Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, September 9th, 2008 - 58 comments
Categories: national, science -
Tags: leaks, trevor mallard
God, another leak from National, this time their research, science and technology policy.
From Mallard’s press release:
“Mr Key should not only be embarrassed, he should be very worried about the shambolic show he is running. Contrary to his desperate claims last week, I did not find any of these policies in any café. Or in any restroom either for that matter.
“These leaks are more like a gushing stream and demonstrate yet again that there are serious problems within National.
“There is clearly a simmering resentment with John Key who is muzzling the caucus, keeping them out of all decision making and keeping his agenda secret from his own MPs as well as the New Zealand public,” Trevor Mallard said.
Key has previously tried to claim that the leaked policies are all from the same bundle and someone must have left them at Copperfields. That line’s now looking well and truly shot.
Honestly, what a shambles.
UPDATE: Frog chips in:
While Trevor is keen to put the boot in as hard as possible, I am simply afraid of what such an ill disciplined caucus could mean in government. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
UPDATE 2: Copy of the leaked policy here.
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Tim Ellis,
So why haven’t they? Either incompetence or the papers don’t naturally fit together (e.g. same caucus meeting).
…wasn’t any big stuff leaked yet
I agree that if Mallard had anything big he’d release it immediately, no point losing out by National releasing first.
Tane, I think I gave a fair and relatively unbiased analysis. My conclusion is that there probably is somebody leaking from inside the National Party. My conclusion is premised on the view that only some of the material leaked out is the result of a deliberate action, and that if there is a leak it is from a minor staffer who for some reason is disaffected.
It is a very long bow to draw to say that these leaks show major factionalism and division in the National Party, as you have. Political parties leak all the time. It’s called gossip. Some gossip is based on actual evidence, other is based on pure speculation. Governments leak all the time. When they do, it is most often as a result of sloppy information security and gossip, rather than malicious leaking.
If the relatively minor leaks point to a divided and shambolic National Party and say that National isn’t fit to govern, then the steady streams of unauthorised information flows that come out of the PM’s office, Cabinet, Labour caucus, and every branch of government for which ministers are responsible, show that Labour isn’t fit to run a government, either.
Why didn’t National release the conservation policy before Mallard, if they were ‘bundled’ together, so as to take the wind out of Mallard’s sails? If that was not a lie, it would have been sensible to do so in order to prevent Mallard from saying there were two separate leaks. They did not. I assume it was a lie (‘misdirection’ if I was feeling generous), or that they were incompetant, or gambling that somehow their ‘bundled’ documents were magically separated before reaching Mallard’s hands.
Crank: In the absence of any other info, occams razor says that the Nat’s are probably corrupt as well for the same reason. Except their amounts are bigger. $2.3 million in anonymous donations from the Waitemata trust in 2005 compared to the much smaller amounts from the Spencer trust for NZF.
After this gets over for NZF, then I’d really like the Nat’s accounts looked at closely.
Tim Ellis said: Clearly there wasn’t any big stuff leaked, otherwise Mallard would have released it by now.
Tim (& Anita taking the same line), I don’t agree. Mallard will know when National is planning to release it. If he had stuff about, say, National’s tax cuts, he’d hold onto that until two or three days befor the National release is due to maximise the Labour spin he can put on it and undercut the impact of the National release.
Tim, there is a huge difference between the inner circle of a party leaking policy like a sieve and a government in power for nine years having leaks come from government departments containing literally thousands of people. The fact that some person/people inside that small group of National people has and continues to leak confidential information should have them VERY concerned.
Toxteth,
Do you still hold the record for sticking marshmallows up one single nostril?
Tim, minor leaks do not involve entire policy documents. A disaffected staffer would tell someone that Key picks his nose and leaves KFC wrappers everywhere. I don’t think it’s very balanced to claim that this is minor, or likely to be from a minor staffer, without corroborating evidence. It is an equally partisan assumption as that which claims Key is about to be rolled. Factionism would be more the middle ground to me – nothing too damaging, but enough to make Key’s ship look unsteady.
Same goes with your call about Garner, it’s not clear that it was an accidental gossip leak at all. The chances of that being accidental are slim, it’s a very specific tidbit of information to have reached the media.
Your last comment (12:43) is illustrative though – some small leaks do happen with frequency, acknowledged. They are not damaging private diary appointments or unreleased policy documents in the run up to an election.
one more leak and national nd John Keys will implode! extra extra…more leaks right now on rnz national…wahooo
Toad,
If there was a good chance National knew he had it and might bring forward their announcement then I reckon the right play is to release it. So if Mallard got a single bundle, such that when he started National would know what he had, he should release the biggest ones first so he doesn’t lose traction.
If, on the other hand, he was getting individual leaks so National wouldn’t know what he had then he should hold big ones back for the most damage. Particularly when a day or two would get robust analysis, for example with National’s tax cuts holding it until the Labour economists have crunched the numbers would make a lot of sense.
We should also remember that the ‘importance’ of the policy leaked is only a floor on the access the leaker has not a ceiling.
There is no reason to suppose that the leaker would release the most important stuff s/he could get. In fact they are likely not to, as it narrows the list of suspects. The leaks are not necessarily designed to do as much damage as the leaker could possibly do, but enough to serve whatever purpose the leaker has.
Bearing this in mind, the fact that tax policy or whatever hasn’t come out tells us nothing about the identity or access that the leaker has. Maybe leaking tax policy would do too much damage, maybe the leaker doesn’t have access to it, maybe leaking it would identify who leaked. Unknowns.
Lprent,
I would have to disagree with you there.
The fact that National has declared donations from its trusts would mean that the simplest assumption is that all donations to the trusts had been passed to the party and declared. And using occams razor that is probably right.
Let’s say, for yet another moment, that I’m a junior National MP. I have a folder which contains some policy drafts (wow, this proves I’m really important). After lunch with my mates I realise I no longer have the folder and feel really sick, I race back down to the cafe to look for it, but it isn’t there.
What do I do?
a) Fess up to the whip/campaign team/my more senior mate
b) Cross my fingers and hope nothing bad happens.
Sadly my cowardice gets in the way and I pick b… A day passes, and Labour starts releasing policies that were in my folder, my stomach goes all swirly (even worse than when I realised I’d lost the folder!).
What do I do?
a) Fess up to the whip/campaign team/my more senior mate
b) Stay mum, sit at the back so when it’s mentioned in a meeting so I don’t have to make eye contact. When asked if I know anything about it, lie.
So what does this tell us? Either
a) National’s spin as untrue (and they know it); or
b) One of their MPs is a lieing coward who won’t even be honest with colleagues; or
c) National knows what’s in the folder.
If they know what’s in the folder, they should have released the rest of the policies by now. So either they’re incompetent, or they’re lieing, or they know that one of their MPs is a lieing coward who doesn’t trust their colleagues.
Matthew, this is an interesting debate.
I disagree that minor leaks do not involve entire policy documents. The issue of how severe a leak is, goes to how secret the material was in the first place. If a document is being circulated to a hundred people, it clearly isn’t very sensitive. If it is only being circulated to three people, then it is likely to be extremely sensitive.
Of the documents released by Mallard, at least three of the four were caucus briefing papers. Caucus briefing papers are not top secret. They are distributed to all caucus members, the research unit, and the Leader’s office. That’s probably eighty people. If they were circulated in advance, they probably went to MP’s offices electronically, which widens the net to MPs executive assistants. That’s about 130 people.
130 people, by definition, is not the inner core. There is no evidence that anybody within the inner core is systematically leaking material to the Labour Party. It is very difficult to think what motive anybody in the inner core might have to do so.
Crank,
One of the accusations being levelled against NZ First is that donations were shaped to the $10k threshold so that they did not have to be declared.
Do you really think National donors didn’t do the same thing?
Anita,
I don’t think anyone is levelling any accusations of the sort.
Making annoymous donations up to the $10k threshold is totally legal.
Aside from the issue that the Vela donations were made by companies that had the same shareholders, if the donations were made direct to the party as opposed to the trust then this would not be an issue at all.
Jeez Tim – you seem to know a lot about how all this politics stuff works – you’re not on the PS/Nats’ payroll are you?
Anita, those are plausible scenarios, but I think there are a couple of elements you’ve missed out.
The first element is that if it was a staffer who left the material at Bellamy’s, it rules out that the accidental leaker is an MP who is a lying coward. If it was a staffer who now knows that they left some documents at Bellamy’s, due to the power structures in Parliament, it’s even less likely that they would fess up. They would be sacked immediately.
Next, you’re assuming that what was left at Bellamy’s, if it was documents left at Bellamy’s, were in a discrete package, and that National should now know which documents were left there, and which weren’t. I very much doubt there was a bunch of folders distributed to everybody. In the accidental leak scenario, it is more likely that documents were circulated electronically. Some MPs and staff would have read them. Others would not have read them. Some would have printed them off, some wouldn’t. What they were carrying around, and how they were bundled, is very difficult to know.
What is likely, however, is that if the documents were accidentally left at Bellamy’s, or Copperfields, or at a bus-stop, they are likely to generally focus on the same topic. This is consistent with the environment, conservation, and biofuels policies being “leaked”. The evidence says that they were a widely-circulated caucus briefing prior to National’s bluegreen launch on Saturday.
Alternatively, in the accidental leak scenario, the documents “leaked” could all relate to a single meeting: briefing papers for caucus. In which case it is unlikely that material not relating to items discussed at that caucus meeting would be among the briefing papers.
You know the answer to that Robinsod, of course I am. By the way, are we still on for our 2am coffee at Starbucks, so I can hand you the tax policy paper for you to hand on to Trevor tomorrow? Will be a good distraction from Winston appearing at the privileges committee meeting if Trevor can do another press release about the leaks, huh?
Tim – so your answer is yes?
Tim,
Ok, it’s possible that the lieing coward is a staff member, that seems a reasonable possibility. Not a very reassuring one for National tho
If I left a bunch of important papers somewhere I’d like to imagine I could relatively accurately describe what was in them “um… the papers from caucus this morning, a phone list for the insurance council, some scribbled notes from my meetings yesterday with x, y and z that I was planning to type up, a pile of paper about the bathroom renovation, the working paper from the select committee and submissions from umm… thingy and whatsit”
Or, if I couldn’t actually remember exactly what was in the bundle, I could figure out what policies I use to have paper copies of and no longer did.
This isn’t administrivia, these are serious and sensitive documents; losing them and then not knowing what you’d lost would not be a sign of usefulness around parliament.
Billy,
Yes I do. And the world’s stickiest bogey
Don’t know why my Toxteth link didn’t work:
http://www.menvafan.net/annat/tv/tyo/bambi2.htm