Harder than it looks

Via the NBR:

Editor Cameron Slater has confirmed speculation Truth will not publish this week.

In October last year, the Whaleoil blogger was drafted to rescue the struggling tabloid.

Tonight he told NBR ONLINE, “The paper was just too far gone … I’m proud of the editorial and production staff and the changes we made, but ultimately the hole it found itself in was just too deep.”

Mr Slater blames previous management and owners for the paper’s plight.

I picked up a few copies of Truth after Slater became editor, and I always meant to write about them but never got around to it. ‘Strange’, is probably the best word: there was extensive racing coverage, extensive prostitution advertising (I would have expected this industry to move online years ago, I wonder why it hasn’t?), there was a column giving advice on how to have a threesome, and extensive political coverage in the form of attack stories about obscure back-bench opposition MPs. But the stories didn’t actually explain who the MPs were: just that Gareth Hughes – to use one example – was a hypocrite because he flew on a plane somewhere.

Maybe Slater is right and he inherited a dying paper, but I can’t imagine the Venn diagram of paying readers who are interested in sex tips, horse-racing and Gareth Hughes overlaps a whole lot, or that many of the paper’s stories made the slightest sense to anyone who wasn’t already plugged into the world of right-wing political blogs.

It’s also an interesting insight into the whole ‘bloggers will replace journalists’ meme. One of the advantages of blogging is that you never have to explain anything – you can just link to a news story in the mainstream media containing all the relevant background  about the issue at hand, assume they’ve got all their facts straight and then go on to complain about how rubbish the mainstream media are. That doesn’t really work if you replace the mainstream media, or try to.

Clever

National’s new comms strategy is very smart. Normally if a party has a minor story about someone in an opposing party – like the half-wit Labour MPs in the Sky City corporate box – they shop it around the press gallery or raise it in Parliament, but often-as-not the story just dies or ends up in a side-bar.

But if National gives it to DPF who publishes it as a rumour on his blog then suddenly the press gallery are competing with each other to track down the story behind the rumour! And when they do it’s a big scoop that they’ve uncovered through the awesome power of journalism, not a trivial political attack.

Crowdsourcing the government’s scandal-crackdown tactic

I’m trying to put together something to document the relationship between National’s countless scandals and blunders and National’s equally countless and seemingly closely correlated ‘crackdowns’ on prisoners, beneficiaries, boat people etc. So could people list either scandals, blunders or crackdowns in the comments; if you could link them to a news story or press release that’d be even better.

All enemies foreign and domestic

Now that they’ve rid themselves of the threat of David Cunliffe, the Labour caucus has turned their sights on their real enemies: the Labour Party membership and the Greens. John Armstrong, senior Herald amanuensis ran a column yesterday consisting of a warning dictated to the Green Party by Labour’s leadership:

Now that David Shearer no longer has to worry about a knife being plunged into his back – at least not for a while – he needs to tackle another longer-running attempted putsch of a very different but equally serious kind.

Along with other colleagues, the Labour leader is getting increasingly perturbed by the ever more brazen campaign by the Greens to try to displace Labour as the major party on the centre-left.

Shearer, meanwhile, is understood to have given several senior spokespeople greater rein to criticise the Greens if they seem too far out of line with Labour’s thinking.

Essentially the Greens are the tail that is wagging too much on the end of a rather distracted and sometimes slow-moving dog.

In the end it is down to Shearer to give the Greens the occasional flick to remind them who is the senior partner in the relationship. But it is a delicate matter. Still, expect a tougher line from Labour from here on.

I doubt this struck much fear into Russel Norman’s heart. The current trend in the polls – Labour gaining, National declining, Greens holding steady, NZ First above 5% – is the best direction Labour could possibly wish for. Are they going to risk that trend and go to war with the Greens for the left-wing vote? (I guess it’s possible. When Labour sees the Greens steady at around 11% of the vote I don’t think they think ‘that’s money in the bag for a left-wing coalition’, but rather ‘That’s 250,000 votes that belong to us that the Greens have stolen.’ If Labour had that vote share they’d be neck and neck with National. So a war for the left is conceivable, but not very sensible.)

Labour’s other new front are their own members. There have been a few posts on The Standard recently about the Labour leadership trying to censor party members from commenting on blogs. And now a couple of the authors on the Standard have announced they’re retiring from the blog after pressure from the party.

My understanding of what’s happened here is that most authors on The Standard comment under pseudonyms. And they’ve commented on the Labour blog Red Alert using those same pseudonyms. Now, when you comment on Red Alert you have to provide your real email address. So these have been matched to Labour’s membership and the dissenting members have been contacted by party officials. All pretty creepy.

Crowd-sourcing racist children’s poetry

This is one of my daughter’s stuffed toys. The official name for the products is something like ‘Mr Snuggle-bunny’, but my name for him/her/it is ‘The Irish Grim Reaper.’

The Irish Grim-Reaper has a song (naturally), and the first verse goes:

Oh I’m the Irish Grim Reaper

I dance a little jig as I slay

But I’ll let you live

If you pay me one pig

I’ll skip home and drink whiskey all day

But I’m struggling with the second verse. I think it starts out:

Oh I’m the Irish Grim Reaper

I’ve potato stains on my grim robe

I’m not sure what’s next. Something about mud on his scythe? Help a blogger out and submit your verses in the comments.

 

Today is disagree with DPF day

He links to a Stuff Nation – article? columns? story? blog? eh – suggesting that only people who pay positive tax should get to vote.

We should only count the votes of people who paid a positive amount of tax (less any cash benefits), and preferably weight them by that amount. This would skew the decision making in favour of productive, intelligent people, leading to much better outcomes for the nation as a whole.

This is such a weird idea, and it crops up all the time on right-wing blogs. But think about it for five seconds: you only get to vote if you paid a positive amount of tax. So all retired people would lose the right to vote. You take a year off work to have a baby you lose the right to vote. Want to start up a business and live off your savings for a year? You lose the right to vote!

Anyway, DPF also dismisses the idea, but then goes on to say:

I don’t support this, but the issues Connell touches on does go to the heart of politics. There are systemic problem when such a huge proportion of the voting population are dependent on the state.

In a very broad sense, the parties of the left that advocate higher taxes aim to get 51% of the country dependent on the state – either through welfare, state jobs, Working for Families, taxpayer funded NGOs, student support etc.  That is because it creates a voting constituency in favour of higher taxes, and hence them staying in power.

This is a reprise of Romney’s 47% argument. It’s a pretty common trope on the right, which buys into the Ayn Rand fantasy of a static society divided into productive workers and unproductive parasites, as opposed to, say, a society in which people are young, and don’t work, and then older, and work, and then even older when they retire and don’t work.

As many, many commentators pointed out when Romney made this arugment, the largest group of people ‘dependent on the state’ are the elderly, who skew towards the right when they vote. The second largest group are welfare beneficiaries, who don’t vote. How does that reality fit into this alleged left-wing strategy of electoral domination through state-dependency?

I guess you could argue that people employed in the state sector are ‘dependent on the state’ and thus left-wing. Nurses, teachers etc. Except that category includes police and military staff, who aren’t notoriously left-wing. How about the public-service? Well, they mostly live in Wellington which mostly party-voted National in the last election.

DPF goes onto say:

Likewise parties of the right try to reduce the number of people dependent on the state. They do stuff like promote asset sales, as the more voters who are private investors and the like, the more who support lower taxes etc.

I’m at a loss to see how the mixed-ownership model ‘reduces the number of people dependent on the state’. The New Zealand private sector seems completely dependent on the state and its ability to use taxpayer money to build profitable companies which can then be sold onto the private sector.

The solution isn’t to restrict voting rights, but to be aware of the dangers of getting a majority of the population dependent on taxpayer funding, because that is how you end up with say 55% receiving most of the taxes, demanding the 45% pay more and more.

Like I said, an increasing majority of those ‘dependent on taxpayer funding’ are going to be the elderly, without whom National would be unelectable, so I wish DPF good luck in convincing his party – its interventionist, authoritarian Economic Development Minister in particular – to implement the values he seems to think it should represent, but doesn’t actually deliver in any of its major policies.

And I’ve STILL got it

DPF kindly emailed me a link to this comment I made on his blog back in 2006.

Now that I’ve seen Key perform in public a couple of times I think its a mistake for Nat-party supporters to hitch their dreams to his star. Key is a classic technocrat, and while he seems very very intelligent he is not intellectual or especially charismatic. I don’t think he’s going to be the panacea people expect.

History will vindicate me.

Not that this will become a regular feature

But last night I dreamed I stumbled across the real identity of Idiot/Savant. After piecing together clues from old photographs, news stories, cryptic hints on his blog and album linear notes I proved that I/S was a founding member of Pink Floyd. He stayed with them after the departure of Syd Barrett but left some time in the early 1970s (the dream was confused as to the exact timing). Concert photos showed him playing a guitar, but he also seemed involved in sound engineering. He wrote some of the songs on Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma. (I had a friend who liked Pink Floyd’s early work in high school, and my dream mind accurately recalled the names and sequences of these albums).

Revenue from the royalties from these early albums allowed I/S to live in New Zealand on a modest income. The dream ended before I could confront him with his true identity.

(Or did it?)

Full disclosure

My wife Maggie started back at work part-time this week, in her new job as a political and media advisor to the Green Party. So from now on I’ll be as biased towards the Greens as I was towards the Parliamentary Press Gallery when Maggie was their Deputy Chair.

I’m blogging less in general these days because of the twin demands of work and my nine-month old daughter. Being in charge of the happiness of someone else’s childhood is a big responsibility. (It still seems crazy that the hospital just let us take her home with us.)

The tell

DPF’s been on an anti-environmentalist binge recently, with a series of posts about Patrick Moore, a (1) former environmental activist at Greenpeace in the 1970s and (2) lobbyist for the logging and nuclear power industries (DPF omitted one of those two facts, see if you can guess which); a post about ‘global warming dirty tricks’, a post entitled ‘more anti-science from the Greens’. I teased him about this on twitter, writing:

I’m guessing your polls now have soft-National voters leaning towards the Greens?

And he responds here.

This is a half-serious theory I developed during the election campaign. During the final weeks Kiwiblog got pretty weird, with an increasingly hysterical run of posts attacking Winston Peters, culminating in the (inaccurate) announcement that Winston Peters was an ‘illegal candidate’.

Why was DPF so exercised about Peters? All the polls had him well under 5%. My theory was that the public polls were historical, but because DPF is the National pollster he had access to the overnight quantitative polls his company conducts for them, and that showed Winston surging. So based on nothing more than DPF’s posts attacking him, I predicted that Winston was on over 5%, which turned out to be true.

Now, I don’t know what National’s polls actually showed regarding Peters. Or if they show that soft National voters are trending Green. And I believe DPF when he says:

Now the reality is I decide what to blog basically when I read a news item, or if someone brings something to my attention by way of blog comment, twitter or e-mail. I don’t have a library or inventory of stories held in reserve, which I release based on what the polls are indicating.

Because I work exactly the same way. I blog about what I’m interested in, and it’s generally reactive. But you blog about what you read and hear in conversation, either intentionally or unintentionally, and DPF gets to read the internal polls and market research carried out by his company for the National Party and discuss them with the Prime Minister and his staff, and it would be pretty weird if none of that informed his choice of subjects. And the supposition seems reasonable enough: the PM’s popularity is trending down, while the Greens have come out swinging this year on issues that have broad public support.