For all you conspiracy theorists out there …
Kim Dotcom is thinking of resurrecting the Internet Party and having another go at the elections.
Internet Party could return in 2017. Independent and with bright young minds who can create a prosperous digital economy for NZ.
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 28, 2016
I have some sympathy for him. Even though he is a wealthy businessman with some dubious business practices in his past and even though he gave large donations to John Banks’ mayoral campaign in an effort no doubt to establish credibility I think he meant well.
His treatment by the New Zealand and US authorities was excessive in the extreme. It appears that he had made efforts to comply with copyright laws on his website. Even if he did not he should have been charged with copyright violations. The laying of racketeering charges to provide a pretext to seek his extradition appears to me to have been manufactured.
And Dotcom has a certain amount of shall we say style. Discovering that his data was being monitored by investigating why his super fast broadband connection so he could play games with the lowest possible ping rate was not operating in as pristine a manner as he had expected requires some understanding of the world around him or luck or both.
But his incursion into New Zealand politics did not help the left last time. Sure he wrote a big cheque and gave Mana access to resources it could only dream of. But this did not help. And his moment of truth meeting in the Town Hall was a big fizzer in that the conclusive proof Key knew about him did not appear. This probably cost the left a couple of percentage points in support. Enough people to make a difference probably then decided to trust the staid predictability of National than the potentially instability of a left wing Government that would have in all likelihood depended on Mana-Internet for enough votes to gain Parliament’s confidence.
So with the greatest respect Kim can I suggest you give this election a miss. There are big issues that the country needs to talk about, such as child poverty and climate change. The fewer distractions there are the better.
But I sense there will be a disruption in the force this year …
The question has been asked. Why did Key resign? It all seems too strange, too sudden.
The writers at Fairfax think so. They said this in their recent article on predicted political events for the year:
There will be one more political bombshell in 2017 that will change the course of the election and install Andrew Little as prime minister.
Maybe they were hinting at this.
There is a fascinating story breaking about how a New Zealand reporter Suzie Dawson is seeking asylum in Russia. I could not work out if this was some sort of early April Fool’s day hoax. But her twitter feed seems to confirm the contents of this article which sets out why she is doing this.
I must confess that I had not previously heard of her but she did write at Spinbin and the quality of her work is high. My impression of her taste grew considerably when I saw that she linked to Simon Louisson’s excellent Standard post on the Panama Papers.
But to go full circle she claims that Dotcom predicts two terabytes of Government data will be released this year and the results will be catastrophic for the Government.
According to Dotcom:
Why do you think John Key resigned? This wasn’t about his family. It’s more likely about the next election and 2 terabytes of emails and attachments that were taken from New Zealand government servers. I heard from a reliable source that the Podesta emails seem like cotton candy compared to the amount of disgusting dishonesty the National government will see leaked at the next election. Key must know. He’s taken the parachute. He can’t stomach the kind of embarrassment that Clinton had to endure with daily releases of dirty emails. And this time even his media cronies couldn’t have saved him. The Internet and alternative media of reputable truth-telling websites are taking over. Leaks are the new political reality. Over time this will be the cure against dishonest politicians. They just can’t survive in this new environment of information.
We have been here before and I think that every claim by Dotcom needs to be taken with a rather large grain of salt. But I suspect that this year will see another level of craziness that will make 2014 look like a walk in the park.
Update: I am satisfied the application for asylum is for real. This could be the case of the first New Zealand reporter ever seeking asylum to Russia.
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