Posts by chris
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Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
It doesn't strike me as entirely untoward to suggest a change of tack.
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Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I do like a suggestion up some thread earlier that simple words like “Is that the truth John? when he obfuscates and downright lies may just be quite powerful because he can always be called on his bullshit in the future from anyone. Trouble is, we need the media doing it.
While I appreciate the intent, asking an evasive individual questions strikes me as veering ever closer to Einstein’s “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. He’ll evade that one and he’ll evade being called on it.
I can’t quite fathom why members of the opposition keep directing questions at him at all, it strikes me as a masochistic exercise. Obviously the media will still ask him questions, but they’re able to do so beyond David Carter’s oversight. Why not simply stop asking Key, Joyce, English, Brownlee, Guy and McCully anything, they’re all economists of truth. Why not instead play The Weakest Link and attempt to isolate less mendacious members, members with some semblance of a moral compass, find issues (there are enough around) related to them and focus more energy directing questions at them?
At the end of the day, John Key is not only proficient at evading questions, he actually appears to get off on it, on the attention and on the side step. That’s his thing, so why not attempt to starve him of oxygen in that room?
When the go-to response to perfectly reasonable questions (4:24) is derision…
Does he regret his pledge that he would’nt let quote New Zealanders become “tenants in their own country”? If not why has today he refused to stand by that statement. Is it because he’s ashamed of selling out New Zealand by rubber stamping every overseas buyers’ application for the last four years?
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to simon g,
How did UK Labour break out of this funk? Tony Blair.
Actually, John Smith. A social democrat.
Snap! Labour’s opinion poll lead was shown to be as high as 23% in early May 1994.
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Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Alfie,
I’d humbly suggest that McCully’s bribe, that dodgy ‘invoice’ and the other backroom antics surrounding this affair have already tarnished our country’s previously enviable reputation for honesty and transparency.
Not to mention the absolute facepalm of an effort to adequately vet the delegate our country sent to assume presidency of the UNSC. Beforehand.
As our foreign minister, his profile is significantly heightened overseas given our role on the UN security council. I think it would be damaging to our reputation if McCully was stood down.
Indeed…
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Polity: New Zealand and the TPP: “Or…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
...do that sort of thing all the time
actually...
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We had no student radio in zombie town but a friend from Hamilton made a one side mixtape of Contact, the playlist: The Lemonheads, The 3ds, Straightjacket Fits, L7, Teenage Fanclub, Rollins Band, Screaming Trees, most of which I otherwise wouldn’t have heard for a couple of years. It concluded with my pick of the bunch:
The beatbox rap promo still worming:
Contact…. FM, telling each and everyone to tune in, don’t know who are or where the hell you’ve been, Contact, 89 FM
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Hard News: Baboom: it's serious, in reply to Russell Brown,
Its investors and management are in New Zealand.
It sounds good, I joined up after your post last night and I was interested in:
We’re always excited about meeting new people and growing the team, so feel free to get in touch if you are:
but I was a little bamboozled by:
Ask questions, talk about something exciting, tell us about your projects. We’d love to hear about it.
Avenida da Boavista n.º 1788
4100-116 Porto
Portugal
So thanks for clarifying that:
Baboom’s Head of Content and Platform Mikee Tucker works out of the two-person office shared with his Loop Recordings label upstairs at Real Groovy Records in Auckland. Ninety per cent of Baboom shares are currently held by Mega investor Michael Sorenson, after an unsuccessful share offering on the Australian exchange last year. Baboom’s CEO is Grant Edmundson and its CFO is music industry veteran Tony Smith.
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Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
A number of excellent points there Sofie especially:
I really don’t think it’s as easy as we think.
And I honestly do respect your restraint in terms of not throwing stones at the opposition, given they’re all we’ve got. However I’m not convinced that working so diligently within the parameters (the box) provided – as Labour have been doing – is reaping much of a harvest. There are avenues and then there are avenues. There are ways and means of getting one’s story on the tele beyond simply playing the game on National’s terms. Winston Peters knows how to make front page headlines and how to garner support from within the media in a manner that makes people sit up and take notice. He and his party have shown they’re prepared to bite the short term bullet in order to make the news at 6, in order to advance longer term discussion. Right or wrong he succeeds in getting his view point into the public sphere time and time again because he knows how to frame a narrative and how to get it the requisite attention. If there’s anyone in that room with the experience and dare I say impudence to get the desired result here it is Winston Peters, and it’s time that the opposition, all of the opposition, deferred to his leadership on this issue in order to collaborate in the most cohesive and effective manner possible. Difficult Times Call For Innovative Measures.
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Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
While I don’t dispute the precariousness of the position our democracy has found itself in Sofie, I do expect the opposition to do better, that is their job. Effectively participating in a debate, as our MPs do every time house is sitting doesn’t simply require turning up. It doesn’t simply require sitting down for an hour to scrawl a couple of year 13 level questions in between international sporting fixtures and beer festivals, it requires full and undivided focus, it requires a thorough understanding of the obstacles and it requires a concise, coherent, unified plan of attack.
If David Lange had turned up for his Oxford debate with the amount of preparation new Labour has put in to this effort we’d be swimming in uranium, but of course he didn’t. He found the most effective way to frame the issue so that there was no recourse for doubt or dispute.
Recently Russell expressed his dismay at the “gotcha” politics, and I share that, but that’s ‘the game’, and I don’t use that word lightly, I’ve no doubt that’s the way many in the Government see it, and that’s the way it needs to be approached in order to succeed. It is a game, and Labour are losing, and blaming their opponents gets us nowhere. I’ve met community constables more adept at extracting the truth than recent Labour. They’ve had months, literally months to plan a course of action on this, and in the meantime they’ve spent a good portion of this time sowing the seeds of racial discontent, flip-flopping on zero hours contracts, getting in behind bar licensing amendments, and a lot more of asking the wrong questions and getting the answers we we all expect.
Language and the framing of it is everything in that game, (see Kirk Serpes) and the beauty of it is that a speaker need not necessarily be the writer. Any aficionado of courtroom dramas is familiar with the trope whereby one or other barrister walks a witness into divulging that which they’d otherwise prefer not to, yes it’s fiction but we’re not talking about impossibilities here, these are opportunities that have presented themselves and it’s largely a case of anticipating those jumps in order to get those chinese checkers home via the most direct route.
When I listen to question time, for the most part I grimace, so often the answer the opposition wants is in their question, the responses are so obvious I can often anticipate the answer before any response has been given, and I just change the channel and wonder what they expected. We know the predator is a slimy eel, yet each opposition member seems to be working alone and for the immediate gratification of hearing a member of the Government lie, rather than forcing them to reveal.
So much of this comes down to language use, think of any leader and their name is invariably associated with a string of quotes, whether or not they wrote them is by the by, all history remembers is that those words came out of their mouths or pens and that oftentimes those words and their sequencing were so profoundly resonant as to be the glue cementing those leaders’ places in history, if not the adhesive that defines history as our species understands it.
There are sympathetic reporters, there’s Andrea Vance, there’s Toby Manhire, I’m sure there are others outside the paywall with an open enough mind, but until Labour or the Greens or even NZF stake claim to the language on this issue and show real linguistic leadership, these, journalists, these masters of language, are left to freely fill in the gaps. On that note, put on a hat of objectivity and try jumping into Toby Manhire’s piece from a point of ignorance. To the uninitiated it’s referential hogwash. While the converted lap it up; a concerted attempt to persuade anyone outside that bubble of anything it is not. He is a writer of prodigious talent just spinning a yarn, because he can, because he can’t be expected to do the opposition’s job for them, because he’s not the opposition.
Certainly there are incredible obstacles barring Labour’s progress, but the underlying sentiment I got from Hooton’s (who you know I’ve never shown much sympathy for in the past) piece is that if Labour can’t muster the wherewithal to take a set here then they won’t and clearly don’t deserve or have the capacity to win the match and lead the country.
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Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Lynn Lander,
But we’ve seen time and again how that plays out "At the end of the day…". I think Matthew Hooton was spot on last week in his analysis of exactly who holds the cards and needs to step up and play them effectively (and the likely repercussions of not doing so):
"An opposition leader will never be given a set of facts as favourable to the opposition as this set of facts. And if the opposition can not make use of this to force Murray McCully’s resignation, that says something very worrying about our democracy, because our democracy is essentially a offensive realist system where the Government and the opposition are meant to be afraid of one another and this Government is really not afraid of this opposition because it doesn’t take it seriously.
And you know there’s also some National Party cheerleaders such as say Mike Hosking – who without bothering to read the documents will say “there’s nothing to see here” – and I put John Roughan in that same category, he can’t possibly have read the documents before he wrote that column but the basic facts demand McCully’s sacking by the Prime Minister.
What you have is what was a bribe – a so-called facilitation payment to a billionaire businessman from a repressive regime in an attempt to get him to stop raising this issue of live sheep exports and allow a free trade agreement to go ahead. To make this possible a story was invented about a 30 million dollar legal risk, that the cabinet was told existed when it did not. There is evidence in these papers that something very close to fraud occurred when the Beehive told the Saudi businessman what to write in the invoices, so the invoices were fake, and they were written in a way on the advice of the Beehive that they would get past the people who had to pay them within the bureaucracy so they were talked about as the purchase of intellectual property. This is completely untrue, this is not what it was at all and of course we know that because the whole agri-hub thing was a complete farce as well and there has been no purchase of intellectual property.
So when you’ve got a clear bribe to a billionaire businessman from a repressive regime over a free trade deal where you’ve got fake invoices being prepared on the instruction of the Beehive – and that should attract the attention – I’d have thought – of the Serious Fraud Office – you’ve got the treasury saying they’re against it, you’ve got the auditor general being compromised; if Andrew Little cannot force the resignation of McCully under these circumstances, cannot get the media, and I exclude Radio New Zealand and the National Business Review and some in the media, other, including the Herald, to take this issue seriously – then John Key can cruise to a forth term”
