Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Interview: Glenn Greenwald, in reply to CJM,
Tim Watkins actually allowed to discuss, with some authority, the real issues of trust, responsibility and ethical implications of the Snowden documents
Not just that, either.
On the Dirty Politics theme, David Slack has just been expressing a lengthy amount of frustration at the platform which The Panel has been repeatedly giving to people like Jordan Williams, Steven Franks and David Farrar.
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Hard News: Interview: Glenn Greenwald, in reply to Idiot Savant,
In line with this I've just heard a quote from the Prime Minister on the 4pm Radio NZ News, saying (paraphrased) that it doesn't matter if the NSA is spying on New Zealanders and he can't control that anyway. All that matters is that the GCSB is complying with the law.
I can't help but think that in a day and age some time ago, New Zealanders might have considered that the GCSB should actually be taking an active interest in stopping other countries from spying on New Zealanders, or at least putting on a facade of trying.
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Hard News: Interview: Glenn Greenwald, in reply to mark taslov,
The Inspector-General is chosen by the Prime Minister, after consultation with the Leader of the Opposition
The wikipedia page isn’t quite accurate, I don’t think. S5 of the Act says it’s on recommendation “of the Prime Minister following consultation with the Intelligence and Security Committee”, which includes the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, and three others nominated by those two (two from the PM, one from the LotO).
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Jake Starrow,
“I’m pretty certain that innocent people had or have nothing to worry about.”
Would you feel the same way if it were the Police vaccuming up data about your every communication and movement instead of our top-secret behind-closed-doors security agency whose only oversight is the [cough] Prime Minister?
How about if it extended, for instance, to real-time monitoring of GPS data in everyone's cars? We wouldn't even need all those pesky revenue-gathering speed cameras, because all those people breaking the law would be fined the moment they slipped over the limit. A net saving for all, except those evil law-breakers!
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to st ephen,
mass surveillance might be a problem if government Ministers were so corrupt that they accessed information and passed it on to attack blogs and a compliant media in order to harass and smear ordinary citizens for political, business or personal reasons. But that would never happen in NZ, right?
Only to other people. But unless you're an other person, you have nothing to worry about.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Russell Brown,
I went to school with Key and I know the suburb he grew up in (and lived for several years in a state house) – it’s a fairly wealthy suburb pepper-potted with good-quality older public housing and, more importantly, is adjacent to once of the best state schools in the country, Burnside High.
On a tangent, today's Press appears to have done a thing on "the struggle street John Key grew up on".
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Jake Starrow,
For example, If Key is re-elected and honours his pledge of no capital gains tax, he can’t govern for all in that respect. Stating the obvious I know but this “governing for all” concept just ain’t possible in so many aspects.
That’s a silly interpretation of only a very slight amount of what I said, and you ignored the rest.
I said the government does what it does on behalf of the people it represents, which is the population of New Zealand. Obviously that doesn’t mean it will always do things that everyone agrees with, but it should actually respect people’s rights and continue to let them be part of the process on equal terms, even when they didn’t vote for it. Children don’t vote for the winning team any more than those who voted for the opposition, but that doesn’t mean children don’t deserve a government that will respect their rights. The same goes for adults.
Once again (if you didn’t read it the first time), the problem I have with John Key’s Cabinet is that it’s dismissive of the governing process when it does stuff. In the name of “getting things done”, John Key’s Cabinet takes advantage of its position at the top of the line of accountability and lawmaking to barge through rules, laws and processes which are meant to be in place so that there are checks and balances and reasonable and meaningful consultation on what happens, both so we can actually trust them and so we can get well designed laws.
All this process stuff with government is there to ensure that governing happens above board, transparently and accountably to the people of New Zealand. Lately, however, much of it has been pushed aside or otherwise ignored. Several times now, we’ve seen our government push through laws which the Attorney-General had to inform parliament were in breach of New Zealand’s Bill of Rights (just one example), after which the government ignored those warnings and done it anyway.
Think about that. The Bill of Rights is the next best thing New Zealand has to a dedicated, legally enforceable constitution. It’s meant to define the fundamental and constitution-style rights of everyone in New Zealand, irrespective of who’s in government, yet John Key’s government is casually brushing away formal warnings of breaches of these rights, with rapid and lazily designed lawmaking, because it’s not legally bound to take notice of those warnings.
Businesses have rules written into law about how they must be run so that shareholders and other stakeholders can have at least some confidence of the boundaries when dealing with them, and (as I said) some of our less ethical directors would love to be rid of those restrictions. Government has its rules too, but they’re only meaningful when those doing the governing actually respect them. Presently we have a bunch of people in Cabinet, including the guy at the top, who are thinking more in a business mindset than a government mindset. They’ve chosen to take unprecedented power for themselves through a combination of changing the law for dubious reasons or ignoring it entirely, and ignoring all the inconvenient rules (like the Cabinet Manual) which until now have been strongly enforced on precedent, largely because nobody had yet thought it necessary to write into law.
This is why I have a problem with John Key and his current government.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Jake Starrow,
With Key, what you see is mostly what you get….a Prime Minister whose narrative is as clear-minded and open as it was when he was a highly-successful businessman. His task is to get things done.
Funny you should say that. One part of my view of John Key is that he’s leading a Cabinet which is more interested in operating government as if it’s a business whose sole purpose is to get done what it decides needs doing, instead of a government which is meant to do those things on behalf of the people it represents – not just those who voted for it. Only it’s not constrained by the inability to change rules and laws which typically govern corporations.
Often when one of those inconvenient laws or processes gets in the way of what this Cabinet wants to do, we’re seeing Cabinet do everything practical to sweep that inconvenience out of the way, regardless of the reason those constriants were placed there to begin with.
eg. Changing the law to let government do things it couldn’t previously do, like usurp democracy in Canterbury in the name of “getting stuff done”.
eg. Pushing changes through Parliament under urgency because they can be pushed under urgency instead of because it’s really needed, even when it’s inappropriate and treads on all those protocols that let the public get involved, consult and provide feedback and discussion.
eg. Separation of Cabinet responsibilities from political affiliations? Much of what Nicky Hager’s written about lately, and direct from Cameron Slater’s mailbox, demonstrates that several of our Ministers and their staff have little or no respect for that separation and responsibility, if it wasn’t already clearly evident. John Key is meant to be responsible for oversight of his Ministers, but it’s silly to believe he can be effective in this, without conflicts of interest, when his own office is tangled in the middle of the controversy and when his political future is tightly connected with the outcome of any real investigation.
This is the type of control and lack of accountability that some of our less ethical company directors would dream of. There’s no effective accountability to the law and so no accountability to anyone. Being able to set the law to suit themselves, and being able to simply ignore it when the only realistic accountability is to themselves. To me it seems that this is the type of operation which John Key is in charge of right now.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don’t get this either. But the theory is that because she’s seen through reforms at a minefield portfolio like MSD without getting blown up, she must be capable.
I was always confused how Judith Collins could ever have been considered as leadership material, too, at least until very recent events made it impractical. I think all it showed me is that not everyone judges people in the same way I do.
Anyone National chooses will be a big risk, given how much of its popularity seems to have been branded in John Key’s image, and that will be hard to match. The party might have to actually campaign on something other than “trust us because we know best”.
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Back on Russell's original topic -- Russell said:
Next month, when Slater's earlier privacy case comes back to court, it's likely that the prosecution will seek discovery of correspondence that rebutts his claim that he is a journalist, rather than someone who is paid to defame.
Slater has won a High Court nod that he is a journalist and that his blog is a news medium. [--snip--] Justice Asher said it was clear the WhaleOil site had more visits than many provincial newspaper sites and he noted a number of news breaks scored by the site. He also noted that Slater had won a journalism award for his story on Brown. Justice Asher said Slater's reports contain genuine new information of interest over a wide range of topics.
"The style of journalism may be criticised and can be dramatic and abusive, but the expression is vigorous and coherent, and there is no evidence provided to this Court of consistent inaccuracy or deceit (although there is evidence of consistent hyperbole)."
Was the High Court able to consider Cameron Slater's leaked mailbox in this decision? It seems curious that Stuff's coverage, at least, makes no reference to the allegations that Cameron Slater spends much of his time regurgitating PR smear campaigns in exchange for payment, even if that wouldn't have changed the final decision.