Written By: - Date published: 1:43 pm, August 28th, 2008 - 190 comments
Categories: election 2008, election funding, nz first -
Tags:
Winston Peters’ stories around the Owen Glenn donation to his legal fund are dangerously convoluted and have stretched everyone’s credulity but without real evidence either way it has been impossible to fairly condemn him. Glenn’s letter yesterday provided strong evidence and left Peters ’hanging by a thread’, as every hack in the country wrote. Now, Helen Clark has effectively chosen to cut that thread.
Clark has chosen to drop Peters in it by telling reporters that Glenn informed her of his donation to the legal fund in February and she asked Peters about it (he denied it) days before Peters held the up the famous ‘no’ sign. Logically, it doesn’t change anything – if Glenn’s account is true, Peters knew without talking to Clark that Glenn had made a donation; if Peters’ account is true, then he wouldn’t have known Glenn made the donation to the trust fund because his lawyer refused to give him any information on it. But it does mean that Peters was at least on notice that a donation may have been made and, given that, he shouldn’t have flatly denied a donation had been made. However, it also shifts the weight of evidence to a conclusion that Peters has been misleading us.
Why has Clark waited until now to release this info? The same reason National waited until now to (kind of maybe) rule out working with Peters (unless he is cleared of wrongdoing). Both major parties have been unwilling to finally cut any chance of working with Peters after the election for fear he would return to Parliament as Kingmaker and go with the other side. After the Glenn letter, both parties judge that the tipping point has been reached where odds are Peters won’t be returning to Parliament because the public’s trust in him is blown and, so, they can get political gain from distancing themselves from him and undermining him. Of course, that’s a little tougher for Labour to do than National – because Labour wants to pass the ETS and has been relying on NZF coming on board. Sacking Peters will probably mean no NZF support for the ETS (it still could conceivably pass if NZF and the Maori Party abstain).
We must remember that this is still all very confused and Peters does have the right to due process. That process is the Privileges Committee hearing but Clark may choose to stand him down from his ministerial portfolios before that if it won’t stop the passage of the ETS.
No matter whether the Privileges Committee finds enough evidence to condemn Peters or not, it’s likely NZF will go into this election with both major parties stating an aversion to governing with them. On top of the stench around the donations, the inability to play Kingmaker should see NZF’s support bleed away. It looks like Peters and NZF have reached the end of the road. But the question will linger, why did Peters behave the way he has? There was nothing illegal or wrong in the Glenn donation, so why did he deny it so firmly when he should have at least suspected there had been a donation?
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Vaniila
Sorry you are wrong show me a case on a blog where some one has copy and pasted from another website or article to a blog. With no financial gain and been done for plagiarism. We arent talking about Uni papers here I know been there done that.
Cheers have a good day.
Rob, speaking of getting technical, the Good Book (Cambridge) states that plagiarisation is: “to use another person’s idea or a part of their work and pretend that it is your own”.
No reference of doing so for profit or personal gain. You clearly passed it off as your own, though, by way of the preceeding sentence: “This is why I believe Heln took so much time.” You sound distinctly grumpy about it, but that’s fair enough, getting snapped doing something as low as you just have is pretty embarrassing.
Now, as to your stealing other people’s comments and passing them off as your own: how long have you been doing this for? I suspect that most of your comments aren’t your own, they often look like cut and paste jobs. In future, when you do this, perhaps you could say “I saw this on X website and thought it was a good comment”
You could then post a link along with the text, to give people credit for what they say, and so as not to pretennd you’ve come up with it yourself.
Nice deflection after that though, my chin is indeed up. We’ll see about the rest.
Rob: What do you mean “done” for plagiarism? We’re not talking about taking a court case here – we’re talking about the fact that now everyone has reasonable doubt to query whether you personally wrote anything you ever posted here. Seeing as how you’re frequently off-topic I can actually imagine a badly scripted program copying comments from sites like Stuff.co.nz and pasting them in at random on The Standard.
How did you beat the captcha – I’m sure Lynn would love to know?
Edit: The edits work!
Rob,
You might want to read the Copyright Act 1994 or any of the many good summaries of it. You are asserting that you are the author of a piece which is, in fact, authored by someone else.
Ignoring the law, for a moment, you are being just plain disrespectful and rude. The person that wrote it put time and energy into doing so, they deserve both respect and acknowledgement.
Bah.
Please note Matt I never said it was mine I said surely this email ties back it in.
It is important to reiterate that plagiarism is not the mere copying of text, but the presentation of another’s ideas as one’s own, regardless of the specific words or constructs used to express that idea. Wikepedia
But lets not lose site of the message there is alot more to come out on Owen offering money to the Maori Party could this be what Helen is worried about? Would also make sense to try and get rid of the Nats off the PC because they may start asking Owens QC who asked Owen to offer money to the Maori party.
Rob,
When you post a “borrowed” comment, using your username with no marker that it is a quote without acknowledging the actual author, you are (as you say above) presenting another’s ideas as your own.
Rob,
Let’s not lose sight that pasting someone else’s text under your pseudonym is plagiarism.
And as you state above that you’ve
“been there done that”
at varsity, you should have learnt your lesson.
Oh and “surely this email ties back it in” is actually in NeillR’s original comment that you cut-and-paste from stuff.
Rob: The conventional way of indicating something isn’t one’s own is by quoting it and providing a source or reference. You seem too illiterate (both technically and linguistically) to understand this, so let’s make it really fucking simple: put quotes “like this” around anything which you didn’t actually type out on your keyboard, and identify who typed it out or where you got it from in parentheses (they’re brackets, like what’s around this phrase) so we can be absolutely crystal fucking clear as to which of the idiotic ideas in your comments have their genesis in your own brain, such as it is, and which were penned by others unfortunate enough to have had their ideas stolen by you. Or perhaps you’d prefer to continue suffering the ridicule so richly deserved by busted plagiarists, particularly those with folly enough to try to defend their actions.
Personally, I wonder if Lynn’s usual solution isn’t more appropriate in this case.
L
(Yes; I write for a living and I’m an academic, so plagiarism pisses me off mightily.)
Lew – for an angry man, your english was impeccable there.
I have held off other calls to ban Rob, despite the fact that he’s a prize twit. But I suggest that it would be a good precedent for the high standards of debate that this blog aspires to to make some kind example of this case (a ban or at least a stand down). Plagiarism is not on in any form, it’s theft.
Lew you sarcastic twerp take the carrot out of your arsehole and don’t patronize me.
I never claimed it was mine. I refuse to have a battle of wits with some intellectual pygmy. So crawl back into fucking cesspit bottom feeder.
Rob: By failing to credit it, you claimed it was yours. You lose.
L
Sometimes when you see a plagiarism story you can at least see the ‘why’ of it. You can imagine why a person might do it, even if you still think it’s a fucking disgusting thing to do.
Other times, like for example, the Bruce Logan case, you just think ‘jebus what a retard’. But even there I think it was just arrogance and laziness. Bruce had his little lame-o Maxim agenda and just stole various arguments for his newspaper columns because he thought he wouldn’t get caught and liked the fame he got posing as some sort of public intellectual. There was at least a reason behind it. He got some sort of payoff from those he liked to consider his peers in the form of respect, acknowledgment, and publication. The fact that those benefits were (at least partly) undeserved is something he has to live with, and the rest of us can judge him for. Likewise the fact that whatever was his own work is now tarnished. That was the risk he took.
But this? Stealing fucking blog comments and pasting them under a pseudonym? Seriously dude, What the fuck is that all about? How hard is it to simply say where the comment is coming from?
And to then get on your high horse and claim no one knows what plagiarism means? That’s some adjectival strange behaviour mate.
Whatever Peter’s has or hasn’t done “the rich labour party donors” and their real reasons for offering Labour or Winston Peters money are a worry to me. The bulk of our Newspapers including the NZ Herald are now owned by APN publishing and the owner is Irish billionaire Tony Oreilly. One of my concerns about this man is that he in partnership with The Carlyle group staged a takeover of a large portion the Australian Media. The carlyle group are big in weaponry and their associations with the US Neocons is strong. There are accusations on the internet about their criminal activities. A movie about it has been removed so I’m not sure of the details etc.
Whether Winston is guilty or innocent I don’t think these rich elites want a labour government. I really believe Labour and Winston have been set up by people who want a National government.
How incredibly gullible both Winston and Labour have been.
Interesting to see which of our assets National will sell to these Vultures (wealthy elite) as reward for their assistance.
Are the wealthy in NZ mainly right wing. I think yes. You just have to look at Rodney Hide’s electorate. Aucklands most elite suburb is the only place in NZ that elects the extreme act party.
Question: How many visits do you get per day/week at the standard. A hit counter would be of interest.