Two comparisons

Back in 2007 the Labour Party introduced the Electoral Finance Act, the main effect of which prevented organisations that weren’t registered political parties from spending more than $60,000 $120, 000 during an election year (it was a response to the Exclusive Bretheren’s multi-million dollar stealth campaign in 2005).

The New Zealand Herald went ballistic and ran a months-long campaign against the legislation, printing the banner ‘Democracy under attack’ across their front page and publishing literally hundreds of stories and columns and editorials attacking the legislation.

Flash forward six years: a National government has introduced legislation that radically reforms the state’s intelligence apparatus, allowing the GCSB to monitor anything in New Zealand that goes by the name of an ‘information infrastructure’. The bill is in response to revelations that the GCSB has been illegally spying on New Zealanders; it gives them sweeping powers to intercept domestic communications with virtually no oversight, rushed through Parliament under urgency, naturally.

It’s early days, but so far the Herald coverage is three stories and this editorial, which concludes:

New Zealand First, as a condition for supporting the legislation, wants every warrant to be reviewed within three weeks by an independent authority selected from the judiciary, the Defence Force and the police. This, it says, would give the public confidence they are not being unfairly spied upon. It is right. A little tinkering along these lines would help smooth the passage of what should be largely uncontroversial changes.

It’s also interesting to compare this mild response to the reaction against the Labour-Green power policy announced a couple of weeks ago. The Herald’s editorial went nuts, as did business editor Liam Dann, as did Fran O’Sullivan, attacking the policy as ‘the ghost of Hugo Chavez’. Fairfax journalist Colin Espiner insisted Labour had ‘literally gone insane‘. A impressively huge propaganda machine swung into action: Business New Zealand, energy company CEOs, fund managers, merchant bankers all came out fighting in a nicely staggered sequence of denunciations.

And that’s okay – it’s a controversial policy. It’s just a shame there isn’t any comparable propaganda machine that can stand up for the civil rights of New Zealanders not to be spied on by their politicians. It seems odd (to me) that establishment journalists aren’t very exercised by any of this. The National Party aren’t going to be in power for ever, and sooner or later the ‘literally insane’ Labour and Green Parties, haunted by the ghosts of Communism and Totalitarianism are going to be in government and imbued with the power to spy on them with impunity.

People might comfort themselves with the thought that they ‘haven’t done anything wrong, so they don’t have anything to worry about’. I keep thinking of the beneficiaries who protested against Paula Bennett’s welfare policy who were punished by having their confidential data leaked to the press. Bennett argued that by speaking out against her those beneficiaries were fair game. (The leaked information was published in the Herald).

So merely disagreeing with a politician’s policies can constitute ‘doing something wrong.’ And thanks to this law change, future governments are going to have a vast amount of power to gather embarrassing information about their adversaries and critics. It would be nice if we could debate that as vigorously as we’ve debated the rights of infrastructure companies to enjoy windfall profits.

(Header image courtesy of Joe Wylie)

Implausible, blatant lie of the day, morning edition

A few years back I asked a former journalist who went to work for the Prime Minister’s office and then moved on, if working on the ninth floor had changed the way they’d have worked as a political reporter. ‘I wish I’d realised,’ they replied, ‘That MPs and senior staffers simply lied to journalist’s faces so frequently.’

Well, the government’s story about the leaking of the Kitteridge report into the GCSB seems like one of those ‘lie to our face moments.’ Via the Herald:

Prime Minister John Key’s says he is unhappy he had to disrupt his programme in Shanghai to address the issues of the GCSB report.

He goes to Beijing about 2pm today for an official welcome at the Great Hall of the People by Premier Li Keqiang and a new round of talks.

Mr Key had talks on Sunday with President Xi Jinping on Hainan Island.

“About the last thing we wanted to be doing is standing here in China dealing with this,” he said at a press conference convened in his hotel after the Government decided to release the report early because of leaks.

The GCSB report shows – amongst other things – that Key lied last September when questioned about the extent of the GCSB’s illegal spying, claiming it was restricted to Kim Dotcom when he’d known since July that there were wider questions about the legality of the agencies collaboration with other agencies and gathering of so-called ‘meta-data.’

And we’re supposed to believe that it’s inconvenient for Key that he isn’t available to answer questions about this in the House today, that he only has time for stand-up press conferences between engagements while he’s in China instead of a full-court press conference in front of the entire gallery.

Deputy PM Bill English sort-of fronted on this issue yesterday. He could categorically deny that the leak came from the PM’s office. He was absolutely confident that the classified appendices to the report wouldn’t be leaked. He didn’t see any need whatsoever for an investigation.

Meanwhile, Paula Rebstock’s $250,000 inquiry of who leaked documents from MFAT – which did, actually inconvenience the government – rolls on.

First thoughts on 3rd Degree, the Fourth Estate’s second new current affairs show

If Seven Sharp had an episode like the debut of 3rd Degree it would be an unqualified triumph. Hidden cameras! Spitting grannies! Cops acting like jerks! Anna Guy! Anna Guy’s kids! Anna Guy has a new love! Anna Guy interviews her own parents! Completely brilliant light entertainment journalism.

Unfortunately 3rd Degree wasn’t marketed like that. Here’s the promo ad again. The premise was that Garner and Espiner – two of our most celebrated political journalists – were going to ask the tough questions and chase the real stories that other journalists were afraid to touch. They were going to dig deep. They were going to take flak. They weren’t going to let anyone off the hook!

Instead we got an amusing but confusing story about Daniel Clout, a wheel clamper in New Plymouth who filmed himself getting abused and assaulted by his victims, and who had an adversarial relationship with the New Plymouth police. But the story didn’t adequately explain where Clout took his mandate from to run around putting his clamps on cars and charging $150 dollars to remove them. Searching for Clout’s name reveals stories like this one, in which we learn that he’s contracted by the owner of the car-park, but that said car-park has a forty-minute time limit for public parking, and Clout clamps people who exceed that and charges them $150, which goes a long way towards explaining why people abuse him and spit on him and why the local police are less than sympathetic towards him.

This was followed by Anna Guy, whose estranged husband was accused of murdering her brother, who is also now a ‘journalist’ for 3rd Degree. The dubious ethics of the piece seemed like a clumsy attempt to generate controversy, and maybe it would have been controversial if it wasn’t awesomely boring. The show ended with Anna Guy spending about ninety seconds ‘in the hot seat’ getting ‘the third degree’ from Garner and Espiner, who elicited nothing from her. Hopefully future episodes figure out what to do with the show’s hosts.

Hyena Hall

There’s a mounting whirlwind of press coverage about Hilary Mantel’s Royal Bodies column in the LRB, claiming that it’s a vicious attack on Kate Middleton. The headline for the Stuff story is Novelist Lashes out at Kate Middleton. You can read it for yourself here, and quickly discover that the actual article is (amoungst other things) a lashing out, vicious attack etc on the public obsession with royalty and the media’s exploitation of that obsession. Sample quote:

When her pregnancy became public she had been visiting her old school, and had picked up a hockey stick and run a few paces for the camera. BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken.

Much of the essay is about Henry VIII and his Queens, and the creepy, unchanging prurience about the sexuality of royal persons:

As for depression, he had a great deal to be depressed about: not just his isolation on the world stage, but his own decay and deterioration. He had magnificent portraits created, and left them as his surrogates to stare down at his courtiers while he retreated into smaller, more intimate spaces. Yet he was quite unable to keep private what was happening to his own body. The royal body exists to be looked at. The world’s focus on body parts was most acute and searching in the case of Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife. No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young. The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme’: which is to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

You really need to bend over backwards to read this as ‘Novelist lashes out at Kate Middleton’, but when you’re a news site on which the lead story is usually about ‘Kate’s Baby Bump‘ this sort of stuff must cut pretty close.

All part of the service

John Key’s State of the Nation speech is here. I await John Armstrong’s coverage of the speech with interest. He’s welcome to use this opening paragraph if he’s on a tight deadline.

Bulls bellowed; sticks transformed into snakes; stars flared and died; dry rivers flooded and fallow fields bloomed into life after Prime Minister John Key addressed the North Harbour Club today.

Do you support Paddy Gower?

The Herald has a Q & A with Paddy Gower – TV3′s new political editor – here. Excerpt:

8. How have you coped with the commentary and in some cases the vilification about your stories this week?

I guess by vilification you are talking about the blogosphere. It comes with the territory. The left-wing blogosphere are coming at me right now over my coverage of Labour’s leadership “issues”. I can totally understand that – people are passionate about their politics, and when it’s their side in the spotlight they don’t like it. It’s just the same when we do stories like the teapot tapes or the GCSB spying issue, but it’s the right wing blogosphere that gets fired up and comes at you. The blogs and Twitter add a new dimension to the public sphere. The passion and debate is great – keep it coming guys, I can take it. I cope by going out and mowing the lawns. They’re always pretty short.

I haven’t discussed this issue with Paddy, but my impression from other political reporters is that political stories are generally very ‘managed.’ Political parties invest huge amounts of money and energy into controlling their presentation in the media, which can frustrate some journalists. If they’re reporting on, say, a leader’s speech, and the policies have been dreamed up by pollsters and strategists, and the speech has been written by the communications team, and the leader’s delivery of the speech has been coached and choreographed by a media trainer, how genuine is it?

I suspect that’s why journalists like Paddy get (very) excited when things don’t go as scheduled, ie the tea-pot tapes, the Labour conference. ‘Something’ actually happens – ie something that isn’t calculated and pre-planned by teams of highly paid experts. Suddenly reporters are finding out something real instead of being led around by the nose. Of course the political parties hate that – they’ve invested all this effort into building a facade, and now everyone can see around it! That’s often when we hear that something is ‘a beat-up’, or ‘a beltway issue,’ or that journalists should ‘concentrate more on policy issues’, ect. But it can also seem a bit bewildering to the rest of us.

Audrey Young trolls the left-wing blogosphere

By profiling Josie Pagani. It’s a good article. A couple of highlights:

“I got very involved in the miners’ strike in England on the picket line. Being radical when I was in my 20s meant having ‘Coal not Dole’ stickers and standing on the picket line. Nowadays … you’re standing outside the mines with a ‘Keep the Coal in the Hole’ sticker.”

Almost as if there had been some horrible scientific discovery made about the impact of coal on the environment between Thatcher’s first term and today.

She happily debates right-wing opponents such as Matthew Hooton, Deborah Coddington, David Farrar and Cameron Slater. There is no personal invective; they are often complimentary about her.

She wonders jokingly if they are trying to destroy her career “by showing me so much love and support”. The most severe criticism is from the left of politics’ left, usually by anonymous bloggers who question her left-wing credentials at best and can be personally abusive. A “neo-liberal apologist” is one of the more constructive criticisms. “Useless” and “loathsome” are more typical.

Why do so many see Josie Pagani as New Zealand’s answer to a ‘Fox News Democrat’? (ie, someone who provides the illusion of balance by advocating for a left-wing party, but is incapable of making a robust argument or articulating left wing values?). You can’t go past the impressive triple negative opening line of her debut opinion column in Cameron Slater’s Truth:

People who say there’s no such thing as unaffordable housing are out of touch

Now how could anyone not on the left not fail to struggle to not disagree with that?

A footnote to the first draft

Maye I’m lacking perspective here – or just plain wrong – but I wonder if the past few months will be judged as a particularly dark and ugly time in New Zealand’s modern political history, in which the wheels really started to fall off the economy and the government avoided taking responsibility via its beneficiary-bashing campaign, blaming the economic down-turn on its victims.

If I’m right then the record should show that the main opposition party – Labour – was basically silent on the issue, cowed by their market research, and that the most articulate criticism of this scape-goating came from columnists in the New Zealand Herald. Tapu Misa wrote about it again yesterday. Paul Little on Sunday. Toby Manhire last week.

Quote of the day, Eloi vs Morlocks edition

The Herald’s John Armstrong delivers a furious attack on NZ Politics Daily author Bryce Edwards and Scoop’s Gordon Campbell, culminating in the most vicious criticism Armstrong can conceive of against a journalist – that the government might not like the things they write about it:

The rapidly growing influence of Edwards’ blog was initially down to its being an exhaustive wrap-up of all of the day’s political news. It is now starting to develop a much more political dynamic that is unlikely to please National.

Actually I sort of sympathise with some of Armstrong’s complaint – that covering international political trips is hard work and don’t often result in ‘hard’ stories. My wife went on these trips when she worked for NZPA, and I heard all about their brutality and logistical challenges, mostly when I was trying to fall asleep at night. Because there’s a general bi-partisan consensus around foreign policy and trade, and there aren’t any opposition politicians on the trip the news stories generated are generally pro-government. Journalists go on the trips anyway because there’s public interest, they can question the PM about political events breaking in New Zealand, and they can write critical stories if something does go wrong.

But it’s hard to credit Armstrong’s tantrum against Edwards as being about ‘bile and invective’ directed at the press gallery ‘based on ignorance’ (he goes on like this for many hundreds of words). On the contrary, Edwards’ blog mostly consists of an extended love letter to the press gallery and their work. Here’s yesterday’s on the NBR site: he links approvingly to Fairfax journalist Andrea Vance (twice), the Herald’s Claire Trevitt, Radio New Zealand, Fairfax political editor Tracey Watkins (twice: ‘an excellent summary’), David Fisher (‘a must read’) and Herald political editor Audrey Young. It’s like that every day. I note without comment that he doesn’t link to Armstrong’s work very often.

You also gotta wonder how many of the Herald’s readers actually care about an anti-blogger temper tantrum from their political courtier? Surely there’s a better medium for this kind of insular, personal rant than a column in a daily newspaper?

And they’re also very musical

The lead story on the Herald’s web site this morning:

You can overthink these things, but I’m not sure that headlines composed to depict Maori as an autonomous, militant and violent collective are all that great for race relations.