Posts by Russell Brown
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This week's __Media Take_ (and a post I'll write on Tuesday) will be in part about the responses of other journalists and broadcasters -- which have by no means all been bad. The pissed-off younger Gallery members who quizzed Key in this extraordinary 20-minute standup were righteous.
But some older media people dismissing the whole book -- including evidence that sitting Ntional MPs paid Lusk and Slater to destroy their opponents in selection contests -- just really need to take a good, hard look at themselves.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Sacha,
Whatever the wider implications, the book has had a profound effect on me, personally. Something that doesn’t come across in the news coverage about Dirty Politics, and Cameron Slater, Jason Ede, Jordan Williams, Simon Lusk et al is just how fucking awful these people are. They spend their lives trying to poison and contaminate our politics.
I've been dwelling on this too. When I got off the plane in Christchurch yesterday, having read most of the book on the flight from Auckland, I actually felt shocked at how hideous these people had been shown to be. Like Danyl, I think the book has had a significant impact on me. I've been on civil terms with some people in the wider circle. I'm not sure I have it in me to do that any more. Fuck them.
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Speaker: Confidential information: the…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Of course it doesn’t stop the people doing those things being absolute twatcocks even if what they do can be defended by a lawyer.
I think this is really the point. It might be successfully argued that it's not actually illegal. But was it ethical or appropriate behaviour for someone being paid by the taxpayer?
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Yeah I think the Law Society needs to ask serious questions about her behaviour there.
Note that Jordan Williams is also a lawyer. In New Zealand.
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David Farrar has now basically acknowledged to me that a call centre worker probably took home the two scripts and gave them to Hager.
This whole "hacked or spied on" thing is disingenuous bullshit. But, of course, more than enough to bamboozle a newspaper journalist. Fucksake.
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Just a note: the book does not actually say Collins was behind the prisoner transfer. The allegation is against a prison officer. P46 and footnote 10, p144.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Sacha,
When I put it to him that it looked like a leak by an employee, as the footnotes in the book actually say, he said "I regard it as spying" and that someone must have taken work with Curia specifically to get information. If all they managed was a couple of scripts that were handed out to call centre workers and read out over the phone to thousands of people, they were a really shit spy.
I'm calling conscious misdirection.
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David Farrar is now claiming to have been “hacked or spied on" because two scripts (one for polling, one for canvassing calls for Louise Upston) used by Curia are quoted in the book.
But surely these are documents he gives to humans to read out over the phone to other humans? I don’t get where hacking of his computers is required at all. It seems far more likely that someone simply leaked them. And it someone was to go to the trouble of hacking Farrar’s systems, wouldn’t they take much more interesting stuff than two things that weren’t exactly a secret anyway?
And, in fact the footnotes for the Farrar chapter explain this: they say Hager's source was "an employee".
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
He decided to publish them. I don’t know who else is responsible for what he decided to put in the book.
No, he didn't publish them. He quoted the messages between the people doing what looked a lot like blackmailing him.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Oh, the irony – it burns. There’s some weird aside in the Three News lead about claims that Slater threatened to “blackmail” Rodney Hide over “dirty texts”. If this the tenor of the thing, I wonder if Hager isn’t going to have some ’splaining of his own to do.
Wut? How on earth is it Hager's fault?
The plan is documented on pages 68-70 of the book and the very public part of it -- the thinly-veiled threat about Hide's "personal life" -- still stands, I presume, on the Whaleoil blog.
FWIW, Hager redacts the name of another MP mentioned in the grisly little exchange between Slater, Lusk and Jordan Williams.