Posts by Matthew Poole
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Legal Beagle: John Banks: what next?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The Transparency International report pulls together a bunch of other research, some of which is subjective analysis by "experts" and some of which is direct questioning of residents. So it's almost a meta analysis, but not quite. The full methodologies and sources are part of the information pack here.
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Legal Beagle: John Banks: what next?, in reply to mark taslov,
A corruption problem or a perception problem?
Read the questions asked in the survey. They're not just about subjective "Do you think your country is corrupt?" measures. "Have you bribed an official to move things along?" "Have you used contacts to move things along?" (both paraphrased) Those are objective questions.
NZ does worse on the perception measures than on the objective ones. We think our country is run for business interests, for example. We don't have a problem with visible corruption as measured by actual experiences, which is why we score well, but we have just as much invisible corruption of national interest in favour of business as in other countries.
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Legal Beagle: John Banks: what next?, in reply to Andre,
Transparency International has declared, once again, that New Zealand is the least corrupt nation in the world, ranked equally with Denmark, is a bit of a joke.
Why is it "a bit of a joke"? It doesn't declare there's no corruption.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to alobar,
I suspect that even if he were to be somehow persuaded that WO is primarily a news site , Blackie would still say that the protections don’t apply in this particular case .
Quite possibly. But such decision would still rule on the matter of WO being a news site. Because Slater has pleaded that WO is a news medium and thus he is a journalist, any ruling in any direction hinges on that. If he's a journalist and thus source anonymity applies, it is so. Or if he is but it does not. Or if he's not, and thus it cannot. Those are the three options, and in any one of them there's a ruling on his being a journalist. If Blackie had ruled that he is a journalist and anonymity applies there would probably have been a different appeal on that matter so we'd still be seeing it go before the High Court.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Paul Williams,
Will it be quite so definitive? Have we seen the construction of the appeal? I’d hope that the High Court would avoid making a broad judgment given the facts as I understand them.
Given that Blackie ruled that Slater wasn’t entitled to confidentiality of sources because he’s not a journalist, I don’t see how any possible appeal could be constructed that didn’t require addressing that question. It’s pretty much the central thesis of the whole ruling: you are not a journalist, ergo, people who speak to you are not journalistic sources, ergo, there is no entitlement to source confidentiality.
ETA: even a narrow judgement on these facts remains the law for the district courts, unless the judge writes something that explicitly says the judgement is applicable only to this specific case and shall not be construed as a ruling on the blogger/journalist distinction in any other case. Which is not particularly likely, given that this is the first case that will rule on that distinction. Judges like to be cited.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m just in no doubt what kind of work he was demanding money for.
Rather an appropriate double entendre for the topic at hand.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to DexterX,
I consider the appeal judgment won’t have a long reach or wide application.
The appeal judgement, depending on what it is, will only create precedent that extends to defamation proceedings involving published material that is similar in nature to the material that is the subject of the proceedings between Blomfield and Slater.
It will also define whether or not a blogger of the nature of Slater (if not bloggers more generally) can shelter behind claims to journalism. It must answer that question before any other decision can be rendered, even if it does not answer it directly. In the absence of any other judicial decisions on the subject, it will be the definitive case law on the matter.
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Hard News: The judge is not helping, in reply to DexterX,
The judgment does not modify or create a precedent that lessens the purpose of s68
Since it's only a district court judgement it couldn't create a precedent anyway, not even for other district court judges. It's the outcome of the appeal which will create a precedent, one way or the other.
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Legal Beagle: John Banks: what next?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
didn’t think they had the evidence for the more serious offence
Which it turns out was completely the wrong conclusion. And since we're talking about something as fundamental as the integrity of our electoral system, one would hope that they'd be rather less conservative about, at the least, putting the evidence before a judge and seeking committal for trial. It's not like they're overwhelmed with these types of cases.
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It's quite disturbing how lightly the Police appear to take electoral law offences. There's no blame to be placed around the lack of action on the incorrect filing, what with the delays in an investigation even starting, but for it to take a private citizen with limited resources to kick off a prosecution on the bigger offence is quite damning.