Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Hitting the fan | Sep 27, 2004 11:32

Well, you know things have become a tad frisky when you're having Titewhai Harawira mediating for you, don't you? But even if John Banks, Dick Hubbard and Christine Fletcher can agree to henceforth play nice, it can hardly change the fact that this has been the nastiest campaign in the lamentable history of Auckland local body politics.

The chickens were coming home to roost as I began writing this post, with the news that John Banks' campaign manager (and Act party fixer) Brian Nicolle had resigned after a meeting with the mayor.

A brief press statement followed from Nicolle, in which he says he visited Banks' home this morning and 'fessed up to the fact that "it was me who facilitated the distribution of the NBR article." He also insisted that "John Banks has always said that he campaigns openly and honestly. He did not and would not ever approve this kind of activity. I have let him down." Hmmm …

Nicolle, you will recall, was the one who obtained PDFs of the NBR Hubbard hatchet job which ended up being printed up and delivered to Auckland homes without the mandatory campaign authorisation information.

The New Zealand Herald, which got the original tip about Nicolle's involvement, has been following the story with ill-disguised glee (check out the finger-wagging in Saturday's editorial) and discovered the identity of the firm that did the mail-drop after being handed cash by a mystery man who called himself Ava.

Nicolle has refused to answer any questions about the affair, but Banks was pressed into saying that he would demand Nicolle's resignation if it became clear he was involved, in the course of an interview with Sean Plunket on Morning Report today. But, with Dick Hubbard likely to press ahead with his formal complaint about the apparent breach of the Local Electoral Act, the mayor might not be entirely off the hook.

Even if you can accept that John Banks truly had no knowledge of or involvement with last week's illegal mail-drop, it would seem to defy belief that Banks really had not, until today, thought to ask his campaign manager what was going on.

Like I said, discovery in Hubbard's suit against the NBR should be a barrel of laughs. Banks has, meanwhile, been claiming that the Metro "11 reasons not to vote for John Banks" story has also been distributed to voters. He modified it slightly this morning, claiming that "photocopies" of the story had been distributed. which "might .... might ..." have come from the Hubbard campaign but Banks appears to be the only one aware of it. Leaving aside for the moment the apparently baseless innuendo here, can you help me, readers? Has anyone seen this thing?

Anyway, all hail even the most modest competition in our arthritic telecommunications market. With TelstraClear in Wellington and Ihug and the other Wired Country ISPs in Auckland offering tasty 2Mbit/s broadband deals, telecom couldn't afford to sit on its hands too long, and it hasn't. From October 24, full-speed JetStream will be available as a flat(tish) rate service at a competitive price, with a 10GB monthly cap (after that you have a choice of dropping to dial-up speed or pay two cents for every megabyte over). This is good - but, as I predicted, it makes the Telecommunications Commissioner's 256Kbit/s designated service - the only one available to Telecom's competitors as an unbundled service - look silly. This will have to be fixed, and soon.

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We know nothing ... | Sep 24, 2004 12:05

John Banks' campaign manager, Brian Nicolle, contacted the NBR last Friday and secured rights to republish last week's Dick Hubbard hatchet-job. He was subsequently emailed the PDFs for the five pages. And now four of those pages have been re-printed and are being professionally mail-dropped in key Auckland suburbs. But Nicolle doesn't know anything about it.

Or so he said to the New Zealand, in a bizarre conversation reproduced on the front page of the paper this morning. Nicolle could only speculate that "we have lots of supporters" and, when the Herald's reporter pointed out that it was "strange" that a campaign manager wouldn't know about something like this, he offered that "Most campaigns are chaos." Really?

NB: Just after I sent out the Public Address email today, I discovered that the Herald had part of its story wrong. Nicolle did not visit the NBR office as the Herald claims, just made a phone call and got his pages via the modern miracle of the Interweb, rather than being "handed" it as the Herald story has it.

The story was advanced a little further - and got more bizarre - on Morning Report, when NBR's editor in chief Neil Gibson confirmed to Sean Plunket that Nicolle had secured the rights, but said that he had no idea what Nicholle planned to do with the pages he had licensed. Also on the line was John Banks himself, who was virtually at screaming pitch from the moment he opened his mouth.

The primary problem with the reprint being distributed is that it is in breach of the Local Electoral Act because it does not say who authorised it. The authorisation requirement is there in part so that campaign spending can be tracked. It is possible that the reprint and distribution costs would take the Banks campaign over the $70,000 cap on campaign spending. So, basically, they can't admit to it.

"My campaign manager doesn't break the law!" yelled Banks, claiming that he too, had no idea who might have taken the "PKGs" and paid for, printed and distributed the pamphlets, adding "I don't know anything about it" and "I certainly wouldn't condone it."

There followed a Linda Clark interview with both Banks and Hubbard, in which Banks claimed not to have personally attacked any candidate during the campaign (this is actually largely true: it's a campaign strategy to try and soften his image - although, of course, he spent three years as mayor slagging off Fletcher and anyone else who crossed him).

Banks also claimed, I think, that he never said anything that wasn't true. Which is just silly. An amused Brian Rudman notes the most recent Banks fantasy in his column this morning:

Meanwhile, Mr Banks continues to inhabit a world of the imagination. His role in Leighton Smith's mayoral debate on Wednesday was a classic. When asked what's been done under his regime to stop the explosion of ugly central city apartments, he blamed his predecessor. "Every single one of the buildings you see under construction and the buildings you don't like outside this west, northwest window Leighton, was rubber-stamped by the previous council."

Then he extolled the virtues of the council's urban design panel, which "we set up", and claimed "every single building to be built in the central business district now must have their stamp of approval. The kind of buildings that you've seen completed on Hobson St will not be able to be built again."

A wonderful achievement, if true. But it's not. None of it. The urban design panel concept was approved in July 2001, when Mrs Fletcher was mayor. And despite the mayor's claim, it has no power to approve or reject any building project. It is purely an advisory body.

It is of course possible that Banks doesn't know he's not telling the truth - that he believes these things are true when he says them. Or perhaps even that they are true because he has said them. You never know with Mayor Banks.

Hubbard has meanwhile taken a $1.5 million defamation suit against the NBR, over last week's "triple bottom lie" lead story. IANAL and I couldn't venture as to whether a court might find the story defamatory, but it is certainly very flimsily-based. I presume the release of the pages would be considered an aggravating factor if a court does eventually find in Hubbard's favour.

NBR has another story today, in which it claims that Hubbard Foods chairman David Irving "now says" in a letter that there was an internal, unpublished triple bottom line report in 2002, in addition to the published one in 2001. I'm not sure whether this makes the Hubbard camp look more confused or makes the original story look more reckless, but if the action goes the distance I have a feeling that disclosure will be fun.

One more question: who told the Herald about Nicholle's visit? Can we expect heads to roll the way they did when word of Barry Colman's funding of Don Brash's media skills training got out?

Anyway, while the NBR Awards were being held at the Town hall on Wednesday, across the square at the Aotea Centre, it was the New Zealand Music Awards, the Tuis. Perhaps it was apt that the two functions were held simultaneously: between them they provided a sort of political equilibrium.

Helen Clark gave the same old speech but got an even more enthusiastic reception than usual from the music biz crowd, and it's not hard to work out why: the various creative industries policies have been spectacularly successful. New Zealand music now accounts for as much as 20% of radio airplay (up from 2% 10 years ago), local releases increase every year as a proportion of overall music sales, and there have been an unprecedented six number one singles this year from local artists. People are making a living off this stuff.

The ceremony, at over two hours, tried the patience of quite a few people (especially when they discovered that the bars in the foyer were shut for the duration), but was, once again, a marvel of production. The opening version of 'Stand Up' by Scribe and Blindspott was sort of messy, but set an exciting tone. A lot of the banter was cut from the televised version, but Mikey Havoc was in excellent form as co-host.

I was particularly delighted to see Dimmer pick up best rock album and best group - and Shayne Carter himself, to judge by his demeanour, was positively gobsmacked by it.

There was also a nice tribute to the late Shaun Joyce of the Sounds music chain. Back in the nineties, when Hard News was a radio rant, Shaun specifically asked to sponsor it for a while, and was kind enough to include a regular contra at his shop for me. He didn't have to do that, and I've always appreciated it.

At the party afterwards, Hayley Westenra and her friends ran about taking each others' pictures and I met Scribe and shook his hand. His huge hand.

Scribe, of course, cleaned up at the awards, taking out six prizes. Which made the following day's silly-old-fart editorial in the Herald look even more daft. The editorial bid "goodbye and good riddance" to the Community Employment Group, which coughed up for the now-notorious hip hop "study tour". But it also blathered that:

Surely a grant of $26,000 linked to the phrase "hip hop" would have set off alarm bells if anyone had bothered to carry out the appropriate checking procedures …

Um, why? Scribe's multi-platinum success has kept quite a few people in wages this year, and Telecom must have seen some value in the business when it bunged all that sponsorship money into the Boost Mobile tour. Is the author saying that Dawn Raid are not very savvy business people? Or that the Dawn Raid Community Trust (which also got CEG funding but has much private sector support too) should be ignored on aesthetic grounds?

Rather than treat the tour grant for what it was - a poorly-conceived decision with no obvious or expected outcome - the Herald's editorial writer decided, somehow, that it was a musical genre issue:

Woe betide the ministry if the words "hip hop" appear on its files in any context other than the gait of arthritic rabbits.

Or perhaps this particular leader writer could henceforth confine his arthritic editorials to things about which he has a clue …

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The Pain | Sep 22, 2004 11:45

Nick Smith has an interesting story in this week's Listener on forensic psychiatrist Yolande Lucire. It's just a shame that she's completely full of shit. Lucire holds that what we know as repetitive strain injury is really a form of workplace hysteria, urged on by self-interested persons in the "occupational health industry".

Actually, I had a crippling attack of RSI several years ago. But I wasn't in a workplace, unless you count my home office as one. I wasn't being urged to wish myself an injury by any consultants or shop stewards.

Indeed, I really couldn't work out what the hell had happened on the morning my wrist collapsed and I dumped a cup of coffee into my computer keyboard. It was three days later that I got the pain: a sharp feeling like a nail going into the underside of my wrist, and a more general pain that developed through my forearm. Given that, like Terminator X, I speak with my hands, it was pretty scary.

But, while Lucire claims that "RSI was not relieved by its purported remedies", I did find a remedy: a floating wrist-rest called the ComfortPoint that can be obtained with some difficulty (these people seem oddly unfamiliar with the concept of e-commerce) from its Australian distributor. But the RSI is never far away from the surface. I can't play PlayStation for longer than about 20 minutes without the pain beginning.

And this week - which, I will grant, makes me additionally pissed off about Lucire - I've had the worst RSI attack in a long while, partially because I've knocked a 6000-word transcript for a Listener cover story. I suspect that too much time spent lately trying to shoot three-pointers in the driveway hasn't helped either. Lucire spoke here under the auspices of the Skeptics, an organisation I greatly admire, but a few of whose members have an ironic talent for fooling themselves sometimes …

Neil Falloon has a very funny account of Friday night's ASPA awards on the new collective blog Dog Biting Men. Some of it is even true. But I've told Nippert he'll never make it as a breakdancer until he gets a haircut …

MediaCow is also back on the same blog. She now has a gender and has some comment on the NBR's Hubbard hatcheting, making the reasonable point that if Mrs Hubbard wants, as she says, to reactivate the dormant role of Auckland's mayoress, she must expect some more scrutiny.

I still don't think that extends to being followed into church so her personal worship can be made fun of. The Cow asks me "where was the scorn" when Metro ran its "expose" on the incumbent John Banks. Well, for a start, Metro never called its story an "expose" and it never ventured into Banks' private life.

It was bylined "Gilbert Wong explains how the record comes up short," and covered, among other things, the city's alarming spending on consultants in the mayor's first two years (nearly double the three-year total for which Banks slammed Fletcher during the last campaign) and the Eastern Motorway fiasco. But the basic difference between Metro on Banks and NBR on Hubbard is really that the former was well-researched and accurate.

The Guardian has an editorial on the British ambassador to Italy's comment in what he thought was an off-the-record speech that President George W. Bush is the "greatest recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida."

Andrew Sullivan, one of the right-wing bloggers who has not decamped to la-la land, has quite a few interesting thoughts about Iraq, the Robert Novak column citing administration "sources" who tipped a near-term bail-out from Iraq, and the Bushites' rollback of gay rights. Worth spending some time on.

The Guardian has Huda Alazawi on her grotesque brush with Abu Ghraib prison. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya's post-Beslan account of being Poisoned by Putin is pretty alarming too. Democracy seems to be running quite rapidly in reverse in Russia.

And - top news! - Pacifier have gone back to being Shihad. Good call. Quite seriously, I think it will make their music better again too …

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Smother Hubbard | Sep 19, 2004 12:54

I dropped into Magazzino on Friday to pick up a copy of the National Business Review so I could read its Dick Hubbard hatchet job in its entirety. All five pages of it. But unfortunately, there were no NBRs. A man had come into the shop earlier and bought every copy on the rack.

So either someone thought the story was such a cracker that they wanted all their friends to have a copy, or Hubbard's campaign was keen to get it off the newsstands. Fortunately, the sanitisation effort did not extend to the Pt Chev Lotto shop, so I was eventually able to secure my own, highly collectible copy of the September 17 issue.

Some parts of the NBR's story are relevant. Hubbard has traded on his image as a "socially responsible" employer and his role in promoting so-called triple bottom line reporting, which assesses a company's social and environmental performance, as well as its financial results. If, in responding to tough market conditions, his actions at his own company have not matched his lofty advice to others, then that is certainly news.

But I haven't been able to find any reference to Hubbard saying, as NBR claims, that the Business Council for Sustainable Development requires "all members to [file a triple bottom line report] every two or three years". The council's published policy, set in 2002, is that all members undertake to produce such a report within three years of joining, which Hubbard Foods did. The council's policy was reiterated in a press release on Friday.

Other parts of the story are a bit desperate. And some are really desperate.

The front-page lead story is headlined 'Hubbard's triple bottom lie' and focuses on Hubbard's apparent claim on Wednesday Night's Face to Face programme, that Hubbard Foods had produced a triple bottom line report in 2001 and 2002, whereas he had earlier told NBR that it has produced one only in 2001. A short excerpt from a transcript of the programme is headed 'Dick's TV deception'. (My five bucks says John Banks was primed to raise the triple bottom line issue, but that's by-the-by.)

NBR's reporters, Jock Anderson and Coran Lill, forewent the logical step of contacting Hubbard and asking him to clarify his comments, presumably because that would have risked letting a little too much air out of the story. The Herald did, however, and was told by Hubbard that he had simply misspoken: "I said 2001. I corrected myself to 2002. There is no 'and' in there and they have taken that to mean two."

At the time, I also took what Hubbard said to mean he'd done two reports, but the Newztel transcript of the interview tends to support his explanation. While NBR's version reads "We did one in 2001, 2002 …", the Newztel version is punctuated differently: "We did one in 2001/2002 …".

More to the point, NBR cuts off the transcript before his next sentence (after an interjection from Banks), where Hubbard talks about "[having done] a lot of recommendations from our first one. Our company is changing dramatically at the moment, Kim, because of our approach to triple bottom line."

Earlier in the interview, he objects not to Banks' taunting about Hubbards having done only one report, but to the mayor's claim that the company has "given away" triple bottom line as "a bad show". Nowhere does Hubbard actually say he did two reports.

So the deployment of the words "lie" and "deception" in the headlines, and the selective use of the transcript would seem quite deceptive in itself. I don't think Hubbard is without his faults, and he has campaigned surprisingly poorly, but this is a very ropey story.

Before we move on, it's only fair to note that John Banks' inference that he championed Auckland City Council's adoption of triple bottom line is fanciful, given that he actually commissioned and loudly praised the Birch Report, which was about as hostile to triple bottom line as you could imagine ("the provision of arts, culture and recreation is not a public good"). I think you'll find that the Local Government Act had a lot more to do with it than the mayor did.

The funniest of NBR's nine Hubbard stories is the one headed 'Strike loomed at stopwork meeting', in which Anderson offers a positively reverential audience to the national secretary of the Service and Food Workers' Union, Darien Fenton, who describes Hubbard as an "average" employer ("not the worst employer, but certainly not the best, despite his self-publicity"). The paper is generally rather less sympathetic to Fenton and her comrades in the trade union movement. As has been noted in Hard News passim, Hubbard's attitude to unionisation has sometimes been paternalistic and obstructive.

Unfortunately, NBR must have forgotten to check the lead angle for the story - that a "looming strike" had been "narrowly escaped" last week at Hubbards - with Fenton herself. Once again, the Herald did, and was told by Fenton that there had been no impending strike action and that staff had simply met and ratified a 3.25% pay rise offered by management.

A story scrutinising the changes in governance structures at Hubbards is also relevant (its board expanded from two to six in 2001, the year of the triple bottom line report, but has since shrunk back to three - making earlier statements about expanding the board to better serve "stakeholders" look like famous last words), but would have been more so had Anderson not tried so hard to squeeze bile and innuendo into every sentence. So there was a "parting of the ways" with Hubbard's longtime operations manager and latterday board member John Ashman. Is this illegal? Or even particularly unusual? The story's claim that only two of the 95 staff famously flown to Samoa by Hubbard in 1998 are still with the company appears to be baseless.

From there, it gets a bit bizarre. On the strength of comments from Barry Gustafson, Hubbard is declared a "thin-skinned opportunist". Another story pots him as - gasp! - a cask wine drinker. A brief story with photograph is based on the clearly alarming fact that Hubbard, um, has a holiday home in Queenstown …

And the whole thing descends to the gutter in a nasty story in which Coran Lill follows Hubbard and his wife Diane into their church and mocks Diane Hubbard's devotional enthusiasm. I wonder if all the people who got up in arms about the Herald's really rather sober assessment of Banks' claims for himself - and all the stuffed shirts who have been noisily defending the churches from "liberal fascists" - will have something to say here?

Hey, but why stop with that stuff? The candidate has had his evidence in a civil case (which took the form of extraordinary allegations of dishonesty against his former business partners) dismissed as worthless by a judge. The judge noted that his evidence did not tally with an earlier sworn affadavit.

The candidate has also been rapped for producing TV ads in which he endorsed a product without disclosing that he had a financial interest in the company that made the product. (Another "endorsement" in the same campaign was offered by a woman who was employed by the company!) And, in a separate case, for making unsustainable claims for that same product.

The candidate has also repeatedly claimed credit for things for which he was not responsible, and in some cases is on record as opposing. I could even put you in touch with one of his former employees, who will have some withering things to say about his management style. Honestly, there's heaps in this. Oh, hang on … that's the other guy, isn't it? The current mayor, that is. Still, it'd make a great story though, wouldn't it? Perhaps this week, then?

Staying with the NBR, it offers an admirably optimistic headline for a story on its latest political poll: 'National still in the running even with continuing economic boom'. Oddly enough, both Stuff and the Herald reported the same poll under the headline 'National Party support ebbing away'. The other papers also noted that under the same poll results, "ACT would be wiped out, with the Greens winning 10 seats, New Zealand First eight, United Future five, and the Progressives and the Maori Party one each." It sounds like the freakin' holocaust for some NBR readers, but oh well, chin up …

I spent Friday night in the company of some of the journalistic stars of the future, at the Aotearoa Student Press Association Awards. As you might expect, Salient just edged out Critic as best overall student publication (the category I helped judge) but I thought the overall standard of entries was up on last year.

Other awards: Salient's ace Keith Ng in the paid newswriting category, Kate Newton, at Critic for best news volunteer, Critic's Hamish McKenzie (a young man who clearly knows how to enjoy himself) for best feature profile, Alec Hutchison (Craccum) and James Robinson (Salient) tied for best issues feature, Sarah Barnett at Salient for best editorial, Brett Ellison at Critic for best Maori content, Emily Braunstein at Salient for best reviewer, the crew from Wellington Massey's Magneto for best design, Critic's Ryan Brown-Haysom for best column, Critic and Nexus tied for best cover and, last but not least, Craccum's Tim Molloy for best cartoonist. As I have previously noted, there's a lot of talent in the student press at the moment.

Craccum's team also probably warranted a special award for Promotion of Unflattering Stereoypes About Aucklanders after spending the whole ceremony smoking, drinking, shouting and heckling from their front-row table. "Are they on the P?" asked one of the down-country journalists. That might be a bit harsh. Too many party pills perhaps. I wouldn't want to have had their co-editor's hangover the next day …

Anyway, Patrick Crewdson deserves a pat on the back for making it all happen. It would have been nice for a few more of the grown-up judges to have turned up, but it was a most enjoyable evening, especially after Damian Christie discovered that some very distinguished Scotch whiskies could be purchased in most gentlemanly servings for only five dollars a pop. I fancied that the rich, complex Johnny Walker Blue edged out the 18 year-old Glenfiddich as Best Whisky to Be Served at the 2004 ASPA Awards. After that, it would have been rude not to have accompanied the kids and some reprobates from the Herald over to the Shakespeare for a nightcap, so I did.

Saturday was quiet, until we went to the rugby at 5.30, to see underperforming Auckland give competition leaders Taranaki a good smacking, with Jerome Kaino, Kees Meeuws and Brent Ward to the fore.

So I certainly picked the right day to go to my first NPC match of the season. And the much-mocked TAB head-to-head odds came out looking pretty good, even if they were only set that way to try and balance the TAB's exposure after three big-time punters made $10,000 bets on Auckland. Do these people know something the rest of us don't?

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