spin

Categories under spin

Same old National. Same old spin.

Written By: - Date published: 10:46 am, July 1st, 2008 - 39 comments

Former National Party MP Marilyn Waring wrote in the introduction to The Hollow Men: I must admit to a sense of anticipated despair about the treatment [the book] might receive… The focus may be on looking for and condemning the leakers as opposed to scrutinising an appallingly mendacious political campaign. This has been precisely the […]

Brand Key shows a contempt for ordinary Kiwis

Written By: - Date published: 6:30 am, July 1st, 2008 - 39 comments

It comes as no surprise that Brand Key has been a Crosby/Textor project from Day 1. The hit and run, the bait and switch, the cake and eat it, the shoot the messenger, the misdirection, the dog-whistle, wedge politics, the outright lie – these are all elements of the classic Crosby Textor strategy that have […]

Nat response to C/T scandal right from C/T playbook

Written By: - Date published: 11:49 am, June 30th, 2008 - 33 comments

There’s a standard formula that Crosby/Textor has its clients use when damaging information comes out. a) refuse to engage. The most senior public response to the revelation that Brand Key has been created by exactly the same people who ran Brash’s divisive, racist campaign in 2005 has come from Key’s chief of staff. No politician […]

Busted

Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, June 29th, 2008 - 122 comments

Nicky Hager’s piece in today’s Sunday Star Times has confirmed what we all suspected: Crosby Textor are the creators of Brand Key. For those of you unfamiliar with CT, they’re known as the dirtiest and most driven political PR firm in the game. CT specialises in dog-whistle racism, attack politics and pretty much every aspect […]

Misdirection

Written By: - Date published: 11:44 am, June 27th, 2008 - 66 comments

There’s a technique that sits at the heart of conjuring tricks called misdirection the act of drawing attention away from the trick itself. You all know how it works: the conjurer will flourish a brightly coloured handkerchief in one hand, while the trick is quietly taking place unnoticed in the other. The same thing happens […]

Cake and eat it

Written By: - Date published: 1:55 pm, June 25th, 2008 - 10 comments

I’ve noticed a new trend in the right’s spin lately (apart from their wholesale theft of campaign scripts) – the ‘have your cake and eat it’ trick. This tactic is basically a response to legislation or policy they don’t like but they know they can’t be seen to be against. So what they do is […]

Deja vu

Written By: - Date published: 11:11 am, June 24th, 2008 - 15 comments

I was having a look through some old campaign PR yesterday and found this gem: It seems John Key ripped off more than just Coldplay when he made his DVD.

Hit and Run

Written By: - Date published: 8:58 am, June 18th, 2008 - 40 comments

I put a comment on one of Steve’s posts a few days ago and he suggested I put it up as a post so here goes: National have been playing a hit and run public relations game for a few years now. It’s not a bad strategy for an opposition as the news-cycle moves so […]

Happy families

Written By: - Date published: 6:11 pm, June 11th, 2008 - 48 comments

The New Zealand Herald’s latest anti-Labour beatup took an unfortunate twist this afternoon. Having spent the best part of a day making hay over Labour being caught, er, using stock photography in a flyer, the Herald was over the moon to discover the offending image had also been used by Kevin Rudd’s Australian Labor Party […]

Which is the waste of money?

Written By: - Date published: 10:33 am, June 10th, 2008 - 35 comments

Every now and then a ‘commentator’ pops up who is so hilariously incompetent you don’t know whether to ignore them or mock them. In Bernard Hickey‘s case, it’s been the former because the man’s work is so bad – his numbers don’t add up half the time, his understanding of economics would have had my […]

Spinbusting: the biggest party must govern

Written By: - Date published: 9:42 am, June 10th, 2008 - 38 comments

A National line that is doing the rounds goes that if National wins more votes than Labour but can’t govern alone it would be undemocratic for a Labour-led coalition to form the next government. After all, in this scenario, National has won more votes than anyone else, so it should be the government, right? Wrong. […]

Spin-busting: ‘Hardworking kiwis’

Written By: - Date published: 2:11 pm, June 9th, 2008 - 180 comments

‘Hardworking kiwis’ is National’s new ‘mainstream New Zealanders’. Referenced by Key ad nauseam, it is the population at which National purports to target it’s policies. As with ‘mainstream New Zealanders’, ‘hardworking kiwis’ has a inherently divisive implicit message: ‘not everyone is a hardworking kiwi’. The term creates an ‘other’; a type of person in this […]

Brand Key

Written By: - Date published: 4:51 pm, June 8th, 2008 - 81 comments

We got this in from the ‘sod and we like it so here’s the guest post we swore we’d never give him (taking the piss out of Ian Wishart didn’t count). ‘Sod, don’t let it go to your head. Brand Key, or the cultural logic of late capitalism in NZ politics Like others I have […]

Scott McClellan on the Daily Show

Written By: - Date published: 11:19 am, June 4th, 2008 - 4 comments

Last night on the Daily Show Jon Stewart interviewed Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary who has come out and accused the Bush administration of a “culture of deception” and of maintaining a “permanent campaign approach” to governing rather than making the best choices. It’s a good interview that provides an interesting insight […]

Some facts on benefit numbers

Written By: - Date published: 5:49 pm, May 28th, 2008 - 34 comments

Hear that sound? It’s Judith Collins banging the sickness beneficiaries drum again. Fresh from a sensationalist report on the front page of the Dom today, Collins is demanding the Government and the Department of Work & Income: “admit they are failing beneficiaries and failing doctors because Labour is more focused on pushing people on to […]

Asking the second question

Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, May 24th, 2008 - 62 comments

Key’s best trick is to answer questions with impressive or technical sounding assertions that stop the line of questioning but don’t actually tell us anything. When he does that, interviewers need to push him to explain himself. Here’s a few paraphrased examples from the last couple of week: Q. ‘What don’t you like about the […]

Spin Bingo: Budget Edition

Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, May 21st, 2008 - 56 comments

Well it’s Budget day tomorrow and we’ve got our man Steve Pierson going to the lock-up so we can get you a good ol’ Standardista analysis ASAP. But while we don’t know what’s going to be in the Budget we can take a fair guess at what National’s response will be. So we’ve decided to […]

Bill Ralston: independent commentator?

Written By: - Date published: 2:10 pm, May 16th, 2008 - 43 comments

If you’ve been reading Bill Ralston’s columns in the Herald on Sunday over the last few months you’ll have noticed how they’ve started to read more and more like long-form National Party press releases. To date I’d put it down to pure laziness – after all, why would you bother coming up with an original […]

Batman Politics

Written By: - Date published: 5:57 pm, May 14th, 2008 - 14 comments

Who would have thought? Murray McCully as The Penguin. Hat tip: onegoodmove

Paul Henry must go

Written By: - Date published: 9:58 am, May 6th, 2008 - 54 comments

This morning’s performace on breakfast TV by Paul Henry was a disgrace. His complete lack of objectivity on the rail and ferry buy-back was even more biased and partisan than we have come to expect from him. Despite Guyon Espiner’s best efforts to provide some objective analysis of the government’s decision, Henry simply shouted about […]

Fran O’Shillivan strikes again

Written By: - Date published: 9:51 am, May 6th, 2008 - 84 comments

Here’s the first par of National’s release on the rail deal: National Party Leader John Key says at a time when householders are struggling to pay the weekly bills, Helen Clark’s decision to spend the thick end of a billion dollars to buy back the rail rolling stock does not make any sense. Here’s Fran […]

Fairfax reporting staggeringly awful

Written By: - Date published: 12:42 pm, April 26th, 2008 - 36 comments

This morning’s Dom Post buys into National’s “Aussie exodus” spin with a lead story claiming “A staggering one in 10 voters are considering a move to Australia” in the next twelve months. The facts, of course, are somewhat different. As we’ve shown before, as few as 0.67% of New Zealanders actually emigrate to any country […]

Power disavows $50 offender penalty

Written By: - Date published: 4:30 pm, April 2nd, 2008 - 17 comments

Duncan Garner kept Copperfield diners entertained yesterday by teasing Simon Power about the implications of National’s $50 conviction levy. We’re told that in response Power threw his hands into the air and exclaimed loudly that the policy wasn’t “his”. What an odd thing for the National Party spokesperson on law and order to say. It […]

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Written By: - Date published: 1:26 pm, March 25th, 2008 - 32 comments

David Farrar appears to be throwing his weight in behind National Party’s “New Zealand Sucks” campaign with another misleading post on migration to Australia. Titled “The exodus grows”, DPF’s take on the most recent stats is that the rate at which people are “fleeing New Zealand” is accelerating. It’s perhaps disguised as one of David’s […]

SST recycles discredited National party spin

Written By: - Date published: 12:28 pm, March 17th, 2008 - 7 comments

Rob Stock apparently holds several awards for personal finance reporting but looks unlikely to win another based on his rehash of National Party lines in the SST this weekend. I can understand the desire to get these pesky articles to the publisher when the sun’s shining and there are better things to be doing outside […]

Yawn

Written By: - Date published: 4:47 pm, March 11th, 2008 - 11 comments

Well National’s finally got their line straight on the research fund and, despite me old mate Dancer’s prediction, they are not supporting it. It seems this one goes to AYB who picked their line perfectly. He said they’d claim the idea’s good but the model is flawed and then have cry about how it should […]

No, he meant “infrastructure”, he really, really did

Written By: - Date published: 3:47 pm, March 7th, 2008 - 27 comments

AYB’s confidence in English as a frontman for National may already have taken a knock as the second half of the dynamic duo has successfully managed his own John Key moment within hours of taking over the reins. When asked on NewstalkZB today whether National would borrow money to pay for tax cuts English managed […]

Tail-spin

Written By: - Date published: 11:12 am, February 23rd, 2008 - 73 comments

While National is trying to pretend John Key’s quote that “we would love to see wages drop” is a non-issue, behind the scenes they’re floundering. We’ve all heard the multiple and conflicting denials (“I can’t recall”, “I never said it”, “I was misquoted”, “I was talking about Australian wages”), and now thanks to a lazy […]

“The literal truth”

Written By: - Date published: 10:49 am, February 16th, 2008 - 49 comments

Fran O’Sullivan’s continuing her ongoing philosophical project of interrogating the notion of truth in her latest repetition of Kiwiblog talking points Herald column. In it she picks up on the Owen Glenn interview and from a few disparate facts weaves a story of intrigue and mystery. Or rather provides us with an insight into the […]

Key conjures up cuts

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, February 12th, 2008 - 10 comments

John Key tells us that he would cut ‘wasteful government spending’ to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts bigger than Labour’s cuts. But do the facts match the rhetoric? Remember National’s wastewatch website? It listed $900 million in ‘waste’ since 1999 only 0.2% of government spending, which won’t pay for many tax cuts. And most of […]

Key speech: strategic blunder?

Written By: - Date published: 2:11 pm, January 29th, 2008 - 113 comments

So this is John Key’s ambition: throwing troubled teens in boot camp, beating up on beneficiaries and criminalising our children. I’ve only had a quick read through the speech in my lunch break so it’s possible I’ve got this wrong, but I get the distinct impression that Key has made a major strategic error here. […]

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