Posts by Matt Crawford
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The person who needs to be held accountable here is Iain Rennie. “As State Services Commissioner, I see my role as a guardian of political neutrality across the State Services,”
He has failed, and must be held to account.
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I normally don't read Duncan Garner, but this opinion this is unusually direct in the way it sheds light on the ABC clique.
But, Karen Price is actually right: The ABC club never died when Cunliffe became leader – they just retired to the corner and got more bitter and twisted. It’s no secret who they are: Trevor Mallard is the life president, Clayton Cosgrove, chief plotter, David Shearer, general-secretary, Stuart Nash, head of communications, Annette King, camp mother, Grant Robertson the uncle, Phil Goff, kaumatua, and the errant ABC kids are Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Kris Faafoi.
I believe many of this crew ran electorate campaigns, so they could get back in and nail Cunliffe should he lose. They wanted to stack the caucus with ABCers, that’s also why they were desperate for Kelvin Davis to win in the north. He’s no fan of Cunliffe either.
The baggage of Goff, Mallard, King and Cosgrove will do Labour no favours in the future. As it is a vote for Robertson looks like a return to power for these leftover retreads from the Clark regime. If he would only cut them loose I'd seriously supporting him, he's probably the most naturally talented person in caucus.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's a sound analysis Brown, and I think you've hit the nail on the head. Regardless of Cunliffe's potential merits or appeal, his inability to work with caucus all but rules him out as a rational option.
Robertson's problem however is that he has hitched his leadership ambition to the the dead wood of the ABC clique. Mallard, Goff, King, Cosgrove are his loyalists and represent the worst aspects of this stale and unpleasant caucus. A vote for Robertson may well mean a leader who shackles the party with these people until at least 2020.
In my opinion Cunliffe was elected last year primarily as a protest vote against caucus. If Robertson does not understand this he will forever struggle to gain membership buy-in. I'm sure as hell not volunteering to keep Clayton Cosgrove's political career alive via the list.
I think a Robertson alternative who does not have the ABC baggage could come through in the votes of the membership.
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I can accept that people think Cunliffe failed, he certainly didn't live up the hopes I had for him as a result of the his leadership race. I voted for him at the time - personally I don't see the infamous Cunfliffe superciliousness, though it seems I'm in the minority here.
My thoughts from the campaign were that Cunliffe seemed a much warmer and genuine personality than Helen Clark, and more natural and confident than both Goff and Shearer. Certainly DC does not come close to the easy charisma of Key, who is preternaturally talented.
For all that however, I certainly agree that the 24.7% result damns him a failure. The problem though is that Cunliffe is just one loser in a moribund caucus.
Goff and King also lead Labour to a then historic defeat, and have spent time since actively undermining subsequent leaders. Hipkins uses his role as whip to act out personal vendettas in public against his caucus enemies. Mallard's contribution to his six years in opposition is a personal junket to the America's Cup, a campaign against the psychoactive substances bill he had voted for just months earlier, and hijacking Labour's campaign for 3 days to talk about bloody moa. Clayton Cosgrove didn't have the word "Labour" on his hoardings, loses his electorate and happily returns on the list and still finds the time to launch an attack on the party's policies only 12 hours after the result.
Robertson's attempts to circumvent the membership by having caucus install him unopposed is contemptible, and him claiming Labour would have won if only he had lead the party is straight up delusional.
The truth is that Labour, as a party, are unelectable. Voters are only too aware that Labour's parliamentary wing now solely exists to perpetually extend the careers of an ever-decreasing number of incumbents.
Selecting Robertson or Shearer or Ardern to lead will do nothing to excise the dead wood that has been allowed to petrify within the Labour caucus, nor can a new leader afford to bring in any new talent before the 2017 election lest they bankrupt the party.
But certainly Cunliffe has failed, and for that it is only right that he faces a leadership challenge. I just see the leadership as the least of the problems facing Labour right now. When so large a swathe of caucus refuse to run on the party list something is very fundamentally wrong.
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to Che Tibby,
Hey Che,
I'm not sure about if/where data would be stored - if we're taking the version presented in the cabinet papers for Cortex then a couple of things raise their head.
The first issue is obviously latency - if Cortex is implemented to sniff and block threats in real time this means it has to be fast. To me I think this means it has to be local to our ISPs.
I'd be really interested to know how hardware intensive Cortex would be. If it were just to filter celebritynudes.exe that sounds almost trivial (and worthless for all but the most mentally enfeebled Spark customers). I think Cortex would go further and deeper into the data - running a hash to match against a list of identified threats? Could generate a lot of work.
Filtering in Australia for child porn websites was said to result in some sort of performance hit, even though it was implemented at ISP level and just rejected URLs that were on the blacklist.
Anyway, probably too much attention paid to Key's strawman surveillance apparatus for one day.
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to nzlemming,
I think it's highly likely we'd be be getting mates rates on NSA tech, so I'm prepared to believe setup costs for software side wouldn't be all that insurmountable ( and we might even be comped the first 24 months subscriptions for new malware definitions).
But the physical breach of our cables, along with ongoing interception and sniffing seems like a mammoth task if we started from scratch. It would require vast amounts of ongoing bandwidth and CPU, especially as Key claims it was to be total.
The cabinet documents assure us that this is not a big deal and well within existing operational budgets. I think this is a pretty decent hint at what the GCSB operational budget is already being spent on.
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Keith,
Further to a few tweets between you and Dylan Reeve,
I think there's a decent sized clue into the nature of CORTEX when we look at the how Cabinet approached the funding to establish it. The most relevant part is the first cabinet document CAB Min (14) 25/9, which outlines the resources being devoted to CORTEX.Background
2 Noted that in March 2012, the Cabinet Committee on State Sector Reform and Expenditure Control noted that Budget Ministers had agreed to set aside a tagged contingency of $XXX million over five years, including $XXX million for, capital expenditure, to counter advanced cyber threats ISEC Min. (12) 4/113 Noted that in December 2013, the Minister Responsible forthe GCSB wrote to the Minister of Finance with a proposal for use of the tagged contingency referred to above, and that it was agreed that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) would prepare a business case for the proposal. (project. CORTEX), in accordance with Treasury guidelines;
The cabinet document goes on in the Resourcing section
noted that $XXX million capital and $XXXmillion operating expenditure can be met from GCSB baselines
So a Cortex is a novel system that interrogates every data packet coming into NZ and checks it against a known database of malware in real time. Capex is to be funded from an existed tagged fund, and the operating costs for this standalone total data interception and sniffing are to be absorbed within baseline GCSB funding.
There are only two possible ways for this to be so - 1. Either the GCSB are the most frugal and efficient IT experts in whole of Government and can sniff our whole IT infrastructure with a figurative piece of no8 wire, or 2. CORTEX is relatively cheap to set up and run as it is piggybacking off other GCSB infrastructure.There is no way that a Government department in the year of our lord 2014 has the spare capacity to build and run a brand-new Intercept and Sniff Everything Program without any distress to an existing budget. It simply isn't credible.
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Stephen Franks.
I'm actually speechless. What a vile and foul human being.
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My hope is that sensible legislative reform of drug law could well be supported by a majority of MPs. Gay marriage turned out to be rather better supported by our politicians than anyone might have thought from looking at the acrimonious passing of civil unions. I think the numbers on the psychoactive substances bill are a pointer to an unvoiced widespread acknowledgement that our regulatory status quo aint all that flash.
The subsequent backlash over legal highs was certainly a bouffant-sized cluster fuck. Though, isn't it amazing that all that public outrage, drama and energy at the start of the year has melted away to absolutely nothing just months later.
Another sign of the times - Family First has their anti-marijuana rhetoric in overdrive. Half of Bob's posts these days seem to be copy-pastes of dire warnings of the weed-induced apocalypse straight off the fundamentalist newswires.
If Bob sees it as a pressing threat, then perhaps it's not so far off after all.
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I think at this point it's salient to recall what was happening in the campaign during the last election.
At this point in the last election campaign, the police were threatening to order search warrants for TV3, The Herald on Sunday, RadioNZ et al - over a complaint by the Prime Minister. Over a digital recording inadvertently made in a public space literally during a media stunt put on for the press - a figurative media circus.
The Police intruded upon our fourth estate during an election campaign over one of the most trivial complaints imaginable.
And this time around?Not so much.