Hard News: Masters of Reality
107 Responses
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Key increasingly resembles one of Uri Geller's spoons. Joyce is more closely identified with a box of loose bedsprings.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I guess to some voters/party members it looks 'tough' and 'manly'.
The lack of support for Labour from the Greens has been growing since before the last election and the snide attacks from their supporters do nothing to heal that rift.
I wouldn't consider a snub from Labour as being "tough and manly" more a "you really aren't helping". Do the Greens think they could get control of the treasury benches without Labour?.
The Greens may not be as far to the left as some in Labour would like but the fact remains that their philosophy is more in favour of people and the environment rather than Big Business and the desire for the mighty dollar so their natural ally would be Labour rather than National. In this particular case I would consider Shearer to be the best man for the job and if the Greens think otherwise then that should be the point of discussion rather than complaining about feeling "left out", who would they like to put up and is he a better choice that Shearer? and that.... should be a private matter between the parties.
If anyone other than the rabid right are to have any say in the running of this country then the bickering must stop, we have a common enemy and that should be reason enough to pull ourselves together. -
Joe Wylie, in reply to
who would they like to put up and is he a better choice that Shearer?
I believe they had Metiria Turei in mind. $2000 jacket vs $50,000 forgotten bank account.
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Sacha, in reply to
I noticed though that Winston wasn’t kicking up a stink about not being chosen
He has more to gain politically by criticising from outside the committee, unbound by its strict confidentiality.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I believe they had Metiria Turei in mind. $2000 jacket vs $50,000 forgotten bank account.
She must have some unpaid parking fines or something? no doubt National will tell us at some point.
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I just relised I had said... "who would they like to put up and is he a better choice that Shearer?"
I meant to say "who would they like to put up and are they a better choice that Shearer?"
Ooops. -
Bart Janssen, in reply to
Why can’t they just make the committee bigger and have wider representation?
Bigger committees don't necessarily get more done. Also it is a security committee so it requires a certain level of adulthood (something rarer than you might hope in parliament).
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
a box of loose bedsprings
I was thinking of a sack of hammers...
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I was thinking of a sack of hammers...
:- )I was thinking "A barrel of laughs".
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nzlemming, in reply to
and the hate site (because it was just horrible, and really off-topic).
Sorry.
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nzlemming, in reply to
He has more to gain politically by criticising from outside the committee, unbound by its strict confidentiality.
Spot on.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Do the Greens think they could get control of the treasury benches without Labour?.
No, they don't. But they don't pretend to either, whereas Labour still thinks it's the big dog it once was, instead of the lost puppy it has become. Does Labour seriously think they could get control of the treasury benches without the Greens?
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Sacha, in reply to
A barrel of laughs
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The Cohen payment trainwreck and the Shearer appointment (though he is likely the most qualified choice) indicate the tipping point looks likely sometime late in 2017, perhaps even well into 2018.
Where one is going to plead in the court of equity one needs to have clean hands.
The passage of time, some four months, over the Cohen invoice is quite damming.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
The passage of time, some four months, over the Cohen invoice is quite damming.
From what I can make of it, for most of that time the block lay with the unpaid volunteer who had what was a pretty dumb idea in the first place., Chris Matthews.
Cohen wrote to McCarten on December 22 and McCarten seems to have taken the view (correctly but unhelpfully) that he wasn’t the person to be pursuing such a thing with. He really should have just sorted it, as an obvious political risk. And they really should have sorted it as soon as Cohen's column was published last week.
I do have sympathy with Cohen – I’ve been that guy chasing an invoice just before Christmas because I don’t know where the money’s coming from for the next couple of months. If I had done such work (and tbh, I wouldn’t) I’d want to be paid.
On the other hand, this isn’t really a big story and the ludicrous bombast from from Patrick Gower yesterday was actually embarrassing.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
On the other hand, this isn’t really a big story
No it isn't -- and I certainly can't disagree with anyone that Gower would benefit enormously from switching to decaf and cutting sugar out of his diet. But I'm getting just a wee bit impatient with folks elsewhere saying it isn't a legit story at all. It actually is a useful thing when journalists point out when our political lords and masters don't quite practice what they preach -- and legislate.
Still, I'm sure we'll all be taking the highest of high roads and refraining from any further comment on Eminem's publishers suing National for breach of copyright. After all, it's pretty trivial in the great scheme of things, right?
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Still, I’m sure we’ll all be taking the highest of high roads and refraining from any further comment on Eminem’s publishers suing National for breach of copyright. After all, it’s pretty trivial in the great scheme of things, right?
Depends on how much money ends up getting involved. Other than that, the rest of the affair can speak for itself.
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Regarding Labour and the Greens… one of the things I heard many times during the last election, as I stood on doorsteps in both rural and urban areas, was that people didn’t like the thought that if they voted Labour, they would also get the Greens. The typical line I got was, “We can’t vote for you, even though we like you, because we don’t like the Greens.”
Okay then. I usually responded by talking about some of the people I have a fair amount of respect for in the Green caucus, in an attempt to make the Greens less scary to these voters. Pretty frustrating to be spending my time doing that, to be honest, when I’d far rather have been talking about Labour and Labour policies, and urging people to vote Labour (I was afterall, running for Labour, not the Green party).
It’s a little hard to know what underlay the comments from voters about the Greens being scary (and therefore they weren’t going to vote Labour). I’m sure that part of it could be that most people don’t want to say to your face that they won’t be voting for you or your party, so they find something else to say which is not openly opposed to the (pleasant, friendly etc?) woman standing right in front of them. But I do think that some of the sentiment behind the words was genuine: many of the voters I spoke to really, really, didn’t want the Greens in government, and that in turn became another negative for Labour in their minds, because Labour would likely form a coalition with the Greens.
So it’s not clear to me that as a matter of electoral tactics, Labour and the Greens should be too overtly allied. It’s not clear that they shouldn’t be aligned either, for that matter. But what seems obvious to some people here at PAS, which is a fairly left wing kind of place, is not at all obvious to many of the voters I spoke to in the six months or so before the election last year.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
But I'm getting just a wee bit impatient with folks elsewhere saying it isn't a legit story at all. It actually is a useful thing when journalists point out when our political lords and masters don't quite practice what they preach -- and legislate.
In my experience it tends to be "Business" people that keep you waiting for payment.
The worst ones that have affected me were almost always in Epsom. That would make me suspect that there are likely to be more members of the National party who are guilty of such behaviour than Labour. -
Kumara Republic, in reply to
many of the voters I spoke to really, really, didn’t want the Greens in government, and that in turn became another negative for Labour in their minds, because Labour would likely form a coalition with the Greens.
What did these voters think the Greens would do, confiscate their houses and cars?
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izogi, in reply to
Shearer does have the background for the role, more so than anyone in the Green caucus. But it does breach an informal (albeit fairly recent) convention, so failing to tell the Greens is either provocative or stupidly clumsy.
Is it an informal convention?
As I read section 7 of the Intelligence and Security Committee Act of 1996, the law seems to state clearly that the Leader of the Opposition can only nominate another member "following consultation with the leader of each party that is not in Government or in coalition with a Government party".
Maybe a lawyer could read it differently, but I parse that section to mean that Andrew Little had to contact the Green Party leader(s) before he made the nomination, even if it was just to say "screw you, I'm doing what I want".
At worst this could open the committee, down the track, to accusations that it's operating illegally if it does something that's disliked by someone. Maybe that could be fixed by Andrew Little picking up the phone to say "screw you", before formally re-nominating David Shearer, but he'd first have to acknowledge he made a mistake.
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Deborah, in reply to
What did these voters think the Greens would do, confiscate their houses and cars?
I never really pursued it too much. I can recall comments like, flakey, tree-huggers, all about the trees and not about business and people, going to put huge costs on people, unrealistic, no economic expertise, wanting everying to have composting toilets.
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From what I can make of it, for most of that time the block lay with the unpaid volunteer who had what was a pretty dumb idea in the first place., Chris Matthews.
I dunno if that makes it any better though - Little should have had a campaign manager / treasurer that were on top of this sort of thing, especially given that Little and his campaign manager were both in a room with Cohen. If he didn't, that was pretty poor form.
More broadly, yeah sure it's a minor thing*, and we're noticing it because Andrew Little has been very good up until now. But the Labour party keeps giving away minor things and they add up. Unforced errors like this just shouldn't happen, and they keep happening, and John Key loves it.
* Although I suspect it's the kind of minor thing that hurts, because it undercuts Little's attempts to articulate himself as straight-talking, honest, a fair-go kinda guy. Also, what is it with the Labour Party and leadership races for causing egg on face? There was Cunliffe's secret trust/donors, Little's unpaid bill, Shane Jones' public donors, etc.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
I never really pursued it too much. I can recall comments like, flakey, tree-huggers, all about the trees and not about business and people, going to put huge costs on people, unrealistic, no economic expertise, wanting everying to have composting toilets.
So it boils down to a couple of common threads: “PC wankers” and “anti-business Communists”. Or to compress it into one common thread, “cultural Marxism”. Did any of them relate from actual experiences, or is it a reflection of what they get from media?
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
What did these voters think the Greens would do, confiscate their houses and cars?
The response I got when asking the question was they were deeply worried about what The Greens would do to “business” and in particular farming. It wasn’t a response that came from lack of thought but rather a genuine worry that Green policy was anti-business. Not helped by some of wittering both from right wing commentators and in some cases Green candidates.
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