Written By: - Date published: 5:36 pm, January 24th, 2008 - 96 comments
Categories: MMP, same old national -
Tags: electoral law, hollow men, MMP, national, peter shirtcliffe, rod donald, same old national
After Brash and the extreme right were exposed in The Hollow Men the Nats changed their leader hoping for a fresh start.
What’s becoming apparent is that National’s shady backers haven’t changed. The policy and the cash are coming from the same people they always have – people like Peter Shirtcliffe who’s evidently now helping to finance National Party activists David Farrar and Cameron Slater in their campaign against the Electoral Finance Act.
Shirtcliffe’s been around a while. In 1993 he launched the “Campaign for Better Government” – a right-wing business lobby group opposing the introduction of MMP.
Rod Donald had this to say about Shirtcliffe and his aggressive campaign:
On ANZAC day 1993 a full page advertisement appeared in the major Sunday paper attacking MMP. Inserted by Peter Shirtcliffe, chairman of Telecom, New Zealand’s largest company, it marked the beginning of a David and Goliath battle that went to the wire… he announced the formation of his Campaign for Better Government (CBG), the opening of an office and the appointment of paid staff.
CBG’s campaign strategy eclipsed the [Electoral Reform Coalition's]. They conducted market research, used direct mail and paid for radio talkback programmes. A confidential report from their market research company somehow made it on to the front page of a weekly business paper. It was a blueprint for an anti-MMP advertising campaign targeting “the least educated and most gullible” sectors of the electorate by providing “easily digestible, alarming material” warning electors of the consequences of MMP [my emphasis].
In the clip below you can see the kind of material that Shirtcliffe and his mates favoured – complete with crying babies, grainy black and white and staticy sound effects.
With Shirtcliffe back in on the act and the Nats dreaming of governing alone you have to wonder how long it’ll be before the next assault on MMP.
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Scoopit!
Well the righties all seem to be upset. Update at 10 I’m sure.
Meanwhile, this looks like a good book..
http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/rickperlstein/
Hmpf, my comment seems to have vanished
I assume snafu.
One can reasonably draw inferences about someone from the campaigns they support.
And about campaigns from the people who support them.
Knowing who funds the FSC gives us useful information, similarly knowing who funds the Labour Party and so on.
That’s exactly why we need the EFA, it tells us who is pulling the strings.
Pascal’s Bookie: Are you saying I’m a rightie? If so, what does that mean? Does it define my views? My personality? The colour of my skin? My lack of belief in democracy?
Or are you just trying to turn it into a generic term of abuse for anybody you disagree with?
phil: “The problem is when the status of those bloggers changes from simple supporter/member to something altogether more professional or organised in nature.”
Some of the others may have met, but personally I’ve only met two other people from the tech & moderators. Believe it if you want or not (I don’t really care if you or that grandstander bill english does), this site was organised via e-mails in a classic “they’d probably help” linkage working around a good idea. A classic net system – look at open source projects for instance.
All of us work as far as I know, and that limits the time that any of us have here – it limits the number of posts. Which is why I find it weird the time that some of the critics of this site can spend blogging on this site.
It runs on the recollection of the small of an oily rag substained by voluntary work, a dedication to community effort, and skills. Thats why I find the ‘work’ of the FSC so farcical. The contrast is priceless.
Hopefully we will get more professional and organised – but it is more likely to be on the open source model than microsofts…
Lynn Prentice
Two Ticks Labour – we want to govern alone….
It’s all the same guys, look at the real issues and open your eye’s. Voting based on a party name while pointing at other parties and accusing them of doing the same things that your own party is doing makes you look incredibly thick and partisan.
Until such time as the two major parties are no longer major parties we are stuck with a two horse race – aka FPP.
If you like MMP – don’t vote for a major party – there will be enough donkey’s voting for them to ensure they survive while you can cast your vote to force MMP onto them irrespective of their anti MMP “Two ticks [party-name-here]” approach.
“It runs on the recollection of the small of an oily rag substained by voluntary work….. Thats why I find the ‘work’ of the FSC so farcical.”
It’s clear Lynn that you detest money and the wealthy. However, that does not give you the right to call the FSC “farcical”. The FSC supporters have the same right than you to advocate their ideas by whatever means, shock horror, even paying for it.
I’d call yours the policies of envy at work. It’s also known as socialism.
Donations are to be valued at retail cost, not out of pocket cost. Or does that only cover Tauranga billboards, and not Auckland blogs?
This blog supported the EFA as strongly as it possibly could. Were you actually only supporting its application to your opponents?
Milo
I think you make a very valid point. A donation received by a political party must be assigned a value, how else would it be accounted for?
Thus the ‘passed on donation’ has a value, how else can it be accounted for?
A new standard of openness and accountability would publish that value. In the spirit of the EFA we would be entitled to know the full names and residential addresses of the people who used it to promote or dissuade voting against any political parties.
Lets see how the standard scratches up to the new standard of openness and accountability they insisted we needed to keep elections fair in NZ.
Santi – I have absolutely no problem with people pursuing money, I have been known to do it in the past myself. I quite often assist people who have that as their main focus. But I really don’t have the time to do that these days – there are so many interesting skills that I haven’t pursued yet.
What I was referring to was the contrast between throwing money at a project and applying skills at it. I see it all of the time in IT, and I really haven’t noticed a high success rate with the money only approach.
BTW: it was with great amusement that I read Bill English’s press release today..
“If it was all kosher, why are technical experts today saying this covert web-site has been relocated?”
It got relocated because I felt like it, and no-one else objected. It was quite amusing to think of Bill getting wound up about it, and I want to try out some parts of the system on linux. Which I will be doing tommorrow. I’m sure that someone somewhere has been telling Bill that moving a site is hard – but it took about an hour, and that was only because I screwed up a script.
I believe that I did mention I like stirring somewhere …..
Lynn Prentice
Lynn Prentice
So have we got this correct. The hits on the standard are going up fast, the blog has been featured on TVNZ news and you decide to move the server… because you felt like it.
Add ‘most risky server administrator’ to your CV. You are unbelievable. Fess up – the standard was slap bang on a Labour party server chewing up Labour party bandwidth and after the publicity it had to be moved. It’s not rocket science.
Lynn Prentice
Seriously, you should stop telling people so much about the changes going on, it informs the debate for some although it may distract it for others.
Trying it out on linux, possibly as quickly as tomorrow. OK – Excellent, it’s been running on a Microsoft server somewhere and it still is somewhere else now. A switch is desired… are Microsoft licenses not legit? If they are why the rush to change?
If it’s for fun sake then by god what a time to impose your sense of adventure on a blog that is rapidly gaining attention.
The next thing that stems from that is; are the anonymous authors of the standard not wanting to pay the license costs to continue with the current platform? And if so, how can they (or you – who apparently isn’t wanting to spend it either) call the ‘gift’ they have received from Labour insignificant?
Pure comedy gold burt. Now go get yourself another whisky you old drunk.
Hey Burt – I see you’re still giving it your best go. And with your disability too. Well done mate you’re an inspiration to all of us.
burt: “Add ‘most risky server administrator’ to your CV”.
I do this type of support for fun – I get paid to be a programmer. This stuff isn’t on my CV except in the interests area. You have to play with code and systems thoroughly before you understand them fully. You figure out your best algorithms after looking at the style with which other programmers solved their coding problems. The best way to play is to do it on your own time.
I think that every bit of software I use these days is legit including the OS’es. I stopped hacking NOP’s and replacing JMPNE’s with JMP in binaries a long time ago – it was good training for bottom level debugging – but got tedious.
This probably doesn’t fit your conspiracy theories listed above, but that is the way I do things.
Beside in this level of system admin, it is easy to leave a couple of tested fallback positions in place. It isn’t like bootstrapping a coding project.
Whaleoil
Jan 24th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
“Hollow talking points from hollow Labour sponsored bloggers.
Come clean on your anonymous backers.”
Any chance you could come clean on the odd features in your sitemeter?
Considering that if you are hacking the system, and then getting advertisers to pay rates based on fraudulent reader figures, the cops will not need the EFB to put you in jail Mr Oil.
I raised these questions on DPF’s site, you ignored them there,
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/01/the_battle_for_botany.html#comments
So lets try again here.
“BTW has anyone else noticed weird stuff going on with Mr Oil’s site stats?
It seems to fail to ever log any referrals
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s10Whaleoil&r=11
And the world map is skewed rather weirdly (look at Scandinavia, while Churchill Canada (a hole in the ground in the frozen north) is one of his bigegst visitors.
http://www2.clustrmaps.com/counter/maps.php?url=http://www.whaleoil.co.nz
Normally I wouldn’t bring such things up, but as our whole day has been taken up with the weekly standard and it’s hosting, I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this electronic mystery?”
You normally would be screaming “leftist smear!!” Mr Oil for what I am suggesting, yet you stay silent hoping this issue goes away.
I await your response with interest.
xxx
S
Look who wants to ditch MMP – it’s Free Speech Coalition donor Don Brash!
http://www.nzcpr.com/guest71.htm
And who’s this supporing him/ Surely not FSC co-founder David Farrar?
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2007/10/a_referendum_on_mmp.html
There are some remarkable similarities bewteen the anti-EFB campaign and the anti-MMP campaign, and the deeper you dig the more those similarities become apparent.
Another weird thing about Whaleys sitemeter
Out clicks, where people leave your site
if you look at my out clicks
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s11harmonia&r=93&v=21
You see where people have left too (in some cases)
But in our whaleoil’s case
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s10Whaleoil&r=93&v=1
Not a single out click
It’s all very odd, but I assume there is a rational explanation.
Over to you Whaley
MMP isn’t actually very good though. How about some sweet sweet STV?
Lynn Prentice – that’s an absolute copout.
Don’t make your position worse by lying. It’s obvious Labour kicked you off their server resulting in you whacking the standard up on your garage PC running over ADSL.
And now your “team of admins” setting up your redundant server cluster has turned into “well actually I’m a code monkey and like to fuck around with servers”?
This place really is a joke. Unfortunately nobody’s laughing.
“There are some remarkable similarities bewteen the anti-EFB campaign and the anti-MMP campaign”
Impeccable logic and powers of deduction.
daveo, are you “Einstein” Michael Porton, aka robinsond, in drag? Who is the tallest intellectual pygmy between you two?
“After Brash and the extreme right were exposed in The Hollow Men the Nats changed their leader hoping for a fresh start.”
What about these hollow men???
http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/?q=content/tvnz-labour-hosted-website-double-standard
Lets see -
Attack book, supposedly based on some stolen information that no one seems to have seen except the author.
or
Labour attack blog proven to have been secretly funded by NZ Labour party and staffed by anon Union workers.
Who are the real Hollow men?
Pretty obvious really, isn’t it?
MMP isn’t actually very good though. How about some sweet sweet STV?
Yeah STV is pretty good but it requires much more political awareness from the electorate to work. Otherwise voters can be alienated by it.
Prophet – You’re really gonna have to get over this obsession eh? Oh and I’ll be doing a lite expose on the “stolen” emails some time over on newzblog if you’re interested…
Robinsod,
“Yeah STV is pretty good but it requires much more political awareness from the electorate to work. Otherwise voters can be alienated by it.’
So the electorate is dumb?? They can’t learn??
Please withdraw that statement.
Simeon – kids need role models but you should look elsewhere. Cameron Slater’s a moron and he’s famous for photoshopping James Sleep’s face onto gay porn. As a good Christian conservative you’d be best to steer clear of his influence.
On another note the Whale has drafted a letter to the Electoral Commission complaining about the standard appearing to encourage people to vote for Labour or against National. What’s really funny is all his links point to articles written before January 1 when the EFA came into force.
Santi – found anything useful to say yet or is it just abuse again from you?
So the electorate is dumb?? They can’t learn??
Please withdraw that statement.
That’s a dumb statement Simeon. It’s a fact complex electoral systems reduce voter turnout or increase the number of spoiled votes. Shouldn’t you be in school at the moment?
So the electorate is dumb?? They can’t learn??
No mate the electorate is disengaged with politics. Advertising like Farrar’s doesn’t help re-engage them.
Has MMP got people more engaged with politics???
77% turnout for the general election in 2002.
It doesn’t seem as if MMP is helping to engage people in politics
Haven’t got much interest in the infantile crap you write Sod.
Interesting to note that the only blog that would give you a writing gig is run by a 16 year old and his friends.
The existence of MMP (or at least a dual party/electorate vote) is entrenched.
I’m not saying they’re disengaged because of the electoral system. I suspect they are disengaged because politics has become a series of trivial backbiting PR wars and ostensibly stopped being about policy and the wider view of how our country is governed.
National’s attack-dog style over substance MO and Labour’s “values framing” have added to this. As has a media that will always run conflict over analysis. I believe we need to find ways to bring the debate back to a proper discussion of policies. Perhaps introducing civics into our schools would be a good start.
Robinsod you are wrong.
If Helen and co listened to the people of NZ then people would be more engaged with politics.
A few binding referendums would be a good start to engaging the people.
I don’t think I am wrong but fair enough it’s just my opinion. What do you base your opinion on?