The First 100 Days

Prime Minister elect John Key has promised major reforms in the first 100 days of his government. What are some of the new leader’s top priorities?

• Commission of Inquiry to determine how to make Prime Minister’s fancy ergonomic chair go up and down.

• Petition United Nations to recognise Murray McCully with honorary human status

• $290 million multi-media advertising campaign to sell budget cuts program to wary voters

• Keep straight face while explaining to Rodney Hide why he’ll make a great Minister of Womans Affairs

• Salvage economy by rummaging around in basement looking for stuff to sell on trademe.

• Sack stuck up little Parliamentary Services bitch that gave Gerry a hard time about credit card receipts.

• Said we wouldn’t sell Kiwibank, didn’t say we wouldn’t lease it in perpetuity. Suckers.

• Urinate in corners of every office on 9th floor.

The Trail of Slime

Poor old Labour. It’s worth taking a minute to imgaine the elation they must have felt for a few days there: they finally had that fucker Key dead cold. Perjury. Fraud. Victory.

Labour president Mike Williams spent several days last week reading court documents in Melbourne, backed up by Wellington-based members of the party research unit.

Last weekend, the party believed it had a smoking gun – a signature on the A$39m first H-Fee cheque bearing a striking resemblance to Mr Key’s. Senior party figures advocated making the document public immediately.

Within days, though, court documents proved that what would have been the campaign’s most explosive allegation was wrong. The January 11 cheque was actually signed by an Australian-based executive of the firm Mr Key worked for.

Colin Espiner has blogged about the origins of this non-scandal:

So where did the Herald story come from? Well as it turns out, from the president of the Labour Party, Mike Williams, who it turns out has been in Melbourne researching it from 13,000 pages of court documents. Did Williams have better things to do during an election campaign than trawl through 20-year-old court records looking for dirt on Key? Apparently not.

What’s interesting is that Labour leader Helen Clark is running a mile from this story. She is refusing to even say whether she thinks it raises questions about Key’s integrity or honesty. Her office says Williams is running this show, not Clark, and while the president may think Key has questions to answer, she’s not making any comment.

Vernon Small at the Dom-Post also has some interesting insights into how the story was propagated:

The saga began when a pile of court and other documents were dropped in a Dominion Post reporter’s letterbox wrapped in a copy of the Otago Daily Times. That was followed by an anonymous text and several drops of further documents from someone calling himself Batman. All pointed to Mr Key and the H-fee scheme.

David Farrar points out that The Standard recently featured a guest-post written by someone called Batman that discussed Keys involvement with the H-Fee, and that The Standard have recently deleted the post.

My (totally uninformed) guess is that Williams and his little helpers found their evidence on Key during the weekend and set events in motion to get the story out there as soon as possible, but the Prime Minister – who is super-cautious when it comes to stunts like this – told them to hold back until she was confident the story was sound. When it transpired that they had nothing they’d already primed the story in the media. It’s hard to walk a story back when its being spread by a guy called ‘Batman’ sending reporters anonymous text messages.

So this is all pretty embarrassing but it could have been SO much worse. Imagine if Labour had gone big with this on Monday or Tuesday night only to have National reveal that it was someone elses’s name on the cheque.

- UPDATED: IrishBill from The Standard has pointed out in the comments that contrary to DPFs claims they haven’t deleted their post by ‘Batman’, merely changed the attribution from being a web-site author to a guest post. It also occurs to me that DPFs outrage towards The Standard is a bit rich for a guy who’s travelling around the country with disturbed National Party activist Cameron Slater, who has spent the election campaign fabricating some pretty spectacular smears of his own, the general loathsomeness of which make the current allegations against Key look mild indeed.

You come at the king, you best not miss

Labour have released their much vaunted ‘neutron bomb’ against John Key:

John Key faces accusations of misleading the public about his knowledge of one of New Zealand’s most notorious white collar crimes.

The allegations centre around the so-called H-Fee – two payments totalling A$66.5 million to Equiticorp funnelled via sham foreign exchange transactions in 1988 – and an interview Mr Key gave the Herald last year.

The timing is most felicitous – this kicks Peters off the front page and will likely keep John Key on there for the rest of the campaign. Whether Mr Key comes out of this alive or not depends in part on how he responds  to the allegations. Remember boys, its not the crime that kills you – its the cover-up.

As far as Labour are concerned, they’ve been rubbing their hands and gloating about this for a while – it had better work. They’re so far behind in the polls that if Key simply blows this out of the water – as he’s done with a couple of other Labour smears – they will look pathetically desperate.

The psychology of debate

Atlantic contributor James Fallows has some comments on the US presidential debates – they also seem relevant to the recent showdown between Helen Clark and John Key:

Here’s why the third debate, and all three debates, helped Obama so much more than McCain.

In general-election debates, it’s a losing strategy to “rally the base.” That’s what your own campaign events, and your fund-raisers, and your targeted ads, and your running mate are for. Especially by the time of the second and third debates, the job is to “rally the center.” That’s where most of remaining persuadable and undecided voters are.

Everything about Barack Obama’s approach to this debate, and all debates, was consistent with this reality. Almost nothing about John McCain’s approach was:

Neither Clark nor Key made McCain’s mistake – the person who came closest was Clark with her absurd and offensive comment about Key being used to shouting people down at home. Both candidates ran very defensive strategies in which they positioned themselves to look calm, strong and leaderlike; Key effortlessly exceeded the expectations set for him. Clark didn’t hurt herself in the debate but she didn’t help herself much either, and she did damage her image with her foolish (but totally characteristic) attacks on John Key and Mark Sainsbury the next day.

Clark and her supporters seem to genuinely believe in their cartoon depiction of John Key as some sort of malign, demonic super-rich psychopath, just as the US Republican Party imagines Barack Obama as being a deranged radical Islamic terrorist. But when people encounter Obama on TV they see a calm, articulate, slightly pompous and sometimes tedious former law professor; when we see Key we see a genial, occasionaly bewildered and safely anodyne Kiwi boy made good. Their political enemies are trying to sell us something we simply cannot believe in.

Neither a fox nor a lion

A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

John Key has defended his party’s planned program of tax cuts, after Treasury numbers released today showed the economic outlook has deteriorated badly since the May budget.

The numbers have seen Treasury reducing its revenue forecasts and increasing its predictions of costs such as benefits.

Cash deficits – the bottom line after all infrastructure funding and payments to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund are made – is predicted to blow out from around $3 billion a year to around $6 billion a year.

Key: $30b deficit won’t stop Nats tax cuts
New Zealand Herald, Monday 6th October 2008

Would it really have looked so bad if National cancelled its tax cuts? If Key stood up and said that the country was in trouble, hard times were ahead and we had to make a sacrifice; the National Party was committed to tax cuts and would work hard to restore the economy to a position when they were affordable, yadda yadda yadda.

He might have lost a few points but his party is so far ahead and his opponents so widely despised that he the Nats could have worn it. I also suspect that many voters would have respected his integrity and leadership – he might even have stood to gain from such a stand. And it would have made his life a LOT easier when he actually gets into power.

I strongly suspect that the upcoming tax-cuts will involve some sort of accounting scam with the government KiwiSaver credit; instead of getting $50 a week into your retirement savings you get it in the hand instead. National will crow that taxpayers now have a choice about what to do with the money.

Maybe they’ve dreamed up something else – I hope so for their sake. If the much vaunted tax-cuts do turn out to be a bait-and-switch gimmick then they’d have been better off with no cuts at all.

It doesn’t bode well for National’s leadership that they haven’t seen the fairly obvious trap Cullen has laid for them and they’re too afraid of opening themselves up to attack if they try and back out of it.

Key denies sheep worrying allegations

The bitter war of words between Prime Minister Helen Clark and John Key intensified today after Clark claimed the National Party leader was involved in a recent series of nationwide attacks against sheep and other livestock.

Addressing a Council of Trade Unions meeting in South Auckland today Clark showed a presentation containing depicting dozens of mutilated sheep and lambs. Most of the dead animals were killed on sheep stations in the Wairarapa and Hawkes Bay regions, although some were killed as far south as Otago. Clark claims she has proof that the National leader is responsible for the attacks.

‘If John Key will inflict these atrocities on defenseless lambs imagine what he will do to the New Zealand economy,’ the Prime Minister warned the 200 person strong crowd who responded well to Mrs Clark’s comments, booing whenever a digitally altered photograph showing Mr Key with large, sharpened canine teeth dripping with blood appeared on the screen. The booing was accompanied by the chant: ‘Killer of sheep! Killer of sheep!’

Mrs Clark estimated that if Key is elected Prime Minister as many as five hundred thousand sheep per month could be killed in National Party attacks on livestock. A spokesperson for the Prime Minister later admitted that this was only a rough calculation and that the real number was closer to four million.

Although farmers affected by the recent attacks insist the perpetrators are stray dogs local to the area, the Labour Party have produced an eye-witness to the attacks who personally saw Mr Key and his fellow National Party MP Judith Collins savaging livestock on a high country sheep station over a period of several nights in late August and early September.

Michael Williams, a former IT analyst living in Auckland confirmed that he saw the National MP’s mutilating spring lambs late at night on the Walter Peak station. Key and Collins are also alleged to have dug up rosebushes in the garden of a residential house on the station, as well as spraying in a number of locations on the property.

‘I was shocked by what I saw,’ Williams said in a statement released to the media. ‘I’m just an everyday bloke and I don’t know much about politics and elections but this is not the way Members of Parliament should behave.’

Mr Williams dismissed allegations that he was not an impartial witness due to his role as President of the New Zealand Labour Party.

‘This is the time to put party politics aside and focus on John Key’s long record of sheep worrying,’ Williams said. ‘We cannot let this killer of sheep become Prime Minister.’

‘I saw what I saw,’ Williams added. ‘You have my word.’

Reaction from the National Party has been confused, with MP Judith Collins admitting that she had been involved in sheep worrying incidents with Mr Key but denying that it was an election issue.

‘How John and I spend our spare time is our business,’ Collins said. ‘This is another disgusting effort by the Labour Party to distract voters from the real issues’

Mrs Collins later retracted her statements, claiming that she had confused the recent sheep attacks with another event. Collins denies that Key or herself was responsible for the attacks.

Mr Key, off campaigning someplace, was not available for comment.

Masters of the Universe

DPF responds to Cullen’s attacks on John Key re the bargain basement half-price sale of Key’s old employer, Merrill-Lynch.

One of Key’s supposed strengths is that he’s a self-made man, and that he must be a pretty sharp guy to rise to the head of currency trader for such a big bank. There’s a general consensus that the people who run the global financial markets are awful smart and that this intelligence will make Key a formidible Prime Minister.

Since the global financial markets tend to collapse roughly every five to ten years I think we can dispense with the notion that these people are talented experts who know what they’re doing. In my previous life I worked in the banking industry, in London and New York and (briefly) Tokyo. I heard friends at Lehman gush about how their company director, Dick Fuld, was one of the smartest guys on Earth. The smartest guy on Earth just sent his company into bankruptcy with $613 billion dollars in debt. Most of his employees had their investments tied up in his companies stock which is now worthless. They won’t be able to get jobs anywhere else.

None of the super-rich traders and VP’s that I ran into during my time at the coal-face struck me as very bright – their ability to get ahead depended on other qualities: ambition, hyper-agressiveness and a phenomenal sense of entitlement got you a lot furthur than intelligence. There is also – especially in American firms – a general sense that your actions have no consequences. If you gamble and it pays off then you win, but if you lose then some other chump – the customer, the tax-payer, whoever – picks up the tab.

This is known as privatise the profits, socialise the risk. It creates a moral hazard that encourages companies like Merrill and Lehmans to take HUGE risks – if they work out they make a fortune, if they fail then the scale of the disaster threatens to crash the financial markets and the government is forced to bail them out yet again. Nice work if you can get it.

DPF is correct in that Cullen’s attack doesn’t quite track, but his defense – that Key made money in the financial markets so he must have the right stuff – doesn’t really work for me. Key seems to be a much nicer guy than any of the idiots I worked for but does his success qualify him to run our country?

Let’s hope he does a better job than the smartest guy on earth just did.

Foreign Exchange

The Herald’s John Roughan is wild about John Key

Reading the first part of the Weekend Herald’s “unauthorised biography” last weekend I felt something close to excitement at the idea of a forex trader running the country . . . You would need caution and supreme instinctive confidence, moment by moment, to survive in forex dealing.

I’ve worked at merchant banks in London, New York and Tokyo and known many an FX trader – although none as successful as John Key. But as far as I can tell you don’t need any of the attributes Roughan is fantasising about – what you need is a good memory, concentration and the ability to work very long hours without a significant deterioration in those skills. So far Key has not shown any special insight into matters of economics or finance – certainly not compared with his deputy leader Bill English. As a senior manager at Merrill’s Key was probably good at strategy, organisation and handling his staff – all qualities he’s shown as leader of the National Party.

The reality of life in the banking world is that it is very boring and very demanding; not many people do it for more than a few years. The pay is good because the job REALLY sucks, not because the skills you need are particularly rare. And all the money in the world isn’t enough to compensate for the ever persistent knowledge that you are wasting your life. That’s probably why Key left it all behind to kiss babies in Pakuranga.

Five Questions for Key

John Key refuses to answer questions about the identity of his political consultants and is under attack from Labour over his involvement in the sale of the railways. What other tough questions is the National leader facing?

• Why did the jackals and wolves at Auckland zoo crawl to the front of their cages and prostate themselves before Key during a recent family visit?
• Why do retail staff at the mall near his home allege the MP and his family are stockpiling food, drinking water, ammunition and antibiotics?
• Is Key’s favourite musician really Robbie Williams? I mean, really? Robbie fucking Williams?
• How can he claim to represent the people of Helensville when his 2007 statement of assets list his primary residences as ‘hollowed out volcano’ and ‘orbital pain-control platform’?
• Why is he called Earnest in urban areas but Jack when canvassing for rural votes?
• Do rich dudes play Monopoly with real money or not?