand has a "racist" justice system. Harawira said Awatere Huata "should get a light smack on the hand" and Sharples promised that "There will be protests, big time, from Maori and I will lead the charge." Harwira said she was honest and "committed to her values". What friggin' values are they then?
It seems to have escaped both of them that the whistleblower in this case was Maori, and so, largely, were the kids from whom the money was effectively stolen. Awatere Huata abused her position as an MP to obtain funding in unusual circumstances towards the end of National's last term in government, took that money for her own purposes and then lied and falsified accounts. She committed a major betrayal of the faith put in her, as a member of Parliament, a trustee and a Maori leader. Now we seem set for an investigation into whether she and her husband fraudulently applied for legal aid. Is this really the ethical standard the Maori Party wants to bring to Parliament?
Staying with Maori issues, what's so wrong with competence? Labour's proposal that, as part of their training, student teachers be able competently pronounce Maori - one of New Zealand's two official languages - seems like an unexceptional policy footnote. And yet, under the headline Labour - speak Maori properly, it was occasion for a front-page lead story in the Weekend Herald, in which National's Gerry Brownlee was afforded room to blather about it being "politically correct tokenism".
Ironically, the people who'd moan about that will also probably be moaning about Kapa o Pango, the New All Black haka performed for the first time in public before Saturday night's game. I thought it was great, although apparently it won't replace the much-loved but textually-not-that-relevant 'Ka Mate', but be performed on special occasions (it reads like something you would only do on home soil anyway).
In rec.sport.rugby.union, someone groused about the old haka belonging "to the All Blacks, the fans and history - it's not some marketing gimmick to f*ck with as you please. Bring back Ka Mate." Simon Garlick offered a useful response in the same forum:
If anyone, "Ka Mate" belongs to the descendants of Te Rauparaha and his Ngati Toa iwi. There's a lot of (historical) bad blood between Ngati Toa and the tribes of the South Island -- I daresay that a "non-tribal" haka will be something of a relief to those Maori purists for whom seeing All Blacks from Canterbury, Otago, and Southland performing a Ngati Toa haka was a bit uncomfortable.
I for one thought "Kapa o Pango" was bloody brilliant. Gave me goosebumps.
There's streaming video of the new haka on the official All Blacks site (if they were really smart, they'd make available a nice downloadable QuickTime version - I'll link to such a thing if anyone's done it) and the text is as follows:
Kapa o Pango
KIA WHAKAWHENUA AU I AHAU!
Let me become one with the landHI AUE, HI!!
KO AOTEAROA E NGUNGURU NEI!
This is our land that rumblesAU, AU, AUE HA!
And it's my time! It's my moment!KO KAPA O PANGO E NGUNGURU NEI !
This defines us as the All BlacksAU, AU, AUE HA!
It's my time! It's my moment!I AHAHA!
KA TU TE IHIIHI
Our dominanceKA TU TE WANAWANA
Our supremacy will triumphKI RUNGA KI TE RANGI E TU IHO NEI, TU IHO NEI, HI!
And will be placed on highPONGA RA!
Silver fern!KAPA O PANGO, AUE HI!
All Blacks!PONGA RA!
Silver fern!KAPA O PANGO, AUE HI, HA!
All Blacks!
In one sense, Marc Ellis's resignation as a director of his own company was inevitable: while his name was still officially suppressed, the celebrity drug scandal scuttlebutt sent Charlie's shares plummeting at just the wrong time. Directors are accountable to shareholders, and someone was going to have to take the rap for that.
But on the other hand, it was grossly disproportionate to the offence. There are plenty of people sitting in governance roles with New Zealand companies who have suffered far greater ethical lapses, and hurt others far more, than Ellis did when he bought a few pills in someone's apartment. And, as David Herkt pointed out to the Sunday Star Times, the moral pose the media are obliged to strike over cases like this has very little to do with what goes on in the real world. Or, for that matter, in the media.
Hat-tip to frogblog: a Guardian editorial gives Don Brash a kicking for his post-debate comments about going easy on Helen Clark.
It's good to have John Roughan back on the Weekend Herald's op-ed page. He has an ability to humanise complex arguments. Case in point: his lament for Don Brash on Saturday, which casts John Key as the hell-for-leather tax-cutter:
The state is not a business. It has none of the risks that check private investors' willingness to borrow. When business people get their hands on a treasury with low debt and healthy cash surpluses, it is time to sound an alarm.
Dr Brash said he was going into Parliament to further reform the economy, particularly in education and social welfare. He did not say he would increase public debt and gamble a Budget surplus on savings he hasn't made. He knows spending cuts are the unpopular side of the equation and probably sees no Richardson or Shipley at his side.
People have a good instinct for political truth. They suspect National's leader has more in mind than he can safely let on. It leaves him looking tentative and rather timid, a mere shadow of the Brash he was at the bank.
This in geek news: the BBC may make BBC1 and BBC2 available on the Internet.
And Anthony Stewart Head, best known as Giles in TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, will guest-star in the upcoming second season of Doctor Who. Fans of Joss will be beside themselves.
The Odds | Aug 26, 2005 12:22
The Centrebet odds on a Labour victory shortened a little again this morning with the publication of the Herald and NBR polls. At $1.33, Helen Clark's party isn't exactly unbackable, but I'm not sure that $3.00 is enough to make you open your wallet for a flutter on Don Brash either.
The Herald poll threw up some stark numbers: National runs 20% behind Labour among women voters, which is not surprising. But it's also 20% astray among voters in Auckland, which is quite startling. If this continues, we might expect some upsets in those North Shore electorates currently held by National MPs.
The Herald's split on polling before and after the tax cuts announcement is also interesting: a staggering 14-point lead to Labour shortened to 6.6% after Monday's announcement, but I wonder if National hasn't already burned off some of that advantage with this week's whoopsies. Labour, on the other hand, has largely stayed out of trouble - even Trevor Mallard - and opened the goodie bag for a policy-a-day. This was always going to be a risk for National once it started Actually Doing Stuff, but the forestry debacle was unforgiveable.
Gordon King has a thoughtful post, pointing out that on current polling, "the total centre-right vote hasn't shifted since the last election":
There are two problems. Firstly the failure of political management to shift centre voters from Labour to National. Secondly, and I believe more importantly, the failure to articulate a credible alternate vision to shift the political centre rightwards.
National's political management in this campaign has been patchy. No matter how much we on the right would like to spin it they have been constantly bested by Labour in timing, execution and delivery. Most of the less important failures (debates, racing cars, policy bungles and suchlike) can be sheeted home to the unexpectedly poor performance of Brash, but in the big stuff of policy delivery they've been made to look like amateurs by a Labour machine astonishing in its ruthlessness.
Gordon advances the argument that what National need is a a vision, "something much bigger" that its tax cuts, "something visionary like flat tax (undoubtedly the next big thing in fiscal reform world wide)." I seriously doubt that any party could pull 45% of the vote in New Zealand with a flat tax policy, but I think the point about National's policy offerings is well made. As I have noted before, several of National's key policies suck: they were originally devised not as a platform on which to govern but to pull in targeted elements of the vote. Abolishing parole might please the Sensible Sentencing Trust, but on the evidence it makes no sense. Ditto for work-for-the-dole and the immigration policy. There are other examples. And did anybody really believe Brash's rationale for his vote on the Civil Union Bill?
If National does fail to gain the Treasury benches in three weeks' time, I would hope that that failure prompts a sweeping changing of the guard. The party has some significant talent set to enter Parliament on its list, and three years in which to put together a coherent platform. I think Labour would have to pull off a miracle to hold out a John Key-style National Party in three years' time. For the moment, National's platform is incoherent; its ironic advantage going forward may be that some of that incoherence has begun to infect Labour's platform. (The expanded Working for Families scheme might simply become a working part of the landscape, or it might become a monster. An immediate shift in tax brackets in this year's Budget, combined with the already-announced WFF roadmap, would have made more sense. But that's history now.)
For the moment, it's hard to see why National bothers to maintain an Arts & Culture page on the policy section of its website. There isn't any policy, and the minister allegedly responsible has now gone more than a year without making a statement relating to her portfolio. She's also broadcasting spokesman; nothing there either. Maurice Williamson is information technology spokesman, but hasn't made any official releases on that. And Foreign Affairs spokesman Lockwood Smith doesn't appear to be offering an international relations policy. Labour won the 1999 election after making a virtual fetish of policy wonkery. It would behove National to do the same.
There was some amusement to be derived from Noelle's political interviews on 95bFM this week. On Tuesday, she talked to United Future leader Peter Dunne, who was emphatic that the Steve Taylor standing for his party in Auckland Central could not possibly be the Stephen D. Taylor who wrote to the Herald declaring that Labour MP Tim Barnet might have to be "'put down' like a rabid dog". Because, well, they wouldn't have anyone like that standing for them, would they?
It's the same man, of course. The same man who flouts the letters policies of a range of magazines and newspapers (because, presumably, acting under false pretences is what Jesus would have done), and claims to have had "over 6000 copies of my letters published throughout the regional and national media over the last 3 years." He uses the Maxim letter-writing wizard, which makes letter-bombing the media trivially easy.
I guess it's possible that the self-described "conservative Christian" Taylor is a perfectly nice man in person, but his presentation via his written communications does not create such an impression. After the Herald apologised for its poor judgement in printing his letter about Barnett, he sent Barnett an email reading: "The NZ Herald may have been forced into an apology Timmy, but Hell itself will freeze over before you hear one from me."
After Noelle's show she received an email from Taylor declaring, among other things, "You may also wish to grow a backbone - attacking someone in their absence is simply a cowardly display of existential insecurity - even for the Irish." Noelle is Irish. And yes, this is the same man who wrote that letter about Barnett (and many others like it), whining because his name was mentioned on the radio. He's not big on irony.
Dunne, to his credit, readily apologised to Noelle by email: "While I am still unaware of precisely what he said, I do not condone the type of rude reply you have received from him, and will be telling him so. This boorishness and abuse is not what I regard as acceptable behaviour." I understand there have been subsequent emails from Taylor, but I won't inflict them on you.
Meanwhile, a few of us have been following the malign progress of a certain Maxim Institute talking point about votes for small parties being wasted. The Fundy Post has written up the background, and quoted the hapless Sandra Paterson trotting out the line, which appears to be aimed at consolidating the moral conservative vote behind National.
In another sighting, Public Address reader Emily May reports the churchgoing editor of the Pohutukawa Coast Times, Duncan Pardon, holding forth on MMP and strategic voting: "a vote for a 3rd party is a wasted vote ... it is not only a wasted vote, it is actually a vote for a party you may not like on the basis that any party that doesn't make the 5% threshold (or win a seat) has its vote redistributed among the parties that do cross the threshold."
This is, of course, complete crap: It's absolutely not true that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote. It can be - if a party fails to either reach the 5% threshold or win an electorate seat. But as it happens, there are FIVE "third parties" who either have a strong chance of making the threshold or winning an electorate seat: the Greens, NZ First, United Future, the Progressives and the Maori Party. Supporters of any of them should know that they can increase that party's representation in Parliament by voting for them.
The exception as things stand is Act, which is - waddaya know! - going after the conservative Christian vote with this pamphlet. Ironically, in an accompanying letter to target voters, Stephen Franks warns them against voting for avowedly Christian parties ("Tactically they siphon Christian votes into ineffectiveness.") That's a bit rich, isn't it?
Franks' implicit references to homosexuality are bizarre. In the letter, he says that "We believe that true civil rights are the hard won individual rights to freedom from coercion, not freedom from the natural social consequences (short of force or threat of force) from lifestyle choices." That'll be the "lifestyle choice" of being gay. In the pamphlet, he intones that: "Liberty may restrict the state's right to punish self-damaging behaviour, but that makes it even more important that the peaceful social sanctions of healthy communities are not suppressed."
I was talking to David Herkt at the Little Brother show on Wednesday night, and he mentioned that he knew one or two young gay men who were toying with voting Act. That's not too surprising, given the breeder-oriented tone of the major party campaigns - but perhaps they'd want to have a quick look at Franks' pamphlet before doing anything rash.
The show was enjoyable and a little surprising (dungarees? cloth caps?) and from there Damian Christie, Simon Pound and I (honestly, you can't move in Central Auckland without running into a blogger-media type) headed up to the university for the 95bFM Private Function gig featuring Tegan and Sara. The venue, Shadows, was packed and whatever it was designed for in the 1970s, it certainly wasn't acoustic integrity, but it didn't matter too much. They were fab.
Some good links: Car Zimmer on Corante looks at the impact (or lack of it) of "Intelligent Design" on scientific discourse. Wired's "TV of Tomorrow" issue has an interview with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, which notes that his is, in various ways, the biggest TV programme on the Internet. (By the way, I bought one of those Dick Smith $150 DivX DVD players. It's a somewhat eccentric conventional DVD player, but it plays DivX and MPEG files quite well. I've got three Daily Show episodes lined up to watch tonight.)
Stephen Hansen sent me this link to a scary Rolling Stone story on the broken practice of lawmaking in the US Congress. And Neil Morrison pointed me to this page of MIDI tunes based on DNA, RNA and protein sequences. Freaky.
The who-the-hell-knows debate | Aug 23, 2005 10:01
I really wish this election hadn't turned into a bidding war. That it has means Labour is heading in a direction with which I'm not entirely comfortable, and National is making spending assumptions I seriously doubt it can meet.
I'm not sure how many people watched Campbell Live last night, but it was quite sobering. Gareth Morgan bleakly declared that either party's promises might be enough to prompt the long-awaited housing market crash, with National's carrying slightly more inflation risk than Labour's.
On the same programme, Rod Oram doubted that National's budget numbers added up. He said that National had assessed every risk on the down side, noting that John Key was assuming substantial savings in Social Welfare spending at the same time as he backed policy (work for the dole) that will, any way you dice it increase costs, in the short term at the very least.
This annoys me. If they're going to have shithouse policies like work for the dole and abolition of parole, I think it would be polite for them to properly provide for them, and I don't think they have. Michael Cullen is already claiming that the compulsory bulk funding policy has not been properly allowed for, and that National, after promising a roading bonanza, has quietly halved Labour's transport spending.
This morning's Herald editorial also concludes with a thought on National's saving assumptions:
Party leader Don Brash and finance spokesman John Key are confident they can find sufficient savings but voters might be more wary. It is never a good idea to accept tax cuts from politicians who have not yet cut their cloth accordingly. Tax cuts are the easy side of the equation; expenditure cuts come with a cost to political popularity and, depending on their timing, they can carry an economic cost, too. Labour is bound to challenge the fiscal responsibility of yesterday's largesse; voters have four weeks to assess whether National would have the backbone to balance the ledger.
Technically (and perhaps even philosophically) speaking, National's plan is tidier than Labour's; or would be if there weren't so many rebates and this and that (we're supposed to factor the carbon tax into family incomes?). And the delay in cutting the business tax rate doesn't make sense in light of their rhetoric for the past three years. A National victory wouldn't mean a so-called strategic deficit or anything of the like, although government debt would rise under National. (By $11.5 billion, according to Jordan Carter, but I'm damned if I can tell.) This assumes, of course, that National's coalition partner would let it all happen.
Anyway, in keeping with the who-the-hell-knows tone of the argument, Frogblog has updated its tax comparison table to find that its sample family is better off with Labour all the way up to an annual household income of $70,000, and DPF is busily demonstrating all the ways that people would be better off under National. (Personally speaking, with a home-based business and one PAYE earner in the house, our household income is a mystery best unravelled by our accountant, but I don't see a sufficient degree of self-interest to sway me either way, even if I was so minded.)
I switched over to the leaders' debate on TV One after the Campbell Live discussion. My God, what a depressing spectacle that was. If they're going to allow the crowd to be packed by the party faithful, they should make them shut up, at least while the participants are speaking. I thought Brash had slightly the better of what I saw, but looking at the video this morning, Clark clearly nailed the opening exchange on tax and spending. It's all here on TVNZ's leaders' debate page.
Elsewhere, there's a stonking new Fundy Post, which catches Weekend Herald columnist Sandra Paterson parroting Maxim Institute talking points even more slavishly than usual.
God I think I need a Daily Show clip.
The Breeder Bounty | Aug 19, 2005 08:57
I'm not sure how much longer Labour's opponents can continue to call it "anti family" with a straight face. I mean, they let those gay folks get married and everything, but the breeder bounty has flowed like a river since then. What is it going to do for its non-breeding Rainbow base? Some sort of décor allowance?
Back on Budget day - which seems so long ago - I wondered whether the government was starting to look unreasonably biased towards families.
Now, well, take a look at Frogblog's swiftly-assembled tax comparison table, taking into account yesterday's announcement of a $400m programme of targeted tax relief for families via Working for Families.
It makes a guess about National's policy (and a generous one, given that I think Brash has ruled out scrapping the 39 cent top tax rate), and you could quibble with one or two other assumptions, but its sample family is, as the missing-in-action campaign slogan had it, "better off with Labour" all the way up to an annual household income of $75,000. A $50,000 household with two children under 12 reaps an additional $141 and is $113 a week better than under National's policy. But at the $90,000 mark, Working for Families cuts out altogether, and you're $52 a week better under National.
There are philosophical problems here which probably had heads scratching at Treasury, most notably that relief abates as income rises: you lose a little more of any extra money you earn. The effect is one of a higher marginal tax rate which may act as a disincentive to financial improvement. The effect would seem modest to anyone (eg, me with a young family, actually) who tried to work their way off a benefit in the 1990s and faced a marginal tax rate of 97 cents in the dollar. The effective marginal tax rates here get nowhere near that mark (more like about half of it), but it's fair to say that they are far and away the major problem with this scheme. (On the other hand, I noticed one blog commenter yesterday decrying it as creeping socialism because, um, you had to fill in a form to get it. For $113 a week, I really don't think that's going to be a problem.)
The thing is, about this time last year, Labour was under the gun specifically for failing to deliver for $50,000 middle New Zealand households. The Star Times had that woman who went to Wellington to deliver a message and all. Perhaps they should give her a call again?
There's also the issue of Dr Cullen's pronouncements in May about there being no room for tax cuts. Well, at $400m annually, this is going to be a smaller fiscal hit - by a factor of between four and seven times - than any across-the-board tax cut from National. And it fits with Cullen's consistent view of tax relief as a social policy instrument rather than an end in itself.
I note that Jordan Carter has been hinting that perhaps this was always in the campaign goodie bag; that the Budget was a feint, and they're just much more clever than anyone thought. I'm not so sure. But never doubt the Clark government's ability to rush into a cavity in the public mood.
UPDATE: A new post by Jordan, and its accompanying thread, notes a couple of things I hadn't picked up about the new policy package: one is that the abatement rate falls from 30 cents in the dollar to 20 cents, which goes some way towards mollifying my concern about marginal tax rates. The other is that according to one of the commenters, a two-child family earning under $40k will pay not tax at all. Crumbs.
Some more audio: my Wire interview from Wednesday with Phil Twyford, the former director of global advocacy for Oxfam and now Labour candidate for North Shore (his website is here). And an enjoyable conversation on drug policy with Dr Richard Goode of the Libertarianz and Nandor Tanczos of the Green Party.
A New Zealander who works for Apple Computer at Cupertino sent me a copy of Steve Jobs' June commencement speech at Stanford. It's pretty cool. The text of the speech is here, and there's audio here and video here. For all that he is capable of being a prime-grade prick, he's still one of my heroes.
The audio of the David Lange Oxford Union debate speech is still here, of course. The 1500-odd listens so far account for 82% of this month's bandwidth. Thanks again, CactusLab. And thanks to the person who added the link to Wikipedia's David Lange page. And there is now also what must be one of the best Wikiquote pages ever.
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