Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Now It's On | Sep 12, 2008 12:55

The general election will, as widely predicted, be held on November 8. And in Helen Clark's announcement of that fact we got a pretty clear look at the message Labour will take to the voters.

Some of it's far from new: we're standing on our record, and they're secret agenda-holding flip-floppers. But she several times characterised National as putting the clock back, being "backward-looking" and seeking a return to the past. In short:

"We can be trusted with the future of New Zealand."

And there was also this:

"Labour is ambitious for New Zealand. National is ambiguous."

Is she saying "they pinched our policies, so we're pinching their sales pitch"?

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Conscious Party | Sep 11, 2008 10:44

It is unusual that the mere viewing of television should detain Helen Clark, but that was surely the cause of three successive delays in her arrival at the APRA Silver Scroll Awards last night. She was watching her foreign minister bid for his political life, live like judicial sport.

Eventually, she arrived, smiling, and took her seat during the awards' traditional period of meditation. It was hard not to wonder what was going through her head, but I hope she was able to enjoy the entertainment, because it was tremendous.

The evening began with a moving musical tribute to the late Mahinarangi Tocker. One of our regulars here, Jackie Clark, was Mahinarangi's friend and sister in law, and she can be assured that the spirit of that tribute flowed through the evening.

The Scrolls format is that each of the five finalists for the song of the year is performed by another act. King Kapisi's take on Elemenop's 'Baby Let's Go' was pretty good and it got better from there. Bachelorette's performance of the Phoenix Foundation's 'Bright Grey' -- solo, spotlit at the foot of the Town Hall's giant pipe organ -- was brilliantly gutsy. I was half-dreading Little Bushman's performance of Liam Finn's 'Gather to the Chapel', but when they swelled it up into a lurching soul groove, it was remarkable too.

And then the Sami Sisters came on to play OpShop's 'One Day', charmed everyone in the room and departed laughing and high-fiving. It was wicked. And Madeleine Sami looks hot with an electric guitar. Voom than made Anika Moa's 'Dreams in My Head' sound like it had always been a Voom song. They should add it to their repertoire.

'One Day', as you might have guessed, took out the prize and even though it's still the only one in the lineup that I couldn't hum you, it's fair recognition of a song that reached a lot of people in the past year.

In the course of the same evening, the Topp Twins were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, then paid musical tribute by Reb Fountain and Johnny Barker; Richard Thorne, editor of New Zealand Musician was surprised and moved to be honoured for his magazine's service; improv drummer Chris O'Connor performed a spooky piece; and -- oh wow -- Martin Phillipps and the Chills rounded out the evening with a performance of 'Heavenly Pop Hit' -- with choir, bellringers and pipe organist. I was crossing my fingers at the beginning but Martin got to his Brian Wilson place and earned the last of the evening's standing ovations.

I think it was the best Silver Scrolls programme I've seen. Don McGlashan's debut as musical director was a notable one indeed. And as ever, I felt like I was with my people for the evening. It's a pleasure and a privilege to come to this party every year.

Watch it when it's on C4.

Other bits and pieces from the evening …

Vodafone will launch a subscription music service next week -- and another music service that it'd be breaking a confidence to tell you about.

Where were the Nats? Couldn't they have sent one member along?

The Trons, the self-playing robot band from Hamilton, have returned from a corporate gig in Paris with Daft Punk. [Correction: I've spoken to someone who'd spoken to Greg Locke from the Trons, who'd heard about the Daft Punk thing too. Amusingly, it's news to him. But, the Trons have in fact been invited to Paris to play a Mercedes corporate do -- which is brilliant. The original version of this story should stand as a demonstration of the perils of getting your news tips from pissed people.]

Seymour Stein was in the country recently to audition a local act. His condition was coming was that a private pub gig be staged for him, and him alone.

Peter Garrett, here in his arts minister's capacity, was cool -- even when the guy from the Rainy Days ranted incomprehensibly to him and threatened to fall on his table.

Real Groove general manager Steve Richards has bought the magazine from the rest of the Real Groovy business and is looking to do new things with it.

A Topp Twins documentary film has been produced and will debut early next year.

Damian Christie was a danger to shipping.

And don't try and book a hall for Saturday, November 8. I heard tell of a certain young band trying to do that this week and having no luck at all, one venue after another. That lends weight to my view that that will be the date of the general election.

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This week's Media7 looked at the present state and future prospects of the music business, with the legendary Peter Jenner, Morgan Donoghue from Vodafone Music, and lawyer and Amplifier founder Chris Hocquard. I think you'll find it interesting.

It's available for viewing on TVNZ ondemand, as Windows Media clips, in a podcast and on our YouTube channel.

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Need to Know | Sep 10, 2008 10:09

Amid the courtroom drama of the yesterday's privileges committee hearing, and the subsequent explorations of Owen Glenn's hurt feelings, No Right Turn usefully points out what is actually at stake: unless Winston Peters can convincingly rebut the evidence Glenn provided yesterday, it will be seen that he "clearly violated both Cabinet guidelines and Parliament's Standing Orders on the declaration of gifts and interests - then lied about it afterwards to the public."

That's what it's about. Well, this part of it anyway.

There is no evidence, from Glenn or anyone else, to support Bill English's claim that Labour helped "jack up" Glenn's donation to Peters' legal fund: indeed, the evidence plainly says it didn't. There was no real incentive for it do do so anyway: the coalition deal was struck; all that was at stake in Tauranga was Winston Peters' pride. You might say that Winston Peters' pride has been a significant factor in this whole, sorry business.

But party president Mike Williams clearly at least knew in December 2005 that Glenn was considering such a donation. And it is unacceptable that it has taken this long for that fact to emerge.

If Helen Clark and her party suffer collateral damage as a result of the business, they only have themselves to blame. None of their dealings with Glenn have breached any laws or standing orders; that which ought to have been declared has been declared. Indeed, as John Armstrong noted in a February column whose conclusions still hold remarkably true, the party erred on the side of caution in its handling of a $100,000 loan from Glenn, declaring the foregone interest as a donation even though it was unclear that it was obliged to do so.

But when asked by journalists about dealings with Glenn since the 2005 election, Williams didn't volunteer information about the loan. It was left to Glenn to say. And even though a number of claims made by Glenn in the wake of his New Year honour (which I still think was well deserved -- he has been a generous benefactor of New Zealand tertiary education) were palpably bonkers, that one was true. If Williams had simply volunteered that information before Glenn did, he wouldn't have been offering his resignation back in February.

And he wouldn't have been right in the thick of it again. John Campbell's suggestion in the course of last night's extraordinary interview with Glenn that Clark was acting as she has to protect Williams is difficult to sustain: Williams hadn't done anything wrong, apart from being reticent with information it would clearly have been wise to reveal far sooner than he did.

It's conceivable that Williams didn't share the fact of his phone call from Glenn with the Prime Minister, certainly before it became an issue for the privileges committee: party presidents are expected to maintain a wall between party leaders and their donors (however often that actually happens), and Peters would have regarded Williams going to the press about New Zealand First's business as an unforgivable act of hostility. But he and Clark have become invested in the opposite act -- maintaining a silence to avoid damaging the credibility of Peters and his party.

They have been in an unenviable position. But it would be sadly ironic if they prove to have sacrificed their electoral fortunes for the sake of Winston Bloody Peters.

I think now we need to know the whole business. I think we need to know whether in fact the mystery figure who offered Tariana Turia a $250,000 enticement to go into coalition with Labour was indeed Owen Glenn.

This is a tricky piece of information, because that offer would have been a serious breach of the law on Owen Glenn's part. Labour didn't jack up Glenn's act to aid Peters' electoral challenge and I do not for a moment think it would have jacked up an offer to Turia -- they might be unwise, but they're not friggin' stupid. But I do think we need to know what happened. Glenn has previously denied making the offer. But if someone on the committee can't ask that question again, surely there's a journalist who can.

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A plot point is reached | Sep 09, 2008 11:07

I've been struggling as much as the next guy to stay with the sprawling Winston Peters scandal (I think, with three different investigations in motion, it can fairly be called that), but clearly, with Owen Glenn jet-setting in to address the privileges committee in person, we've reached an important plot point.

I've been surprised by how many people still seem to think that Peters will walk free, his maverick reputation enhanced by the allegedy vicious and unwarranted media beating he has endured.

The very best he can hope, it seems to me, is to emerge as a screaming hypocrite whose party handled donations in ways designed to obscure their nature and source, even as he sermonised about others doing the same. But that would be a stretch.

The Herald clearly has access to damaging correspondence, that makes Peters look like a liar, or worse, and he and Peter Williams' assurances that it will all become clear and uncontroversial sound hollow.

But the perfectly legal means by which, according to Audrey Young's Herald story, $80,000, probably from the Vela family, was split into eight chunks and channelled through linked companies to avoid declaration, does demonstrate quite what could be got away with under the old electoral law. You can easily enough make the case that the Electoral Finance Act is a mess, but the old way of doing thing was indefensible.

The people who decried Glenn as a filthy foreign honour-buyer at the beginning of the year and now hail him as a good man done wrong by the evil power-lesbians of Wellington will doubtless be glued to proceedings, and hoping that what muck flies up will stick at least partially to Helen Clark.

If last week's Roy Morgan poll is to be believed, the public isn't seeing it that way, and if Glenn says he merely gave Clark a passing assurance that he'd dealt with Peters over his donation to the legal fund, that might continue to be the case. Glenn, as we've noted here before, was saying some strange, and palpably untrue, things at the time. But if he drops her in it -- and he might -- the few days' dawn of the Morgan poll will be over.

It seems to me there are a number of interesting dimensions to this story that warrant covering. I have been of the view that Clark wasn't obliged to bring down her government in January by refusing to give her foreign minister the benefit of the doubt. Peters serves at her pleasure, but not in the same way that a Labour minister does. Does this have implications for MMP governments, or is Peters just a special case?

And with the revelations of The Hollow Men, and now this, it seems reasonable to ask whether the racing industry has anything else it would like to tell us. Because the big money that swings around there seems like a malign influence on the body politic.

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Weekend Warriors | Sep 08, 2008 08:02

In her Herald on Sunday column, Deborah Coddington essentially apologises for the hurt her notorious Asian Angst story caused: and then completely blows it by describing herself as having been subject to "the media equivalent of gang rape" by "sadists".

I was appalled when Chris Trotter hauled out the "gang rape" phrase to describe the news media's pursuit of Winston Peters, and I'm no more impressed at Coddington using it in this way.

I'm also unconvinced by her wish, expressed to Keith Ng and Charles Mabbett, that the Press Council could only be more like a group therapy session that would "gather all protagonists together to discuss the problem, rationally" so that "I might understand more about you being offended, and you might understand a little about the decision to commission and publish the story."

She might want to re-read the column she wrote at the time, in which she responded to reasonable and well-referenced criticism by railing against "insane bloggers", insulting Tze Ming Mok and needlessly conjuring a false and defamatory statistic about Asian women and abortion. The woman who wrote that column wasn't up for a rational discussion.

But I do agree with her point in one, important sense. Coddington had to pretty much gatecrash the event she describes in the column, where, under the auspices of the Ministry of Social Development, public servants gathered to discuss the media's reporting of "diversity issues" -- without the bother of journalists actually being present to put their view. I can't see the merit of the Press Council turning into a counselling service -- its job is to hear complaints -- but if the public service is going to stage a talking shop about journalists' work, it should bloody well invite some journalists along.

I wasn't there, but Simon Pound was, and he'll be preparing a report for Media7.

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Oddly enough, I have a gig with Deborah Coddington coming up fairly soon, and the same is true of the other person I'm minded to criticise today: Fran O'Sullivan.

In her Weekend Herald column, Fran introduced us to "the Palin doctrine" on US foreign policy. And no, she wasn't being ironic.

For a start, "America must be strong in a dangerous world" isn't a doctrine, it's an empty truism. And isn't it customary for the subject to have uttered at least one coherent public thought on an issue before being accorded doctrinal status?

Last week, Sarah Palin capably read a speech largely crafted (by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully) before she was even chosen as a candidate -- it was and is a party speech. Clearly, it went down quite well, but it would seem extremely unwise to credit her personally for much of its content.

But that's not stopping Fran …

While Obama indulges in breast-beating about the international opprobrium President George W. Bush courted by authorising the Iraq invasion in the first place, Palin prepares to farewell her own son to join the troops.

This telling family story underlines, in a way that Obama cannot, that Palin is a heartland American, one of the many small-town parents who have farewelled loved ones to fight our wars, following in the tracks of her running mate John McCain in Vietnam.

Well, "telling" as all this is, I guess if Obama wanted to know how it felt to have a son being deployed to Iraq, he could always ask his own running mate, Joe Biden.

Republicans, speeches to the contrary, do not own the concept of American military service. Indeed, US troops abroad have reportedly donated more to Obama than McCain by a ratio of 6:1.

Anyway, Fran continues:

New Zealand elites tend to scoff at this syndrome.

Palin's messages are refracted through a liberal but horrendously politically correct lens that views the US as a war criminal for invading Iraq and would rather the next administration packs its tents ASAP and dog tails it back to Washington.

Crikey. That passage labours under a syntax that would stop the heart of a horse, it offers an idiom previously unknown to the english language and it is wholly a straw man argument. Fran has done great work: this isn't it.

I could go on, and I've actually cranked out an analysis of the two campaigns' different approaches to disability policy -- relevant given the way that everyone's name-checking autism and waving around Down's babies -- but I think that's enough for now.

I'll leave the last word to the plain-spoken folks at the Anchorage Daily News in 2006:

"Ms. Palin has undeniable charisma and outsider appeal, but she has little statewide experience and a weak command of the issues she would need to master as governor -- a flaw she conceals by routinely skipping campaign forums with her opponents." Another story from the same paper reported, "Palin missed a few scheduled events and, at others, came off as unprepared or over her head. After an education forum last week, she was mocked by her opponents for submitting a folksy three-year-old essay about her schoolteacher father instead of a plan for improving schools."

She appears to be exactly the kind of person the world doesn't need in the White House: a religious zealot prone to abuse of executive power, and in the pocket of extraction industries. We should dread to think how that "doctrine" might read.

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Well, the Brian Jonestown Massacre was as you'd expect. I didn't think they were genius, but it's certainly very enjoyable, and sometimes beautiful, music to hear. Early on in an epic set, Anton Newcombe would casually rehearse an opening chord and the fanboys would squeal in recognition. Later, he took to raconteuring, but his pitch-perfect story about staggering into an Islington pub in the morning to see the first test in the Lions vs All Blacks series ("And it was like boom! Nine seconds! And their captain was just crocked. Game on.") was lost on an indie crowd. As the evening (well, actually, the morning) drew on, breaks between songs drew longer as he abused various members of his band, and invited them to leave for their musical crimes. It was both what-you-pay-your-money-for theatre and genuinely tense. Earlier, I thought Dimmer were fantastic, especially in the 15 minutes they spent in a fully rocking but intensely musical version of 'Seed'. Yah.

PS: Speaking of the rock 'n' roll, we have a music special on Media7 this week. Our panel is: Peter Jenner (the legendary former manager of Pink Floyd and The Clash and a bracing voice on the future of the music biz in the internet age); Vodafone's Morgan Donoghue (who has some very interesting things in the wings); and Amplifier owner and entertainment lawyer Chris Hocquard. Space is very limited, but if you'd like to come to the recording at The Classic tomorrow evening, drop me a line asap.

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