Public Address - Hard News (Home)

If you can't say something nice ... | Nov 14, 2008 10:46

I spent yesterday café-hopping my way through meetings and bouts of internet access in Wellington; a working lunch at the Matterhorn and lawn bowls at leisure in the late sun in Newtown. In what must be a rough week for some people in the capital -- not least, the staff who carry their things out of Parliament today -- the city had a smile on its face.

I ran into PA System regular Steven Crawford on Cuba St, and twice at Astoria strangers came up to me to say thanks for Public Address. I always appreciate that: it's a reminder that real people read what we all write. (Or rather, it puts a human face on the big traffic the site has been doing this month: -- 168,000 pages served from Wednesday Nov 4 to Tuesday Nov 11, and more than 31,000 unique readers in the past month.). So let me now say something nice, on a more personal than political level.

Judith Tizard is the only MP I have really known to more than say hello to. I met her in 1995, and later played a modest role in her electorate campaign that year (constituting the beginning and end of my involvement in party politics), but she has been friend of our family since. She is one of the kindest people I know.

So I've been disappointed by the sheer bile heaped on her before and after her relatively narrow loss in Auckland Central. You know the score: "minister of nothing", "lazy", "arrogant". The MP who would go to the opening of an envelope. I have long held that this rather misses the point. The Labour caucus actually needed someone like her -- the meeter-and-greeter, the networker. You could hardly have let Pete Hodgson loose on a roomful of people, could you?

Her talent is to be at home in any crowd. She will always be remembered as The Minister for Eight Foot Sativa, after travelling in the middle of the night to see the westie metal band play their showcase at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas. She was the only member of a jetlagged New Zealand contingent to do that. Good-quality earplugs, she told me later, were her secret.

Her technique is simple enough: she listens to someone she hasn't met until she has a story of her own to tell, she tells it, and a bond is made. This facility means she knows an enormous number of people, and she introduces them to each other. When I introduced her to the Singaporean blogger Mr Brown at the Banana conference launch last year, he was flabbergasted not just that she was so friendly and helpful, but that that she had actually heard of him.

She's a cancer survivor who struggled with another serious illness -- a rare form of hepatitis -- in the past three years, and to be honest, I'd have rather she'd stood down before this election. There were clearly problems with her 08 electorate campaign, and she had the duties of a Wellington minister over the eight months that Nikki Kaye (with whom I have no quarrel, and wish well) was doorknocking in Auckland.

I also, obviously, disapproved of her recent stance on Section 92 of the copyright amendment bill, even if she was to some extent fronting the policy opinions of MED lawyers. A lunch with Lawrence Lessig in the week before the election does not seem to have deterred her from that stance, but I think it warrants recognition that she made time for Lessig when she knew he wouldn't agree with her.

She was the only MP who ever turned up to the Public Address Great Blend events -- right from when they were held at the Grey Lynn Bowling Club -- and she wasn't shy about asking questions from the floor during the debates.

She made a similar commitment of her personal time to spend nearly the entire weekend at both Kiwi Foo Camps, and remains (I think) the only government minister of any country to have played Werewolf.

I have fond memories also of the Great Auckland Central Hero Debate, which she chaired, and in which I argued (if that term can be applied to the string of rude jokes that typically made up a speech) for the last three years. That's a special event, and I hope it can continue. Judith's affinity and support for gay Auckland is another part of who she is.

Judith could be scatty and sometimes say things she would regret. She probably never had the talent or ambition for a senior Cabinet role, but she actually worked much harder than was popularly supposed. She also has a genuine sense of civic duty and an affinity for Labour Party tradition. And I still think she has more going for her as a person than many of her Parliamentary peers.

I don't see her often outside a professional context, but it's some measure of her that when she discovered Fiona had breast cancer a couple of years ago, she swiftly turned up at the door with a good bottle of wine and sympathy (typically, she was the one who cried). She has made many other small acts of kindness towards our family and others over the years. I look forward to seeing more of her now. And perhaps now that she's out of politics, people could give the nastiness a rest and let her get on with it.

---

We need a tune. M.I.A.'s got one. Let out on the internet just last week: her cover of Tom Waits' 'Way Down in the Hole' (best known as the theme music for what certain people regard as the best TV drama ever, The Wire), renamed as 'S.U.S. (Save Ur Soul)'. It's way cool. Have a nice weekend, everybody. I'm very, very tired and must rest.

(341 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Rethinking the EFA | Nov 12, 2008 09:43

Phil Goff has let it be known that he, personally, wasn't really comfortable with the "final wording" of the Electoral Finance Act, and would be keen to work with the National-led government on a new or amended law. So how should a fresh crack at electoral law look?

The Herald wades in this morning on its pet project, keeping with the caring, sharing spirit of the times by dialling down its language on the subject from hysterical to only mildly hysterical. It declares the fulfilment of its own predictions, that the law had "a chilling effect on discussion of public issues, led to court challenges and generally dampened political advocacy."

But it seems oddly short of specific examples of Attacks On Democracy, and, ironically, the 'Democracy under attack' sidebar accompanying the editorial online lists only two stories, both about Rodney Hide's yellow jacket -- which, amusingly, only came before the Electoral Commission because it was reported by one of Rodney's own looser units, the excitable Andrew Moore.

That the drafting of the EFA was an embarrassment is no secret. But it would seem prudent, now that a real-world experiment has been conducted, to identify actual harms -- and sort teething troubles from fundamental flaws -- rather than continue to tub-thump on the basis of philosophy.

I'm not clear on what we missed that would ordinarily have been part of a campaign, and it seems to me that more failures have been laid at the feet of the EFA than is strictly credible. On the Media7 election special, Linda Clark declared that she had only had one pamphlet in her letterbox in Ohariu-Belmont, and this was surely the fault of the EFA. Laila Harre pointed out that parties were not newly constrained from campaigning for themselves in this fashion, and the lack of paper in the letterbox was far more likely to be related the the dynamic of that electorate. Deborah Coddington said people had been terrified of the complexity of the spending rules.

This puzzles me a bit. If you assume that everything that's not editorial is an advertisement -- and that is certainly one of the controversial elements of the law -- then it's fairly straightforward. If you spend up to $12,000, you need do nothing but include a promoter address on your ads. If you intend to spend more, you fill in this very simple form, which is little more than some name and address fields. Your limit as a "third party" in the campaign is $120,000. You file a return: I'm not sure if this is more complicated than the form.

Family First registered as a third party, along with several unions and the Free Speech Coalition and two or three dozen others. The Sensible Sentencing Trust got in a snit and didn't.

So what was the upshot? I got the usual party material in the post, but there were no mysterious leaflets muttering dark warnings about the Green Party or immigrants. There were fewer third-party newspaper advertisements. And there may have been a chilling of advocacy from people or groups uncertain about the application of the law.

There was a low turnout in this election, but it would be drawing a long bow to say that this was a direct consequence of the EFA, rather than, say, disillusioned Labour voters staying home, or an uninspiring campaign.

The Herald's fixes are thus: it wants the review of electoral law now "in the hands of publicly funded academics" (in context, it would appear the paper does not have a high opinion of "academics" and their fancy book-learnin') to be halted along with the Greens' "people's assembly", and suggests that the Law Commission be the nucleus of a process embracing the Electoral Commission, Human Rights Commission and Law Society and public submissions.

Fine idea.

The editorial continues:

The restricted period should not be the entire election year, the law should set far higher advertising spending limits for citizens in relation to incumbent political parties, removing the onerous obligations for registration with the state and it should eliminate all secret funding of parties. Broader changes to state-funded broadcasting and use of parliamentary funds must also be considered.

Only then will the chill be lifted, the stain on our democratic freedoms be removed.

Some of which I would happily agree with. But, as it has all along, the Herald skips over the reason the EFA was mooted in the first place. There is little point in making all party funding transparent if opaque surrogate organisations can spend the same money without having to declare a thing. There is still a place for regulation of third-party campaigning, even if the definition of what constitutes campaigning for a party needs paring back. And how any cap or oversight could be applied without the "onerous" filling in of a registration form isn't clear to me.

I suspect the reality to be addressed lies somewhere in the expanse between the Herald's plucky democratic everyman and Labour's Brethren-and-big-business bogeyman. And if those tasked with rethinking the law look carefully enough, I expect they'll find it.

(167 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

And meanwhile ... | Nov 11, 2008 09:48

Local lefties who want some schadenfreude to pass the time while they wait for a pony need go no further than the case of US Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado, who was thrashed by her Democratic opponent last week -- but has yet to congratulate her opponent or even concede the race.

Clearly, she's taking it hard. And it couldn't have happened to a nastier theocrat. Musgrave was named one of the 10 worst Congressmen by Rolling Stone, which noted that she went from blanking out passages in health textbooks as a school board member, to leading the charge for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (which she described as "the most important issue that we face today").

She unsuccessfully pushed a legislative amendment that would have denied runaway teens access to contraception, but drafted a successful amendment blocking a requirement for trigger locks on handguns.

She was later named "Gun Rights Legislator of the Year" by Gun Owners of America, a group that regards the NRA as too soft), and whose leader (a Musgrave donor) was so tied up in white-power and militia groups that he was dropped from the campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1996.

The National Education Association, gave her an 'F' on public education issues, a leading environmental group gave her a 0% rating on conservation issues, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington listed her as one of the "20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress". She refused to return or donate money she received from a PAC run by Tom DeLay after he was indicted on charges related to another PAC. She was an enthusiastic participant in the porkfest that was the House Committee on Agriculture.

Last year, she joined the Congressional Prayer Caucus, whose purpose is to "build a spiritual wall around America" and has declared that the First Amendment does not confer "freedom from religion". She worships at Sarah Palin's old church, the Assemblies of God.

Her margin of defeat was the second-largest of any Republican in 2008.

(Although, it must be said, that is still rather better than our own smacking parties did on Saturday …)

And just to round things out, George W. Bush is set to leave office as the most unpopular US president in the six decades that approval ratings have been recorded.
---

Pew has some fascinating exit poll numbers on Obama's victory, showing he made gains in virtually every voter group (the exception: over-65s). He also made gains over 04 in nearly every religious sub-group, mostly notably the religious but "unaffiliated" voters.

Perhaps most notably, Obama led the Democrats to a seven-point advantage over Republicans in declared party ID on polling day. Four years ago, they were dead even. The surge in Democratic affiliation has been widely tracked and predicted, but it's interesting to see it show up in an election.

---

Independent observers' reports, newly revealed by the New York Times, back up the early (and swiftly forgotten) news stories indicating that Georgia's confrontation with Russia this year was provoked by heavy and indiscriminate shelling of the separatist South Ossetian capital by Georgian forces. People are looking again at the role of ace neocon Randy Schneumann, who was for a time this year in the pay of both the Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili and the McCain campaign, where he was a senior foreign policy adviser.

---

I see some spoilsport has removed the dry little joke on the Labour08 campaign website. Here's the screenshot.

---

And finally, we're back on deck at Media7, with an election post-mortem featuring Brian Edwards, David Slack and Barry Soper. If you'd like to join us early this evening at The Classic in Queen Street, hit reply and let me know asap.

(242 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Congratulations, Mr Key | Nov 10, 2008 09:06

I fancied at times that John Key looked more pleased for himself than anything else on Saturday night, but there is no denying his mandate. Labour has been told to take a rest by the voters --- thousands of whom, in Auckland at least, just stayed home this year. The message has been underlined with a series of dispiriting electorate defeats.

Key can take much personal credit for the victory, if only because the campaign strategy focused so heavily on him. Not only were National's old guard kept out of the spotlight, we simply never saw the likes of Stephen Joyce, the new list MP and (we are told) anointed Cabinet minister.

If his victory speech was that of a man without a lyrical bone in his body, Key finished the campaign in much better shape than he began it. A critical bloc of voters decided they did trust John Key, personally.

It cannot go unremarked here that it's my generation that takes office now. Key and his deputy are both just a year older than I am, although it would be fair to say our life experiences do not greatly cross over.

Key's opponent, Helen Clark, hailed her people on Saturday night with an exuberant multi-lingual greeting, and departed with the authority and decisiveness you would expect of her. It was a strong performance from a Prime Minister who, as past Prime Ministers do, will soon enough enter the affections of even those who opposed her.

Matthew Hooton made a useful observation on Sunday last night: that Clark had changed the National Party as Margaret Thatcher reshaped the British Labour Party. I think this is the case not only in terms of policy, but people. Maungakiekie was won on Saturday by a Samoan-born New Zealander with a Cambridge MBA. Perhaps his face would not have fit in 1999.

But the most striking performance of the evening was surely the belligerent, threatening interview given by Roger Douglas to TV3. He growled "we've got some changes to make" as if he were a man with an influential mandate, rather than the revival candidate on the list of a party that won fewer votes than Winston Peters did.

We unexpectedly got a look at his soul, and I'm very sure John Key wishes we had not. Douglas was weird and he was angry; so much so that Hooton, on TV3, was driven to spend the rest of the night assuring the nation that the centrist, consensus-loving John Key would pay him no heed.

Earlier, Peter Dunne had barely begun to drone on (or should that be "barely begun to get his drone on"?) before TV3 cut away from his speech to follow Winston Peters to the rostrum in Tauranga. Peters had clearly taken a drink or two, but he has the charisma or an old prizefighter.

I'm not sorry to see him depart but I am mindful that more people voted for Peters' party than gave Sir Roger Douglas his barking mandate. If New Zealand First now comes undone, there is a distinct community of interest looking for a home.

The settings were sometimes evocative: Peter Dunne seemed to be on his own, Winston's was an old folk's home, Tariana was with her whanau, and Labour's do was full of women drying each others' tears. Only the dancing Sikhs saved National's gathering at Sky City from looking more like a drunken eastern suburbs theme party than it did. (The hooting Parnell types outside Key's gate as he left for Sky City briefly made me think of a zombie flick. I imagined bands of them roaming St Stephen's Ave, clutching bottles of pinot gris.)

The centre-left is hardly bereft. This is hardly of the order of the 21% drubbing National sustained in 2002. It would not require too many votes to swing back (or return to the polls) in 2011 for another shot at government. The Greens have two more MPs, and Labour's new talent includes people already committed to refreshing the party's ideas via its Policy Council. They clearly have somewhere to go, and seem to be swiftly setting the course. Whether they should have started heading there sooner is now a moot point.

Hooton's argument is that the need to remain electable in 2011 will stay Key's hand on policy -- indeed must do so. And I hope he's right, because Act's new caucus looks like a horrorshow; rounded out as it is by Sensible Sentencing Trust hardliner David Garrett. Act and National will undoubtedly agree on a clutch of populist law and order policies that we'll pay for in various ways down the line.

But it's not correct to say that National does not need the Maori Party's support to govern. Governing is more than confidence and supply, and National will need a partner for a majority on legislation that Act doesn't like, and a broader base for when the novelty drains away.

The Sunday programme yesterday drew a line under that idea. Pita Sharples respectfully declared himself willing to talk with National, emphasising that any accord would need to be good for both parties ("mana enhancement" he called it).

Rodney Hide's performance on the same programme verged on the disgraceful. It was the first time the two leaders had sat together since the election. Yet twice, he taunted Key about being "to the left of Helen Clark", and declared that National's "spending promises have been way over the top", airily presumed that National would "be persuaded" to support Act's three-strikes policy and put forward the ditching of the emissions trading scheme as a fait accompli.

And then came this:

"John's gotta keep faith with his voters and so too does Act -- people voted for Act and we got a very clear message … Act is actually where National's philosophy is and where their vote support is -- and John Key has to be careful because he knows that half his core support actually agrees with Act."

Has to be careful? It sounded like a threat, and I think it was meant to. Jovial Rodney has been put away: switched with a man with the manners and countenance of a Ferengi trader. It was an extraordinarily arrogant and presumptuous display, and the man who won 12 times more votes just sat there opposite and looked uncomfortable with it.

John Key claims he will run a government for "all New Zealanders". He should start by putting the Act Party very firmly in its place.

PS: I was delighted with the way the election-night Media7 turned out -- I think it's the best show we've done. Simon Pound's story on Hone Harawira was fascinating, our panel (Linda Clark especially) was sharp and the spin doctors' lunch in Wellington was revelatory. You can watch it here on TVNZ ondemand.

(427 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!