I was wondering why Key’s team weren’t trying to milk his upcoming hardtalk interview for PR like they have with his other international media appearances.
Finally, an interview where some truly difficult points were forced. Made John Key look like a complete amateur and, despite some notable occasions, Stephen Sackeur is a wonderful interviewer who does his research.
The only question left to ask is this: wtf was John Key thinking accepting an interview from the one place that was going to truly sock it to him?
Stephen regularly makes the world’s most powerful people cringe in their chairs and only a few have truly stood their ground and fought with him – he always has an army of facts for any interview he does and isn’t afraid to follow up the 1st punch with a 2nd and 3rd…
Sorry just spilt coffee over my Keyboard
where was I ?
>Finally, an interview where some truly difficult points were forced.<
Not really passing judgement on Hardtalk verses Campbell Live, but Key refuses to front on CL or any program where he might be asked similar questions, this interview could be look at as entrapment, maybe not only should we feel embarrassed, but sorry for our dear leader.
The wanker
Front on New Zealand TV you slack prick
What an embarrassment! Opposition parties could have a field day with this performance. “100% pure relative to other countries” Better than a Tui ad. So ‘unemployment is really good compared to …!”
There is an episode of hardtalk on BBC World at 3:30am tonight (which presumably will also be shown on TV1), but I’m not sure if it is this interview. Some commentators on open mike yesterday mentioned watching this episode, not sure where they are located.
Hard Talk is scheduled to show on TV One overnight at 3.30am Wednesday. However, it was also on the scheduled early this morning at the same time, so I’m not sure if it will be the Key interview tomorrow am.
After doing some digging, I found that proxies from hidemyass.com seem to work (click on IP: Port Proxies in the centre of the menu, in the box on the left scroll down until you get United Kingdom and hit Search).
The 2nd one on the list is let me download the Windows Media Player version, which is 242mb. And it also appears that I can watch it! There’s DRM that forces it to expire 30 days after you’ve downloaded it, and no-doubt it’s also doing geo-location checks on my IP address, so need to use the proxy to watch it.
If no better source turns up, I might see if I can screen-scrape this, encode it and upload it somewhere on the net. Youtube probably won’t work though as BBC will probably automatically send them a take down notice.
“Conserving our native animals and plants is the core thing New Zealanders expect the government to do in conservation. The cuts to the budget the government has already made have reduced the department’s capacity to actually do that. With all of the rhetoric around the need to cut further, the public is being softened up for further cuts in areas like conservation.”
The department had a $1.6 billion budget for the 2010 financial year. In 2009, the government signalled it would be slashed by $54 million over a four-year period.
It woud be neglect if MSM do not pick up on this. Any bets on this happening? Has there ever been a more cringe worthy international performance by a NZ PM?
Oh the stupid it hurts.(PR folk that is not slippery sideshow)…..after years of laughing at the Ozzies having Howard as PM the worms turned big time with sideshow up front hamming it up on the world stage….am I coping it big time now from across the ditch.
I couldn’t believe the ridiculous smirk he has on his face at the start of the interview. I can’t imagine any other leader that would go into an interview with an expression like that.
He looked from the start as if he was going to be asked about corgis and the LotRings, like back home. Quite fun when he does his assassin eyes when hes reeling off numbers – steely trader squint, probably works on a monitor.
It must have been a real surprise for Shonkey to get a real journalist asking some real questions instead of the patsy arse kissing questions we get from NZ journalists, who are bribed to be Nationals mouth piece. Didn’t he completely fail in the real world where people respect the truth and lies are confronted.
Key’s answers were very telling taking on two flavours. The first was a typical denialist attack – discredit the source by saying it was that scientist’s ‘opinion’ and that he could find other opinions to refute it. His second type of reply was that there wasn’t an issue just ‘look out the window’ at the natural beauty.
The first is disingenuous, the second is quite scary if that is his yardstick for conservation. It implies that so long as the green veneer is there then he is happy to sell the 100% NZ brand regardless of any environmental crises going on behind.
I agree Key should have said something along the lines of:’ “Yes quitre correct – New Zealand isn’t 100% pure, it hasn’t been since colonisation. Sorry about the last ten years of duping tourists into coming here. But well you gotta love the marketing particulalry by politicans like Helen Clark and their officials as they toured around the world suckering it out of money. Again apologies from New Zealand to the world… come down and we’ll make it up to you with some fush n chups & an L&P.”
It was a horrendous show of pass the buck in parliament today, with Shonkey doing just that on a number of difficult questions. Next National will be blaming Labour for their drinking.
What was that shit about “two way trade on its way to 12 billion…y’ know, 20 billion”
So the total of import/export trade with China is…what exactly? I mean, fuck. 12 billion is a long way from 20 billion. What is two way trade heading towards and when will it be at the 12 cough 20 billion mark? And how much of that 12 cough 20 billion will be earned by NZ and how much by China?
That aside, I was waiting for him to blame the Christchurch earthquake for…..stuff. And then follow that up by claiming to be 110% committed to…stuff.
Anyway. The Nats publicly dumped the ‘Clean and Green’ sales pitch. So why didn’t he just say that his government recognised the ‘Clean and Green’ image as a bit of a have and move on?
Meanwhile. What are those tougher environmental measures for dairy farming he was referring to? Anyone?
I watched the interview yesterday on BBC World. Couldd be the same interview if it is on again tonight
If you have MySky, record it. This interview is a much watch.
Seriously, if this ‘100% Pure’ thing is all anyone has picked up on yet from the internet clip, then WOW. There is a whole lot more insight into Key’s mind and character in this interview.
You’re right. Key’s comments re immigration in the interview were also cringe-worthy. All his talk about encouraging worthwhile people to NZ; of them investing in our economy; bringing their skills and money, etc. Has he not been briefed by Kate Wilkinson on the great job she’s done dodging Campbell Live’s attempts to interview her about Martyn Payne? Overall, Key’s HARDtalk interview performance reinforced my view that the guy’s a lightweight.
And just to highlight how the MSM helps Mr – can’t answer questions by himself – Key cover up his mistakes…
MikeMs comment pretty much sums it up:
I’m very impressed at how Stuff’s summary of the interview managed to twist a boring environmental topic into something that was 90% about Key’s thoughts on the Monarchy.
Comment by MikeM on Dim post — May 10, 2011 @ 7:28 pm
Dim Post is also giving this an airing. Most are displeased or more, with our Prime Ministers foolish performance, just as there is an absence of support for Key here. Do Burt and Pete et al only get paid 9-5? Dim Post
Damn. Doesn’t go quite to the right page. [Fixed — r0b]
The HardTalk interview has probably done more to boost Goff & Labour’s chances in the November election than any other media event in the past 2 & half years. My friends , scattered across the world wherever HardTalk screened, have all expressed a collective cringe at seeing such a pitiful performance from a NZ PM.
Key’s performance was one that demonstrated what quality interviewing is all about… the interviewer allowing the interviewee to put his own foot in his mouth and then gently probing so that the foot goes even deeper into the speaker’s throat.
There was no excuse for Key being so uninformed, so ignorant and so shallow apart from his own arrogant belief in his PR creation.
It just shows how pathetic the media are here , they let that flimsy , pathetic excuse for a PM get away with SMILE and try the deflection routine . What is it ? do the media get stars in their eyes ?
Sackur refers to New Zealand being “vulnerable” to world economic events, and Key says that any small country that is effected by a large event is vulnerable but New Zealand is in a “economically quite a strong position”!
Sackur then says that one thing New Zealand does not have is strong growth. John Key says that “we don’t accept that position”. ‘Not only dairy… but forestry, land, beef, seafood prices are at record highs.’
Sackur then hits him on NZ having 30% lower wages than Australia, and 25% of NZ Graduates leaving NZ as opposed to 2.5% leaving Australia. Key defends NZ, says that nobody else in the OECD has had as big a population increase as NZ.
It goes on.. but here is the best quote from Sackur:
“You spent many years working in London making a lot of money. And I wonder if you’re the right person to be telling New Zealanders, “You know what, you should stay at home, invest in your own country, and you can make it in your own country” because you had to come here to make it”
Very internationalist perspective from Sackur. Very big picture. No wonder he is so sceptical of Key.
Ref the Helen Clark interview on Hardtalk…That woman made us proud to be NZ’ers. She handled those questions with such skill. That’s the difference between someone who is briefed, goes out of her way to be informed and lives by her principles. That line from her is so true “I say in private what I say in public”. I heard her say that so often. And some of the prescient comments left by viewers are being fulfilled right now.
Too true, the difference in the two interviews is marked.
I didn’t always agree with Helen but she is clearly intelligent, principled, well-informed, and very much her own person. None of which can be said about the present Head Bozo.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had another HC-like person in Labour?
Please can the NZ MSM get some similar interviewers. So refreshing to have someone that actually did some research, asked real questions and expected real responses in place of the usual one-liner PR spin we get in NZ.
I managed to use a proxy to download the WMP version (see 3.2.4 above). Spent the last 50 minutes trying to transcribe it all, and only got through about 8 minutes of it! It’s 30 minutes long, so this doesn’t seem like a go-er.
Here’s what I have so far. Apologies for any typoes and lack of grammer and punctuation. I’ve tried to get the wording almost as exact as I can, although I might miss a few ‘ums’ and other sounds out, as well as word stresses and Key’s slack-jawed gabbing.
Hard talk today is in central london. my guest is new zealand’s visiting prime minister john key. his first term in office has been a baptism of fire. he’s had to cope with a prolonged economic slowdown, and a string of disasters including a major mining accident and the devastating christchurch earthquake. geographically isolated and small in population, just how resilient is new zealand when put to the test?
HT: prime minister john key, welcome to hard talk
JK: thanks very much, great to be here
HT: is it proving harder than you expected to be new zealand’s prime minister?
JK: well we’ve certainly had more challenges than one might either want or expect, if you think about the time i’ve been in office, nearly three years, we’ve had the global financial crisis, two earthquake in christchurch, ah pike river mine disaster, we’ve ended up having to uh buy and ah bailout a number of finance companies and in recent times provide support for an insurance company which has a large exposure to christchurch so it hasn’t been an easy time for us
HT: those are massive tests, and we’ll go through them in some detail, but they’re tests that you’ve had to face, as, I think the most inexperienced prime minister in the last 100 years of NZ’s history. i mean you-you-you came in to office, I think just 6 years as an MP, 2 years as party leader, you weren’t really terribly well-equipped as a political leader were you?
JK: well it depends on what you think um are the skills that you need to be a good prime minister. it’s certainly true I got there in the fastest time, prior to me was david lange who I think took 7 years, but i think in modern day politcs you are seeing the emergeance of young leaders. um we’re seeing that in the case of president obama now in the US, obviously with david cameron here in the united kingdom, and I think the experience that i had working in a number of international markets here in the uk, singapore, australia and the likes, that banking experience where you have, very much, the economy at the front and centre stage of the issues new zaealand faces. i think actually the mixture of skills I’ve had would be about the right ones.
HT: well, you were a successful banker, you made lots of money, but you’d never, for example, run a city, let alone a ministerial department. and then to go to some of those challenges you’ve already alluded to, here you are, faced, for example, in christchurch, with what you I think described as possibly, maybe, NZ’s darkest day ever, with the christchurch earthquake.
JK: I think the answer to that is that you need to have a plan. I mean ultimately, one of the things the commercial sector teaches you is that you have to have a sense of where you’re going, a sense of how you’re going to achieve that, and to be able to frame up the challenges that ya face. in the case of christchurch, if one puts to one side the human tragedy, which has been enormous – I mean we lost 181 people there – um then th-the process of funding the rebuilding, of what is actually required to make that happen, allow that to happen in a timeframe which is sensible both for new zealand and for the people of christchurch, i think is rather the self-explanatory. now, we have taken some hard calls, we’ve passed legislation which gives us ah very wide and encompassing powers to enable us to rebuild christchurch quickly, we’ve essentially assumed that responsibility at a central government level
HT: does it make sense to rebuild christchurch, quickly? i mean th-the city is still getting serious tremors, it’s had around the area of the city, it’s had 2 major earthquakes in the last 8 or so months. is it wise, to rebuild christchurch?
JK: we believe so – the second earthquake we think is an aftershock of the first one, and that’s been supported by our scientists in new zealand. now it’s true, there’s been 5000 aftershocks in christchurch measuring above, i think 3 or 4 on the richter scale since the first earthquake on the 4th of september.
HT: ah-a-and because of that you have a lot of people in christchurch who are saying ‘i want out of this city, i see no future for myself and my children in this place’
JK: yeah-it’s-been-interesting-actually-the-response wh- look there are about 400,000 people that live in christchurch, and there is no perfect way of measuring how many people have or will leave, but if you put your finger in the air and say what’s that number likely to look like and I’d say it’s 20 to 30 thousand people.
HT: you’re sounding determinedly upbeat, but here’s where it gets very difficult for a very small country – populations not much more than 4 million – we’re talking about your second city, economists reckon that in the short-run, the next year or two, it could mean that rather than expecting growth of over 3%, it might be down to 2%, so it’s a real drag on new zealand’s economic prospects. and that’s, in a way, illustrating how vulnerable your small country is, would you accept that?
JK: well by definition, any small country where it’s affected by a very large event um has less room to move than say a larger country – that’s-that’s a statement of fact. having said that, new zealand finds itself in economically quite a strong position, so gross debt to gdp is under 20% currently, and we are going into our budget process on may the 19th with a zero budget, so instead of spending a billion dollars more, we will spend zero. and that money will be used over time, um to pay for the earthquake. so we are addressing that through essentially trimming government expenditure.
HT: but what you do not have in nz right now is-is strong growth, in fact you have virtually no growth at all, and that’s really not something you can blame on the earthquake. I just wonder whether you, with all of your financial background, over-estimated your ability, and the country’s ability to deliver, ahh, sustainable growth, because it isn’t happening, is it?
JK: well we wouldn’t accept that position. i mean for a start off, the global financial crisis had quite an impact, so when we came in to office at the end of 2008, the country had experienced 3 quarters of negative growth, and that continued into the back-end of 2008 and into early 2009. but if you strip the earthquake out and say ‘ok how does nz really look’ we have a very strong commodity sector, so it’s not just diary prices – forestry, lamb, beef, seafood, all of those are at record highs, and not withstanding that we’re combatting very high exchange rate, actually that part of our economy is very strong, we have the rugby world cup in new zealand, the christchurch rebuild will add probably a percent to the gdp every year for the next, 5 to 7 years. so, look i, the picture that we see, is one that we see is one of growth, above 4%
HT: (interjecting)well y-y-y-you’re painting a rosy picture, which I think a lot of new zealanders might-might question. I mean they heard you, for example, in-in, ahh, the last couple of years, consistently saying, ‘we are going to close the prosperity gap, the wages gap’ in particular ‘with Australia’, and people compare yourselves with australia. it hasn’t happened, in fact the wages gap is wider than ever.
JK: (smiling) actually we also reject that proposition. but let me take you through that, so. (chuckles)
HT: well, the-the opposition leader just the other day, Phil Goff he said “the best this government can do is now trumpet that new zealand wages are 30% below australia’s giving us a supposed competitive advantage. he used to talk about the fact we were going to close the gap’
JK: I won’t get into a political debate about the robustness of his numbers. but let me-let me take this step back for you. new zealand has had a widening wage gap with australia [why? why?] over the course of the last 40 years. primarily mineral resources base in australia. so australia’s very minerally wealthy, and china’s having a huge impact on their market. so to give you some idea of that, the capital investment going into the mining sector in australia, for the last decade, has averaged about 5 to 10 billion dollars a year. in the last 3 years alone in australia it’s been 55 billion dollars a year.
HT: i’m sure you don’t want to spend the whole interview comparing yourselves to australia, but, here is one important fact. more than a quarter of new zealand’s graduates, that is the brightest and the best that your country’s producing, are now living outside of your own country. that’s 10 times the rate for australia-born graduates, and that suggests to me that you have got a fundamental, a structual problem.
That’s fantastic! the interviewer doesn’t rate Key’s credentials at all, does he? and don’t accept/reject the proposition huh – only because he can’t deny them.
Haven’t updated this for a while but since National Ltd™ came to power:
has been caught out repeatedly lying in the run up to and during the election campaign about its real intentions in relation to the environment
celebrated the opening of the foreign-owned Pike River Coal Ltd mine on DOC land adjacent to the Paparoa National Park from which 1 megatonne of coal will be extracted per year for the next 20 years – Pike River Coal Ltd has announced that it has found additional coal in the national park
removed a proposed efficiency standard (MEPS) on incandescent lightbulbs
reversed a moratorium on building new gas/oil/coal power stations
removed the bio fuel subsidy
scrapped the scheme that would have penalised imported vehicles producing high emissions
removed regulations for water efficient new housing
renewed leases on sensitive high country farms which were meant to return to DOC
reversed restrictions on the freeholding of vast swathes of land on the edge of the Southern Lakes
arbitrarily excised 400 hectares from the brand new Oteake Conservation Park, including the most important and, ecologically, the rarest part of the new Park, the tussock and shrubland that went right down to the banks of the Manuherikia River, to enable future access to lignite
said nothing to say in regard to the World Commission on Protected areas of IUCN’s severe criticism of its intention to investigate mineral resources and mining opportunities in protected conservation areas including our three UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Te Wahi Pounamu-South West New Zealand, Tongariro National Park and the Sub Antarctic Islands
approved two prospecting permit applications lodged by Australian iron-ore giant Fortescue Metals Group subsidiary FMG Pacific lodged in June – areas covered by the two-year permits include an 8204-square-kilometre area of seabed adjoining the west coast from Cape Reinga to the Manukau Harbour and a 3798-square-kilometre prospecting area of land from Cape Reinga to the Kaipara Harbour including Ninety Mile Beach, the west side of the Aupouri Peninsula, Kaitaia and the Hokianga.
approved an additional prospecting permit for Fortesque Metals in relation to 3568sq km right next door to the Kahurangi National Park where the Heaphy Track is
was forced to release its Ministry of Economic Development (MED) report under the Official Information Act that proclaims “significant mineral potential” in the Fiordland, Kahurangi and Paparoa national parks – the report said the Waitutu area of the Fiordland National Park had sufficient petroleum reserves to be “worthy” of inclusion in a review of conservation land protected from mining
secretly granted the minerals industry the right to veto proposed National Park boundaries and permission for any such vetoes to be kept confidential – in spite of recommendations from its own officials against any such a veto
Minster of Conservation Tim Grosser, on 29 August 2009, called for caring New Zealanders to halt their “emotional hysteria” and recognise that conservation land should be mined for minerals and went on to say “Mining in a modern, technological way can have a negligible effect”
Associate Minister of Conservation Kate Wilkinson, in an interview in “Canterbury Farming” rubished her own department, DOC, suggesting it was incapable of looking after the high country reserves and parks under its control
gutted the home insulation scheme
pulled $300 million out of public transport, walking and cycling schemes and added it to a pot of $2 billion to ‘upgrade’ state highways
changed the law to provide billions of dollar in subsidies for polluters via the ETS casino which is now a target for scamming by international criminals
begun a process of gutting the Resource Management Act to make it difficult/impossible for the public to lodge appeals against developers
removed the ability of Auckland to introduce a fuel levy to fund planned public transport upgrades
left electrification of the national rail network up in the air without promised funding commitments
removed the Ministry for the Environment’s programme to make Government Departments ‘carbon neutral’
removed funding for public tv advertising on sustainability and energy efficiency
pulled funding for small-town public litter bin recycling schemes
cabinet ministers expressing public support the bulldozing of Fiordland
reduced Department of Conservation funding by about $50 million over three years
canceled funding for the internationally acclaimed ‘Enviroschools’ programme
usurped the democratic role of local Councils of determining policies for their citizens by requiring the abandonment of the efficient and well-established tree protection rules for urban areas
set about revamping Auckland governance in a way that is likely to greatly reduce the ‘Environmental Watchdog’ role of the the current Regional Council
removed Auckland’s metropolitan limits and opened the gateway for unfettered urban sprawl
defended internationally the importation of rain-forest-wrecking palm kernel and stood silent while Federated Farmers called Greenpeace “terrorists”
stood silent while Godfrey Bloom, a Member of the European Parliament and infamous Climate Change Denialist, publicly rejoiced in the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior – who was doing so while standing on a dock next to the replacement vessel
took a 0% emissions reduction target to Copenhagen. Yes, seriously, that isn’t a misprint – that was the lower bound of their negotiation platform – then missed the 01/02/10 deadline for commitment to action it had agreed to – meanwhile 55 of the 80 countries which attended did make the deadline
secretly cancelled the internationally recognised scheme for the mandatory labelling of exotic woods to ensure the timber has not been taken from rain forests in direct contradiction of its own statements made at the 13th World Forestry Congress in Argentina
supported the Department of Conservation’s decision to open up the pristine Cathedral Cove to an ice-cream franchise
given the Department of Conservsation $1.7 million to further develop commercial activities on DOC land and started an “off set” plan allowing company’s to damage the conservation estate if they agree to improve land elsewhere – no monitoring regime has been suggested on put in place
left DOC director-general Al Morrison to announce that DOC is to charge for services that had been free and, to soften the public up to the idea that there will be more “energy generation schemes” operating on DOC land
taken no action to reduce existing pollution pouring into the Manawatu River and is “leaving it up to industry” to come up with solutions to heal the river which was described by the Cawthorn Institute as “one of the worst polluted in the Western world”
announced a $1.1 million industry subsidy to kick start marine farming without identifying no-go areas nor putting in place a consultation process for individiuals, communities, and other general coastal users
blamed New Zealanders after a Japanese whaling ship deliberately smashed into a smaller, more vulnerable craft in the open sea
was forced to release documents under the Official Information Act which confirm that DOC has “giving up” on ecologically valuable high-country land in the Mackenzie Basin because of funding cuts. The released documents cite “statements made by ministers”, “diminishing funding” and the Government’s new high-country policies as reasons for the changed stance – the comments from DOC were made after Land Information New Zealand (Linz), which manages the tenure review process, ignored DOC’s previous conservation recommendations for the farms
used former National Party minister and current director of Open Country Cheese – a company convicted of filthy farming practices – Wyatt Creech to head up an enquiry into Environment Canterbury which had been standing up the dairy farmers’ demands for more and more water resources and less and less regulation. The Creech report recommended the Environmental Canterbury be sacked and replaced with government appointments and the voters of Canterbury do without democracy until the water situation had been resolved. The Canterbury area holds 50 percent of New Zealand’s fresh water reserves and 50 percent of the water required for hyrdo energy. The Creech report said Environmental Centerbury put too much focus on the environment.
Despite international condemnation for knowing next to nothing about the parlous state of the New Zealand fisheries, National Ltd™ bucks international trends, pours more acid on the 100% Pure brand and increases the bluefin tuna quota.
New Zealand is subject to international criticism for its backing of commericial whaling which National Ltd supports
Government-owned company Solid Energy runs an essay competition entitled “The role of coal in sustainable energy solutions for New Zealand” for school children. First prize is a trip to New Zealand’s largest coal customer, China.
Supported access fees for entrance onto DOC walkways – fee introduced following cuts to DOC’s budget.
New Zealand’s environment would profit from mining national parks, Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson says.
Department of Conservation director-general Al Morrison said the conservation estate created “opportunities to do a whole lot for a lot of different people. We’ve got to get away from this idea that somehow we have to protect one-third of New Zealand for a certain constituency and put it in a jar of formaldehyde and leave it.”
State coal miner Solid Energy could get an extra slice of the action if highly sensitive conservation land is opened to gold, silver and other prospecting. Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee said Solid Energy’s work could be widened to include other minerals and resources, or it could form part of a new state-owned enterprise to maximise government returns from any mining. He did not rule out the company, which produces 80 per cent of New Zealand’s coal, having a role in mining gold and other minerals on Great Barrier Island and other conservation areas being eyed by the Government http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/3519703/Golden-possibility-for-state-coal-miner
>removed a proposed efficiency standard (MEPS) on incandescent lightbulbs <
I posted a lot of mercury bombs into parliament, spreading mercury vapour throughout the postal system and parliament buildings, and it was legal, the bulbs tended to break as they went into the post box.
But it got the idiot law stopped 😉 … maybe?
@BLiP! – excellent stuff, i’ve been trying to pull together a summary like that for some time. Request permission to shamelessly borrow/promulgate.
Despite the almost non-exhaustive nature of that list, it’s pretty much a lot worse than that.
try: Sacked ECAN councillors claiming ‘dysfunctional’, but OIA documents reveal Carter, Brownlee and Key up to their eyeballs in pushing officials to get rid of ‘hurdles’ to ‘accelerating large scale water storage and irrigation in Canterbury’. Guess what the two hurdles were identified as? Water Conservation Orders and Council Processes.
What do we see come out of the toothless NPS on freshwater this week? a fund entitled “Irrigation acceleration fund”. Subtle? not very.
For those of you not up with the play, while the media spotlight played out on the sacking of ECAN councillors, the true fatal thrust to water in Canterbury was the amending of Water Conservation Orders (essentially National Park like status given to rivers that met the required tests under the RMA) so that there is no longer a right of appeal.
The comments here have spurred me into tidying the list up and adding more to it. I’ve been busy with mahi – the evil, foreign-owned multi-national I work for has decided the best way to increase productivity is to not replace staff who leave. That means the rest of us have to pick up the slack. Do you think our salaries have gone up to reflect the extra work? Like fuck.
SOMEONE needs to put this up on Youtube and pass it on to the New Zealand media or else no-one will see or hear about it except for us geeky lefties that will not vote for the brat anyway.
There is a lot more to this interview than the freely available highlights online.
I followed someone’s instructions here and downloaded it via a hidemyass proxy but i don’t know how to convert it to youtube friendly …
Made total mincemeat of him. Makes you realise how pathetic NZ current affairs TV is. Can’t we get Stephen Sackur to come to NZ for the election campaign?
richard you are right. current afairs in NZ is pathetic and that is the way these people want it. they know they can stand up to the hair and teeth jobs shoulder tapped by TVNZ and the others so to save themselves the bother they just dont have any current affairs at all! very convenient and then they say that the public isnt interested. well they would be if there was some blood on the floor every now and again instead of the saccharine hucksterism that passes for investigative journalism these days.
You know that there’s something wrong with the MSM when, confronted with scientific research, they go and get a businessman to cast doubt on the scientists research.
HA! Whilst I was listening to the interview in the above clip my 14 year old daughter was sitting on the sofa behind me mucking about on facebook or whatever and she suddenly piped up and said, ‘Why can’t he just answer the question!’
Re: the question whether NZ will let Crafar being bought – I can mostly hear that slurring guy trying to buy interview time while figuring out how to answer, nay, avoid the question.
This one that NZ elected as PM in 2008 shows himself to be very mediocre, nay, an embarrassment at coming up with responses when he is interviewed.
Cut out the explanation of the research- cut out the journalist saying you aren’t answering the questions and end with the journalist patting Key down…
John Key should be immortalised ” Compared to other countries we are 100%” compared to sum I achieved 100% in School cert English 🙂 !!!
I only wished that JK was min of education when I was at school !!!!!
This is pure magic and should be aired many times. The unfortunate thing is that this will be lost on many. Still even so late in the day nice to have a chuckle. Pure magic
Anyone know when the full interview will be on again and where. There maybe some more gems that were missed on the 3 minute clip
Another classic part is near the end, where Key goes on about NZers supporting the monarchy based on a poll that said 85% of people here supported bringing back knighthoods. Shortly afterwards, Sarkur points out that a poll he has seen says around 40% of NZers want a republic. Key responds by saying “There’s always some random poll that you can draw from but…”
Everytime i watch Key’s answers my face meets the palms of my hands at regular intervals. I know NZ does have some decent journo’s but could you imagine Key getting that type of grilling with more regulararity. His tenure as PM would’ve been finished long ago. Since Muldoon’s over the top treatment of any journo’s not giving the Nats favourable treatment back in the early 80’s there seems to be an utter lack of consistent probing invesitgative journalism in NZ putting chancers like Key under real public scrutiny. That coupled with the severe scaling back in NZ based newsrooms.
Sackur is not known as one the BBC’s hardest interviewers. But he was doing what any investigative political journo does well. Puts his subject under pressure and see’s how they react. In Key’s case not very well. Sackur having dealt with the seasoned Westminster politico’s for years was always going to have done his research on Key and most of it was not going to be favourable. As oppossed to the Herald who have just gone to their default position of being the Nat’s propoganda leaflet. The Herald article almost seems to hint that the big old nasty BBC had no right to harrass NZ’s glorious leader. Plus going to a NZ business bloke to refute the claims of a respected scientist must surely be the Herald’s idea of a piss take.
Key must be asking himself “why can’t all international TV invites be as intellectually challenging as Letterman”?
Having watched the full interview, I actually think that your average viewer would think that Key does OK. Don’t get me wrong imho Key is evading questions, contradicting himself (most notably with the whole “academics and lawyers” and republic v monarchy statistics) etc
But he is very good at doing it while smiling without ever getting aggressive and taking the bait. Most people, when proven wrong like he is, a few times just in this interview (!), or when caught out lying, e.g. the whole Kiwirail shares thing before the 08 election, would go on the attack or get really flustered. He just sticks to some semi-evasive waffle, might even partially concede a point to conceal the fact that he is getting caught red-handed, and remains mild-mannered.
How does he get away with it? Well, in NZ, the casual mild-mannered approach is king. It’s a cultural thing. Politicians like Clark and Goff who are too serious, too intellectual, or too earnest invoke suspicion – they must be full of themselves if they aren’t constantly in self-deprecating humour mode or if they use technical vocabulary (tall poppy syndrome) – and are called “robots” “hapless ideologues” “ivory tower types” and so on. They are not “one of Us”. Key on the other hand is your “average white businessman familyman golfplaying aucklander” type who speaks the language of low-level corporate office. He ticks all the boxes for the Herald, most journalists, tv, etc. as being “one of Us” so he has significantly greater leeway on any subject anyway. He fits into what the Nats would see as the “mainstream NZer” mould quite nicely. Add to that his casual, friendly mild manners and our journos hesitate to attack him because they would be attacking a friendly one-of-us type bloke – they will be the ones seen as unreasonable aggressors. Even Sackur when he nailed him couldn’t bring himself to go all the way.
Invoking “pragmatism” also gets him off the hook. This is an anglo-saxon misnomer to conceal a dominant ideology in this case a watered down neo-liberal approach. Neoliberals can afford to be conservatives in NZ, in the literal sense of the term, because we are not that far off a neoliberal paradise anyway. And Key like many other politicians will avoid rocking the boat by any means possible. This “conservative” line is seen as both “moderate” and “reasonable”.
So the nicknames “teflon” “slippery” are all well-founded. Unless a respected journo nails him with an unrelenting line of questioning on prime time telly – and the PR boys will avoid that at all costs – he will remain our friendly PM whose policies go unnoticed and unchallenged behind the artificial veil that is his Image. If only they would show a few more vids on the news of him sneering and jeering nastily in the house, that could go a long way to undermining his “nice-guy-not-a-politician” persona. His honeymoon with a befuddled media is not even over yet and it’s almost election time so there is little hope of that happening…
It takes the BBC – a leading overseas media organisation – to show the true face of our useless “leader”. Again this proves the uselessness of most NZ media. Apart from a few exceptions the NZ media has become so useless and pre-occupied with “image” and “presentation” that no matters of substance are reported on in-depth. Like with our supermarkets we have something like a duopoly owning the newspapers, magazines and some TV and radio stations. Public broadcasting gets treated worse year by year.
So many in NZ are so brain-washed, they do not get a chance to see “real” questions being asked to our leading politicians. Many do not even bother informing themselves, because they have grown up in a society where commercials on radio and television take up a per centage of broadcasting times, so that any program gets fragmented and listeners and viewers constantly distracted and otherwise brainwashed to simply be “consumers”.
This interview should be a revelation of how useless John Key really is. He dodges questions all the time, contradicts himself, denies facts and make a total fool of himself. Sadly hardly anyone in NZ bothers watching or listening to Hard Talk!
So no wonder we get election results that make critical and informed people wonder how that came about.
At least one tv program showed a 45second extract of this – Media7 on TVNZ7
TVNZ7 the best news in the country at 8pm where they take time to interview people and get to the bottom of issues unlike the tabloid headlines prevalent on TV1 TV3 Prime.
TVNZ7 the channel discarded by our beloved national govt
no surprises there – Key and Coleman are conducting their own Glorious Cultural Revolution
with the motto “Kill Public Service Broadcasting”.
Nothing more from me today - I'm off to Wellington, to participate in the city's annual roleplaying convention (which has also eaten my time for the whole week, limiting blogging despite there being interesting things happening). Normal bloggage will resume Tuesday. ...
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponscame into force today, making the development, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal in international law. Every nuclear-armed state is now a criminal regime. The corporations and scientists who design, build and maintain their illegal weapons are now ...
"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected ...
by Daphna Whitmore Twitter and Facebook shutting down Trump’s accounts after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill is old news now but the debates continue over whether the actions against Trump are a good thing or not. Those in favour of banning Trump say Twitter and Facebook are private companies and ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichThanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 ...
Tide of tidal data rises Having cast our own fate to include rising sea level, there's a degree of urgency in learning the history of mean sea level in any given spot, beyond idle curiosity. Sea level rise (SLR) isn't equal from one place to another and even at a particular ...
Well, some of those chickens sure came home bigly, didn’t they… and proceeded to shit all over the nice carpet in the Capitol. What we were seeing here are societal forces that have long had difficulty trying to reconcile people to the “idea” of America and the reality of ...
In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated ...
Peter S. Ross, University of British ColumbiaThe Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern ...
Susan St John makes the case for taxing a deemed rate of return on excessive real estate holdings (after a family home exemption), to redirect scarce housing resources to where they are needed most. Read the full article here ...
I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the ...
The hypocritical actions of political leaders throughout the global Covid pandemic have damaged public faith in institutions and governance. Liam Hehir chronicles the way in which contemporary politicians have let down the public, and explains how real leadership means walking the talk. During the Blitz, when German bombs were ...
Over the years, we've published many rebuttals, blog posts and graphics which came about due to direct interactions with the scientists actually carrying out the underlying research or being knowledgable about a topic in general. We'll highlight some of these interactions in this blog post. We'll start with two memorable ...
Yesterday we had the unseemly sight of a landleech threatening to keep his houses empty in response to better tenancy laws. Meanwhile in Catalonia they have a solution for that: nationalisation: Barcelona is deploying a new weapon in its quest to increase the city’s available rental housing: the power ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters, PhD The 2020 global wildfire season brought extreme fire activity to the western U.S., Australia, the Arctic, and Brazil, making it the fifth most expensive year for wildfire losses on record. The year began with an unprecedented fire event ...
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a digital story – read the full story here.Tess TuxfordKo te Kauri Ko Au, Ko te Au ko Kauri I am the kauri, the kauri is me Te Roroa proverb In Waipoua Forest, at the top of the North Island, New ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... Story of the Week... Coming attraction: IPCC's upcoming major climate assessmentLook for more emphasis on 'solutions,' efforts by cities, climate equity ... and outlook for emissions cuts in ...
Ringing A Clear Historical Bell: The extraordinary images captured in and around the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021 mirror some of the worst images of America's past.THERE IS A SCENE in the 1982 movie Missing which has remained with me for nearly 40 years. Directed by the Greek-French ...
To impact or not to impeach? I understand why some of those who are justifiably aghast at Trump’s behaviour over recent days might still counsel against impeaching him for a second time. To impeach him, they argue, would run the risk of making him a martyr in the eyes of ...
The Capitol Building, Washington DC, Wednesday, 6 January 2021. Oh come, my little one, come.The day is almost done.Be at my side, behold the sightOf evening on the land.The life, my love, is hardAnd heavy is my heart.How should I live if you should leaveAnd we should be apart?Come, let me ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 3, 2021 through Sat, Jan 9, 2021Editor's ChoiceAfter the Insurrection: Accountability, Reform, and the Science of Democracy The poisonous lies and enablers of sedition--including Senator Hawley, pictured ...
This article, guest authored by Prof. Angela Gallego-Sala & Dr. Julie Loisel, was originally published on the Carbon Brief website on Dec 21, 2020. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article and comments. Peatlands Peatlands are ecosystems unlike any other. Perpetually saturated, their ...
The assault on the US Capitol and constitutional crisis that it has caused was telegraphed, predictable and yet unexpected and confusing. There are several subplots involved: whether the occupation of the Michigan State House in May was a trial run for the attacks on Congress; whether people involved in the ...
On Christmas Eve, child number 1 spotted a crack in a window. It’s a double-glazed window, and inspection showed that the small, horizontal crack was in the outermost pane. It was perpendicular to the frame, about three-quarters of the way up one side. The origins are a mystery. It MIGHT ...
Anne-Marie Broudehoux, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)Will the COVID-19 pandemic prompt a shift to healthier cities that focus on wellness rather than functional and economic concerns? This is a hypothesis that seems to be supported by several researchers around the world. In many ways, containment and physical distancing ...
Does the US need to strike a grand bargain with like-minded countries to pool their efforts? What does this tell us about today’s global politics? Perhaps the most remarkable editorial of last year was the cover leader of the London Economist on 19 November 2020. Shortly after Joe Biden was ...
Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato and Valmaine Toki, University of WaikatoAotearoa New Zealand likes to think it punches above its weight internationally, but there is one area where we are conspicuously falling behind — the number of sites recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Globally, there are 1,121 ...
An event organised by the Auckland PhilippinesSolidarity group Have a three-course lunch at Nanam Eatery with us! Help support the organic farming of our Lumad communities through the Mindanao Community School Agricultural Foundation. Each ticket is $50. Food will be served on shared plates. To purchase, please email phsolidarity@gmail.com or ...
"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here." Prisons are places of unceasing emotional and physical violence, unrelieved despair and unforgivable human waste.IT WAS NATIONAL’S Bill English who accurately described New Zealand’s prisons as “fiscal and moral failures”. On the same subject, Labour’s Dr Martyn Findlay memorably suggested that no prison ...
This is a re-post from Inside Climate News by Ilana Cohen. Inside Climate News is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here. Whether or not people accept the science on Covid-19 and climate change, both global crises will have lasting impacts on health and ...
. . American Burlesque As I write this (Wednesday evening, 6 January), the US Presidential election is all but resolved, confirming Joe Biden as the next President of the (Dis-)United State of America. Trump’s turbulent political career has lasted just four years – one of the few single-term US presidents ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
The Government has approved an exception class for 1000 international tertiary students, degree level and above, who began their study in New Zealand but were caught offshore when border restrictions began. The exception will allow students to return to New Zealand in stages from April 2021. “Our top priority continues ...
Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
The commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Ruapekapeka represents an opportunity for all New Zealanders to reflect on the role these conflicts have had in creating our modern nation, says Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Kiri Allan. “The Battle at Te Ruapekapeka Pā, which took ...
Babies born with tongue-tie will be assessed and treated consistently under new guidelines released by the Ministry of Health, Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall announced today. Around 5% to 10% of babies are born with a tongue-tie, or ankyloglossia, in New Zealand each year. At least half can ...
The prisoner disorder event at Waikeria Prison is over, with all remaining prisoners now safely and securely detained, Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says. The majority of those involved in the event are members of the Mongols and Comancheros. Five of the men are deportees from Australia, with three subject to ...
Travellers from the United Kingdom or the United States bound for New Zealand will be required to get a negative test result for COVID-19 before departing, and work is underway to extend the requirement to other long haul flights to New Zealand, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed today. “The new PCR test requirement, foreshadowed last ...
In a historic corner of Dunedin, startup culture is thriving. Catherine McGregor visited the city’s Warehouse Precinct to meet the people driving the movement. When Jason and Kate Lindsey bought the four storey building now known as Petridish, it was an absolute wreck. Once home to a thriving hat and textiles ...
Summer reissue: The Fold’s very first guest is back to tell Duncan Greive how she pulled off the media deal of the year.The chaotic couple of weeks which finally saw the end of the Stuff-NZME saga were riveting and strange, replete with stock exchange announcements, legal challenges and finally the ...
Chris Liddell has dropped his candidacy to become director-general of the Paris-based OECD. Without support from the Ardern government and vilified in the media as somehow being involved in the encouragement by Donald Trump of the Washington riots, he plainly saw he had little chance of crowning his stellar career ...
Tara Ward hands out her first impression roses as she dives deep into the sea of single men vying to win The Bachelorette NZ’s heart. While the world burns in a searing fireball of unpredictability, we can take comfort in the fact that some things never change. The heart still yearns, ...
People from all around New Zealand will be converging on the super-secret Waihopai satellite interception spybase, in Marlborough, on Saturday January 30th. ...
In its Thursday editorial the NZ Herald speaks an important truth: “Investment important to stay on track”. This won’t have startled its more literate readers but in its text it notes the strong result in the latest Global Dairy Trade auction, which prompted Westpac to raise its forecast for dairy ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Mark, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Kyoritsu Women’s University With the spread of COVID-19 steadily worsening in Japan since the onset of winter — daily records for infections and deaths continue to be broken — the fate of the Tokyo Summer ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Taylor, Early Career Research Leader, Emerging Viruses, Inflammation and Therapeutics Group, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University All eyes are on COVID-19 vaccines, with Australia’s first expected to be approved for use shortly. But their development in record time, without compromising ...
Yesterday’s government announcement on new state housing is a pathetic response to the biggest housing crisis in New Zealand since the 1940s. At a time when the country needs an industrial-scale state house building programme, the government ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Obadiah Mulder, PhD Candidate in Computational Biology, University of Southern California Australia is in the midst of tropical cyclone season. As we write, a cyclone is forming off Western Australia’s Pilbara coast, and earlier in the week Queenslanders were bracing for a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lynette Vernon, School of Education – VC Research Fellow, Edith Cowan University When the holidays end, barring a fresh outbreak of COVID-19, teenagers across Australia will head back to school. Some will bounce out of bed well before the alarm goes off, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW In an age of hyperpartisan politics, the Biden presidency offers a welcome centrism that might help bridge the divides. But it is also Biden’s economic centrism that offers a chance to cut through what has become ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology Twenty years ago, on January 25 2001, a virtually unknown German supermarket chain quietly opened its first stores in Australia. The two stores – one in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Giuffre, Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Technology Sydney Bluey is easily the most successful Australian television show of the last decade. A record-breaking success for its local broadcaster the ABC, as well as production partners BBC Studios and Screen Australia, ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permissionIt will take $3 million to clean up 1 million litres of abandoned toxic waste from a property in Ruakaka - three times more than the last big chemical clean-up undertaken by government agencies A two-year mission to clean up 1 million ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. The action Biden took on just his first afternoon in office demonstrates a radical shift in priority for the US when it comes to its efforts to combat the climate crisis. It could put more pressure on New Zealand to step up. ...
Ban Bomb Day event at the New Brighton Pier, 9am, on January 22nd, 2021 January 22nd, 2021, marks the first day the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) Enters into Force and becomes international law. Aotearoa NZ is one of the ...
New Zealand triple-code star, Anna Harrison, can't stop returning to the courts - whether it's netball or beach volleyball. She tells Ashley Stanley what keeps drawing her back. The day before Anna Harrison leaps back into netball, she will have one more hit-out at another of her favourite old sports ...
The lights are burning into the night at the New York Yacht Club's America's Cup base as they race to fix their damaged boat. And Suzanne McFadden discovers something surprising may emerge. Out of American Magic’s calamity may come opportunity - for even more speed. While the lights burn bright ...
This week's biggest-selling New Zealand books, as recorded by the Nielsen BookScan New Zealand bestseller list and described by Steve BrauniasFICTION 1 Tell Me Lies by J.P. Pomare (Hachette, $29.99) Every January, there's a new best-selling crime thriller by the New Zealand-born author who lives in Melbourne. Pomare is ...
Our approach so far in trying to end what Dr Collin Tukuitonga describes as a 'racist' disease - rheumatic fever - has not worked. It's time we try something new, he writes. Acute rheumatic fever and the rheumatic heart disease it causes, long-known as a disease of poverty, is a blight on ...
New to sailing? With the Prada Cup resuming this weekend, here’s how to bluff your way into sounding like a pro. When I was 10, my mum made my brother and I join the local sailing club. It was a favourite pastime of families in Kerikeri, and my brother was actually ...
A formal complaint to the UN, signed by a NZ Muslim group, says France’s Islamophobic laws and policies are entrenching discrimination and breaching human rights laws. The Khadija Leadership Network has joined a global coalition of Muslim organisations to formally complain about the French government’s systemic entrenchment of Islamophobia and discrimination against ...
Summer reissue: Join Michèle A’Court, Alex Casey, Leonie Hayden and a lineup of incredibly successful New Zealand women as they confront their imposter syndrome once and for all. First published 20 October, 2020. Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members ...
With criticism from National piling on over the property market, the prime minister has detailed when the government will make housing announcements. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marco Rizzi, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Western Australia Some Australians could be receiving a COVID-19 vaccine within weeks. Amid the continued spread of the virus and emergence of highly contagious variants, the federal government has accelerated the start of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University Australia’s Threatened Species Strategy — a five-year plan for protecting our imperilled species and ecosystems — fizzled to an end last year. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Lecturer, General Dentist & PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland Baby teeth, or milk teeth, act like lighthouses to guide the adult ones to their correct destination. A baby tooth will become wobbly and fall out because the adult tooth ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Coley, co-founder of All Good and Karma Drinks.Bananas are one of the ...
Tackling topics such as rugby and body image, Stuff’s latest podcast shines a much-needed light on Aotearoa’s complex relationship with masculinity, writes Trevor McKewen, author of the book Real Men Wear Black.I wasn’t sure what to think when two episodes of the new local podcast He’ll Be Right landed in ...
The Rainforest Alliance reveals that 68%* of Kiwis say the COVID-19 pandemic has made them more conscious about environmental and social sustainability issues. Seventy two percent* state that they have been trying to make more sustainable purchasing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has raised concerns that Australia’s proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code could fundamentally break the internet as we know it. His concerns ...
ANALYSIS:By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path Two weeks after the storming of the US Capitol by the followers of his predecessor, in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Cantrell, Lecturer, Creative Writing & English Literature, University of Southern Queensland Described as “the world’s greatest storyteller”, Roald Dahl is frequently ranked as the best children’s author of all time by teachers, authors and librarians. However, the new film adaptation of ...
Peak housing body, Community Housing Aotearoa (CHA) welcomes the updated Public Housing Plan announced today by Minister Woods, and the commitment by this Government to fix New Zealand’s housing crisis. The 8,000 additional homes are a significant ...
Having recently walked much of the South Island stretch of Te Araroa, Kirsten O’Regan reflects on the magnificent landscapes and interesting characters she encountered along the way.On our 36th day of walking, we climb through the fire-blackened hills above Ohau, stopping to examine heat-disfigured trail markers. Fresh green shoots have ...
Miss Torta in central Auckland is putting the spotlight on a snack that’s commonplace in Mexico, but until now relatively unknown in New Zealand.You’ve heard of a torta, but what is it, exactly? Well, depending on the cuisine it can mean a flatbread, cake, tart, sweet pie, savoury pie or ...
Two of three ministerial statements from the Beehive have been released in the name of the PM over the past two days. The more important, insofar as it involves political action that will affect the wellbeing of significant numbers of Kiwis, was the release of the government’s Public Housing Plan ...
Jacinda Ardern has reminded Labour MPs "ongoing vigilance" will be required in 2021 to avoid another Covid outbreak, admitting she held her breath over the summer break. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zareh Ghazarian, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University Despite many young Australians having a deep interest in political issues, most teenagers have a limited understanding about their nation’s democratic system. Results from the 2019 National Assessment Program – Civics and ...
Pinged $65 for overstaying 10 minutes in a parking block? Put away your hard-earned cash and read this first.Hopefully, by now, I’ve already established myself at The Spinoff as the resident tightarse, determined to avoid all unfair and unnecessary punishments (see: oversize baggage charges). Today, I’m focusing my attention on ...
Nuclear weapons states and their allies risk reputational ruin if they flout a new UN Treaty, Carolina Panico argues The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will come into force this month, on January 22, 2021, turning nuclear weapons into illegal objects. It is an achievement that ...
How does one turn into a rabid extremist over the description of a children’s bike? Emily Writes looks at Facebook comments so you don’t have to.You’ve been there, I know it. You’re scrolling along, trying to avoid QAnon conspiracy theories and Trump apocalypse memes when a story catches your eye. ...
Joe Biden is now the President of the United States and many people across America and throughout the world will consequently be breathing more easily. But while the erratic, unpredictable and irresponsible years of the Trump Presidency may be over, ...
Tough border testing for New Zealand honey imports to Japan is re-igniting the conversation about the use of the weed killer glypohsate in New Zealand. ...
The Taxpayers Union should be aware of the law and of the history of ACC. The ACC is a legal system introduced in 1974 to replace the common law right of accident victims to sue for damages for personal injury sustained as a result of negligence ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne Terrorism, political extremism, Donald Trump, social media and the phenomenon of “cancel culture” are confronting journalists with a range of agonising free-speech dilemmas to which there are no easy answers. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor of the Sydney Pharmacy School, University of Sydney You’ve just come from your monthly GP appointment with a new script for your ongoing medical condition. But your local pharmacy is out of stock of your usual medicine. Your ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deanna D’Alessandro, Professor & ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney On Wednesday this week, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was measured at at 415 parts per million (ppm). The level is the highest in human history, and is growing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Renwick, Professor, Physical Geography (climate science), Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington It might be summer in New Zealand but we’re in for some wild weather this week with forecasts of heavy wind and rain, and a plunge in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zareh Ghazarian, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Monash University Despite many young Australians having a deep interest in political issues, most teenagers have a limited understanding about their nation’s democratic system. Results from the 2019 National Assessment Program – Civics and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University Last week, the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney came under fire for their (since removed) policy stating “only transgender women who’ve undergone a gender reassignment surgery are allowed entry”. The policy was ...
There are good grounds for optimism after the guardrails of American democracy held firm through to Joe Biden's inauguration today as President, writes Stephen Hoadley Pessimism abounds about the perilous condition of American democracy. Commentators and headline writers proffer memes such as ‘broken and divided nation’, ‘the threat from within’. ...
*This article was originally appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. Donald Trump will forever be remembered as the president who was impeached twice - and for his rhetoric that struck a chord so deep in America that it will take years to dissipate. Donald Trump leaves Washington with the lowest approval ...
A new plan shows how and where the Government will build 8,000 new state housing places it funded in Budget 2020, Marc Daalder reports Jacinda Ardern has kicked off the political year with a major announcement, promising hundreds of new state housing places in regional centres across the country. With ...
This is the full transcript of President Joe Biden's speech after being sworn in at his inauguration this morning in Washington DC Chief Justice Roberts, Vice President Harris, Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, Leader McConnell, Vice President Pence, and my distinguished guests, my fellow Americans, this is America's day. This ...
Analysis: President Donald Trump has left the White House, and his deputy chief of staff confirms he is withdrawing his candidacy to lead the OECD. New Zealander Christopher Liddell withdrew his nomination to be Secretary-General of the powerful 37-member OECD and was one of the last members of the Trump Administration to depart ...
Andrew Paul Wood assesses the best-selling picture book by Grahame Sydney It's no great secret the commercially very successful Grahame Sydney has a long-standing beef that his work doesn’t receive more critical and institutional approval. I sympathise about the lack of critical attention, but I can understand why. The Discourse™ ...
This story was produced in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and Columbia Journalism Investigations. It was originally published by Public Integrity, Mother Jones, The Arizona Republic and Orlando Sentinel. It is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the ...
Kate Wills is facing stage four cancer with the same fierce approach she takes into her ocean swimming - never say can't. Even on the mornings Kate Wills feels wretched from her fortnightly chemotherapy treatment, she drags herself up at 5am and goes swimming. “I have to. It’s my job – to ...
Some costs associated with meetings speak for themselves, others are less conspicuous. Victoria University of Wellington's Val Hooper lays those costs out, making suggestions on where we can rein them in. Meetings – when last did we count the costs? And so it’s back to work and one of the ...
Analysis: It has been easy to ignore anyone daring to criticise or even question any aspect of the government’s Covid-19 response. Their voices have rarely been heard, and when they have been raised they have been quickly and decisively howled down by the favoured coterie of academics. ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s US presidential inauguration live blog: inauguration news, analysis and reaction, updated through Wednesday and Thursday. The inauguration ceremony begins at 5.15am Thursday, NZ time, and Joe Biden takes the oath of office around 6am. 7.25am: And what about Trump?In the early hours of this morning, NZ ...
In 10 x 100, we survey a group of 100 people via Stickybeak and ask them 10 questions. Last month we quizzed Wellingtonians. Today, we ask NZ drivers how they’ve found a holiday period without international tourists, and what they get up to while they’re on the road.Across Aotearoa roads ...
Emmanuel Macron's anti-separatist policies have garnered backlash from the international Muslim community. Now, a global coalition has complained to the UN. ...
Minister of Tourism .. touring for himself, not the tourism sector
Yes, Stephen Sackur dear, yes you are right, yes, John Key is 100% pure bullshit
In any case, some folks I know say tourism has been cursed since he took the portfolio
Finally, an interview where some truly difficult points were forced. Made John Key look like a complete amateur and, despite some notable occasions, Stephen Sackeur is a wonderful interviewer who does his research.
The only question left to ask is this: wtf was John Key thinking accepting an interview from the one place that was going to truly sock it to him?
Stephen regularly makes the world’s most powerful people cringe in their chairs and only a few have truly stood their ground and fought with him – he always has an army of facts for any interview he does and isn’t afraid to follow up the 1st punch with a 2nd and 3rd…
I was going to edit and saw your reference … indeed the interview shows up John Key as Minister of Amateurism
*facepalm*
Finally, an interview where some truly difficult points were forced.
Sorry just spilt coffee over my Keyboard
where was I ?
>Finally, an interview where some truly difficult points were forced.<
Not really passing judgement on Hardtalk verses Campbell Live, but Key refuses to front on CL or any program where he might be asked similar questions, this interview could be look at as entrapment, maybe not only should we feel embarrassed, but sorry for our dear leader.
The wanker
Front on New Zealand TV you slack prick
god, he gets tetchy after a couple of questions… and then it gets worse.
“we’re 100% pure, relative to other countries”
and when he asks Key if he’s happy to have china owning Kiwi farmland
“well, we’re happy to have them as a major trading partner”
“that’s not what I asked you, is it?”
is there a link to the full interview?
What an embarrassment! Opposition parties could have a field day with this performance. “100% pure relative to other countries” Better than a Tui ad. So ‘unemployment is really good compared to …!”
Spain where unemployment hit 21% – depression level (not that that is mentioned in the NZH article).
BBC iplayer can only be accessed in the UK. I’m wondering if it will show up on sky here?
There is an episode of hardtalk on BBC World at 3:30am tonight (which presumably will also be shown on TV1), but I’m not sure if it is this interview. Some commentators on open mike yesterday mentioned watching this episode, not sure where they are located.
Hard Talk is scheduled to show on TV One overnight at 3.30am Wednesday. However, it was also on the scheduled early this morning at the same time, so I’m not sure if it will be the Key interview tomorrow am.
Watched the whole thing last evening on skys 93BBC. Painful, embarrassing and cringe worthy.
After doing some digging, I found that proxies from hidemyass.com seem to work (click on IP: Port Proxies in the centre of the menu, in the box on the left scroll down until you get United Kingdom and hit Search).
The 2nd one on the list is let me download the Windows Media Player version, which is 242mb. And it also appears that I can watch it! There’s DRM that forces it to expire 30 days after you’ve downloaded it, and no-doubt it’s also doing geo-location checks on my IP address, so need to use the proxy to watch it.
If no better source turns up, I might see if I can screen-scrape this, encode it and upload it somewhere on the net. Youtube probably won’t work though as BBC will probably automatically send them a take down notice.
Species extinction.. ‘what are you going to do about it?’
Make funding endangered, of course!
Hope TVNZ picks up that interview.
It woud be neglect if MSM do not pick up on this. Any bets on this happening? Has there ever been a more cringe worthy international performance by a NZ PM?
Oh the stupid it hurts.(PR folk that is not slippery sideshow)…..after years of laughing at the Ozzies having Howard as PM the worms turned big time with sideshow up front hamming it up on the world stage….am I coping it big time now from across the ditch.
Aye
Key said that NZ will inevitably become a republic but not under his watch.
He has previously said that the age of retirement will not go up under his watch.
Another inevitability that he should address now if he wanted to do the best for the country.
He is a coward.
I couldn’t believe the ridiculous smirk he has on his face at the start of the interview. I can’t imagine any other leader that would go into an interview with an expression like that.
Nah, don’t worry, the stupid smirk was lost faster than the Kiwi dollar has lost a cent on the currency market on a bad trading day.
In fairness to John Key, he’s probably the only leader who’s never watched Hard Talk and doesn’t know who Stephen Sackur is.
Well he knows who he is nowfor farkin sure. Oh that cheered me up after a bad day.
Irish, I’m still getting my head around them making him MP for Helensville.
Can’t I just call this guy a hack or not actually go on his programme like I would in NZ?
Quick get Dick Griffin to head the BBC!
He looked from the start as if he was going to be asked about corgis and the LotRings, like back home. Quite fun when he does his assassin eyes when hes reeling off numbers – steely trader squint, probably works on a monitor.
It must have been a real surprise for Shonkey to get a real journalist asking some real questions instead of the patsy arse kissing questions we get from NZ journalists, who are bribed to be Nationals mouth piece. Didn’t he completely fail in the real world where people respect the truth and lies are confronted.
Key’s answers were very telling taking on two flavours. The first was a typical denialist attack – discredit the source by saying it was that scientist’s ‘opinion’ and that he could find other opinions to refute it. His second type of reply was that there wasn’t an issue just ‘look out the window’ at the natural beauty.
The first is disingenuous, the second is quite scary if that is his yardstick for conservation. It implies that so long as the green veneer is there then he is happy to sell the 100% NZ brand regardless of any environmental crises going on behind.
Wish I could watch this, but still waiting for my Brighter future and my ultra fast broad band, is there a transcript anywhere?
If you still can’t get it here is an alternative, just about as funny. “John Key has gone missing” http://www.bryangould.net/
Ah, a journo with a brain who has done the research!
IrishBill: you will want to change your handle. We don’t allow identity theft here.
I agree Key should have said something along the lines of:’ “Yes quitre correct – New Zealand isn’t 100% pure, it hasn’t been since colonisation. Sorry about the last ten years of duping tourists into coming here. But well you gotta love the marketing particulalry by politicans like Helen Clark and their officials as they toured around the world suckering it out of money. Again apologies from New Zealand to the world… come down and we’ll make it up to you with some fush n chups & an L&P.”
That’s actually not far off what he did say.
Wow, 2 1/2 years into his term, all Key supporters can say is – it’s all somehow Labour’s fault
LOL
It was a horrendous show of pass the buck in parliament today, with Shonkey doing just that on a number of difficult questions. Next National will be blaming Labour for their drinking.
Can’t blame that on Labour. No Way. No How!!
Accomplices all share blame. Check your history.
http://10yearsyoung.tourismnewzealand.com/
According to John Key “we are masters of our own destiny” LOL
Who is HIS master, that is what I want to know.
he may have meant to say that he was “master of his own domain” – which he isn’t.
Or ‘Captain of my destiny’ a quote attributed to Nelson Mandela according to the movie Invictus
Ha Ha Ha – looks like Shonkey is desperately hoping for some RWC magic to help him win the election too….
Well I have news for you, John the destroyer – you’re not Nelson Mandela, this is not South Africa, and the All Blacks are not the Spring Boks
And do you think that the E-Mails are going to be running thick and fast between his kitten bearing masters, and him?
A friend in the UK sent me this link http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9480610.stm
What was that shit about “two way trade on its way to 12 billion…y’ know, 20 billion”
So the total of import/export trade with China is…what exactly? I mean, fuck. 12 billion is a long way from 20 billion. What is two way trade heading towards and when will it be at the 12 cough 20 billion mark? And how much of that 12 cough 20 billion will be earned by NZ and how much by China?
That aside, I was waiting for him to blame the Christchurch earthquake for…..stuff. And then follow that up by claiming to be 110% committed to…stuff.
Anyway. The Nats publicly dumped the ‘Clean and Green’ sales pitch. So why didn’t he just say that his government recognised the ‘Clean and Green’ image as a bit of a have and move on?
Meanwhile. What are those tougher environmental measures for dairy farming he was referring to? Anyone?
So much GOLD in 3 minutes
For the Greens – “Jump into any river or stream in NZ” Would love to see him being presented a list of rivers or streams to jump into.
I’m thinking of printing T Shirts “Mostly 100% pure”
Do you think he shook off his minders and went over thier heads for the interview?
I’m thinking of printing T Shirts “Mostly 100% pure”
“Was 100% pure” ?
I was wondering the same thing, he’s not usually allowed to do serious interviews.
Maybe he made a new friend at the wedding.
How about “Conditionally 100% New Zealand Pure”
@Billy Fish, I’d suggest Key jump into the Manawatu or Tarawera rivers, and be sure to put his head underwater after doing so.
I watched the interview yesterday on BBC World. Couldd be the same interview if it is on again tonight
If you have MySky, record it. This interview is a much watch.
Seriously, if this ‘100% Pure’ thing is all anyone has picked up on yet from the internet clip, then WOW. There is a whole lot more insight into Key’s mind and character in this interview.
You’re right. Key’s comments re immigration in the interview were also cringe-worthy. All his talk about encouraging worthwhile people to NZ; of them investing in our economy; bringing their skills and money, etc. Has he not been briefed by Kate Wilkinson on the great job she’s done dodging Campbell Live’s attempts to interview her about Martyn Payne? Overall, Key’s HARDtalk interview performance reinforced my view that the guy’s a lightweight.
And just to highlight how the MSM helps Mr – can’t answer questions by himself – Key cover up his mistakes…
MikeMs comment pretty much sums it up:
I’m very impressed at how Stuff’s summary of the interview managed to twist a boring environmental topic into something that was 90% about Key’s thoughts on the Monarchy.
Comment by MikeM on Dim post — May 10, 2011 @ 7:28 pm
Dim Post is also giving this an airing. Most are displeased or more, with our Prime Ministers foolish performance, just as there is an absence of support for Key here. Do Burt and Pete et al only get paid 9-5?
Dim Post
Damn. Doesn’t go quite to the right page.
[Fixed — r0b]
The HardTalk interview has probably done more to boost Goff & Labour’s chances in the November election than any other media event in the past 2 & half years. My friends , scattered across the world wherever HardTalk screened, have all expressed a collective cringe at seeing such a pitiful performance from a NZ PM.
Key’s performance was one that demonstrated what quality interviewing is all about… the interviewer allowing the interviewee to put his own foot in his mouth and then gently probing so that the foot goes even deeper into the speaker’s throat.
There was no excuse for Key being so uninformed, so ignorant and so shallow apart from his own arrogant belief in his PR creation.
It just shows how pathetic the media are here , they let that flimsy , pathetic excuse for a PM get away with SMILE and try the deflection routine . What is it ? do the media get stars in their eyes ?
I just watched the interview on Mysky again.
Sackur refers to New Zealand being “vulnerable” to world economic events, and Key says that any small country that is effected by a large event is vulnerable but New Zealand is in a “economically quite a strong position”!
Sackur then says that one thing New Zealand does not have is strong growth. John Key says that “we don’t accept that position”. ‘Not only dairy… but forestry, land, beef, seafood prices are at record highs.’
Sackur then hits him on NZ having 30% lower wages than Australia, and 25% of NZ Graduates leaving NZ as opposed to 2.5% leaving Australia. Key defends NZ, says that nobody else in the OECD has had as big a population increase as NZ.
It goes on.. but here is the best quote from Sackur:
“You spent many years working in London making a lot of money. And I wonder if you’re the right person to be telling New Zealanders, “You know what, you should stay at home, invest in your own country, and you can make it in your own country” because you had to come here to make it”
Very internationalist perspective from Sackur. Very big picture. No wonder he is so sceptical of Key.
I’ll just put this here…
Helen Clark on HardTalk re: China free trade.
LOL, the comments for that video are priceless, considering the current govt and Key’s performance.
Ref the Helen Clark interview on Hardtalk…That woman made us proud to be NZ’ers. She handled those questions with such skill. That’s the difference between someone who is briefed, goes out of her way to be informed and lives by her principles. That line from her is so true “I say in private what I say in public”. I heard her say that so often. And some of the prescient comments left by viewers are being fulfilled right now.
Too true, the difference in the two interviews is marked.
I didn’t always agree with Helen but she is clearly intelligent, principled, well-informed, and very much her own person. None of which can be said about the present Head Bozo.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had another HC-like person in Labour?
Epic fail from Key.
Wonder if Metiria or others will be on Hard Talk anytime soon.
Real empty interview from Key. Was he hungover from the wedding?
I may be wrong but I think it was conducted here.
It was definitely in London
Please can the NZ MSM get some similar interviewers. So refreshing to have someone that actually did some research, asked real questions and expected real responses in place of the usual one-liner PR spin we get in NZ.
keys had to protect china.. he is ordered to.
it is what peopleabove himtell him ..he has to be careful..hes f**ked up alot though heh
I managed to use a proxy to download the WMP version (see 3.2.4 above). Spent the last 50 minutes trying to transcribe it all, and only got through about 8 minutes of it! It’s 30 minutes long, so this doesn’t seem like a go-er.
Here’s what I have so far. Apologies for any typoes and lack of grammer and punctuation. I’ve tried to get the wording almost as exact as I can, although I might miss a few ‘ums’ and other sounds out, as well as word stresses and Key’s slack-jawed gabbing.
Hard talk today is in central london. my guest is new zealand’s visiting prime minister john key. his first term in office has been a baptism of fire. he’s had to cope with a prolonged economic slowdown, and a string of disasters including a major mining accident and the devastating christchurch earthquake. geographically isolated and small in population, just how resilient is new zealand when put to the test?
HT: prime minister john key, welcome to hard talk
JK: thanks very much, great to be here
HT: is it proving harder than you expected to be new zealand’s prime minister?
JK: well we’ve certainly had more challenges than one might either want or expect, if you think about the time i’ve been in office, nearly three years, we’ve had the global financial crisis, two earthquake in christchurch, ah pike river mine disaster, we’ve ended up having to uh buy and ah bailout a number of finance companies and in recent times provide support for an insurance company which has a large exposure to christchurch so it hasn’t been an easy time for us
HT: those are massive tests, and we’ll go through them in some detail, but they’re tests that you’ve had to face, as, I think the most inexperienced prime minister in the last 100 years of NZ’s history. i mean you-you-you came in to office, I think just 6 years as an MP, 2 years as party leader, you weren’t really terribly well-equipped as a political leader were you?
JK: well it depends on what you think um are the skills that you need to be a good prime minister. it’s certainly true I got there in the fastest time, prior to me was david lange who I think took 7 years, but i think in modern day politcs you are seeing the emergeance of young leaders. um we’re seeing that in the case of president obama now in the US, obviously with david cameron here in the united kingdom, and I think the experience that i had working in a number of international markets here in the uk, singapore, australia and the likes, that banking experience where you have, very much, the economy at the front and centre stage of the issues new zaealand faces. i think actually the mixture of skills I’ve had would be about the right ones.
HT: well, you were a successful banker, you made lots of money, but you’d never, for example, run a city, let alone a ministerial department. and then to go to some of those challenges you’ve already alluded to, here you are, faced, for example, in christchurch, with what you I think described as possibly, maybe, NZ’s darkest day ever, with the christchurch earthquake.
JK: I think the answer to that is that you need to have a plan. I mean ultimately, one of the things the commercial sector teaches you is that you have to have a sense of where you’re going, a sense of how you’re going to achieve that, and to be able to frame up the challenges that ya face. in the case of christchurch, if one puts to one side the human tragedy, which has been enormous – I mean we lost 181 people there – um then th-the process of funding the rebuilding, of what is actually required to make that happen, allow that to happen in a timeframe which is sensible both for new zealand and for the people of christchurch, i think is rather the self-explanatory. now, we have taken some hard calls, we’ve passed legislation which gives us ah very wide and encompassing powers to enable us to rebuild christchurch quickly, we’ve essentially assumed that responsibility at a central government level
HT: does it make sense to rebuild christchurch, quickly? i mean th-the city is still getting serious tremors, it’s had around the area of the city, it’s had 2 major earthquakes in the last 8 or so months. is it wise, to rebuild christchurch?
JK: we believe so – the second earthquake we think is an aftershock of the first one, and that’s been supported by our scientists in new zealand. now it’s true, there’s been 5000 aftershocks in christchurch measuring above, i think 3 or 4 on the richter scale since the first earthquake on the 4th of september.
HT: ah-a-and because of that you have a lot of people in christchurch who are saying ‘i want out of this city, i see no future for myself and my children in this place’
JK: yeah-it’s-been-interesting-actually-the-response wh- look there are about 400,000 people that live in christchurch, and there is no perfect way of measuring how many people have or will leave, but if you put your finger in the air and say what’s that number likely to look like and I’d say it’s 20 to 30 thousand people.
HT: you’re sounding determinedly upbeat, but here’s where it gets very difficult for a very small country – populations not much more than 4 million – we’re talking about your second city, economists reckon that in the short-run, the next year or two, it could mean that rather than expecting growth of over 3%, it might be down to 2%, so it’s a real drag on new zealand’s economic prospects. and that’s, in a way, illustrating how vulnerable your small country is, would you accept that?
JK: well by definition, any small country where it’s affected by a very large event um has less room to move than say a larger country – that’s-that’s a statement of fact. having said that, new zealand finds itself in economically quite a strong position, so gross debt to gdp is under 20% currently, and we are going into our budget process on may the 19th with a zero budget, so instead of spending a billion dollars more, we will spend zero. and that money will be used over time, um to pay for the earthquake. so we are addressing that through essentially trimming government expenditure.
HT: but what you do not have in nz right now is-is strong growth, in fact you have virtually no growth at all, and that’s really not something you can blame on the earthquake. I just wonder whether you, with all of your financial background, over-estimated your ability, and the country’s ability to deliver, ahh, sustainable growth, because it isn’t happening, is it?
JK: well we wouldn’t accept that position. i mean for a start off, the global financial crisis had quite an impact, so when we came in to office at the end of 2008, the country had experienced 3 quarters of negative growth, and that continued into the back-end of 2008 and into early 2009. but if you strip the earthquake out and say ‘ok how does nz really look’ we have a very strong commodity sector, so it’s not just diary prices – forestry, lamb, beef, seafood, all of those are at record highs, and not withstanding that we’re combatting very high exchange rate, actually that part of our economy is very strong, we have the rugby world cup in new zealand, the christchurch rebuild will add probably a percent to the gdp every year for the next, 5 to 7 years. so, look i, the picture that we see, is one that we see is one of growth, above 4%
HT: (interjecting)well y-y-y-you’re painting a rosy picture, which I think a lot of new zealanders might-might question. I mean they heard you, for example, in-in, ahh, the last couple of years, consistently saying, ‘we are going to close the prosperity gap, the wages gap’ in particular ‘with Australia’, and people compare yourselves with australia. it hasn’t happened, in fact the wages gap is wider than ever.
JK: (smiling) actually we also reject that proposition. but let me take you through that, so. (chuckles)
HT: well, the-the opposition leader just the other day, Phil Goff he said “the best this government can do is now trumpet that new zealand wages are 30% below australia’s giving us a supposed competitive advantage. he used to talk about the fact we were going to close the gap’
JK: I won’t get into a political debate about the robustness of his numbers. but let me-let me take this step back for you. new zealand has had a widening wage gap with australia [why? why?] over the course of the last 40 years. primarily mineral resources base in australia. so australia’s very minerally wealthy, and china’s having a huge impact on their market. so to give you some idea of that, the capital investment going into the mining sector in australia, for the last decade, has averaged about 5 to 10 billion dollars a year. in the last 3 years alone in australia it’s been 55 billion dollars a year.
HT: i’m sure you don’t want to spend the whole interview comparing yourselves to australia, but, here is one important fact. more than a quarter of new zealand’s graduates, that is the brightest and the best that your country’s producing, are now living outside of your own country. that’s 10 times the rate for australia-born graduates, and that suggests to me that you have got a fundamental, a structual problem.
Great work. I hope you’re able to complete that process at some point! I for one would be fascinated to read the whole transcript.
Alternatively, some of the HardTalk interviews seem to be on You Tube. It’s possible that this one will make it there eventually too I guess.
Thanks Lanthanide!
I couldnt even find the full WMP, proxy or no – just the 3-minute clip. Pray tell, where does yon full WMP reside?
regards, Terry
Thanks for that, if you or someone posts the transcript somewhere, please let me know.
Nice one L, Stephen Sackur is like a terrier with a bone – he rocks
That’s fantastic! the interviewer doesn’t rate Key’s credentials at all, does he? and don’t accept/reject the proposition huh – only because he can’t deny them.
Haven’t updated this for a while but since National Ltd™ came to power:
has been caught out repeatedly lying in the run up to and during the election campaign about its real intentions in relation to the environment
celebrated the opening of the foreign-owned Pike River Coal Ltd mine on DOC land adjacent to the Paparoa National Park from which 1 megatonne of coal will be extracted per year for the next 20 years – Pike River Coal Ltd has announced that it has found additional coal in the national park
removed a proposed efficiency standard (MEPS) on incandescent lightbulbs
reversed a moratorium on building new gas/oil/coal power stations
removed the bio fuel subsidy
scrapped the scheme that would have penalised imported vehicles producing high emissions
removed regulations for water efficient new housing
renewed leases on sensitive high country farms which were meant to return to DOC
reversed restrictions on the freeholding of vast swathes of land on the edge of the Southern Lakes
arbitrarily excised 400 hectares from the brand new Oteake Conservation Park, including the most important and, ecologically, the rarest part of the new Park, the tussock and shrubland that went right down to the banks of the Manuherikia River, to enable future access to lignite
said nothing to say in regard to the World Commission on Protected areas of IUCN’s severe criticism of its intention to investigate mineral resources and mining opportunities in protected conservation areas including our three UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Te Wahi Pounamu-South West New Zealand, Tongariro National Park and the Sub Antarctic Islands
approved two prospecting permit applications lodged by Australian iron-ore giant Fortescue Metals Group subsidiary FMG Pacific lodged in June – areas covered by the two-year permits include an 8204-square-kilometre area of seabed adjoining the west coast from Cape Reinga to the Manukau Harbour and a 3798-square-kilometre prospecting area of land from Cape Reinga to the Kaipara Harbour including Ninety Mile Beach, the west side of the Aupouri Peninsula, Kaitaia and the Hokianga.
approved an additional prospecting permit for Fortesque Metals in relation to 3568sq km right next door to the Kahurangi National Park where the Heaphy Track is
was forced to release its Ministry of Economic Development (MED) report under the Official Information Act that proclaims “significant mineral potential” in the Fiordland, Kahurangi and Paparoa national parks – the report said the Waitutu area of the Fiordland National Park had sufficient petroleum reserves to be “worthy” of inclusion in a review of conservation land protected from mining
secretly granted the minerals industry the right to veto proposed National Park boundaries and permission for any such vetoes to be kept confidential – in spite of recommendations from its own officials against any such a veto
Minster of Conservation Tim Grosser, on 29 August 2009, called for caring New Zealanders to halt their “emotional hysteria” and recognise that conservation land should be mined for minerals and went on to say “Mining in a modern, technological way can have a negligible effect”
Associate Minister of Conservation Kate Wilkinson, in an interview in “Canterbury Farming” rubished her own department, DOC, suggesting it was incapable of looking after the high country reserves and parks under its control
gutted the home insulation scheme
pulled $300 million out of public transport, walking and cycling schemes and added it to a pot of $2 billion to ‘upgrade’ state highways
changed the law to provide billions of dollar in subsidies for polluters via the ETS casino which is now a target for scamming by international criminals
begun a process of gutting the Resource Management Act to make it difficult/impossible for the public to lodge appeals against developers
removed the ability of Auckland to introduce a fuel levy to fund planned public transport upgrades
left electrification of the national rail network up in the air without promised funding commitments
removed the Ministry for the Environment’s programme to make Government Departments ‘carbon neutral’
removed funding for public tv advertising on sustainability and energy efficiency
pulled funding for small-town public litter bin recycling schemes
cabinet ministers expressing public support the bulldozing of Fiordland
reduced Department of Conservation funding by about $50 million over three years
canceled funding for the internationally acclaimed ‘Enviroschools’ programme
usurped the democratic role of local Councils of determining policies for their citizens by requiring the abandonment of the efficient and well-established tree protection rules for urban areas
set about revamping Auckland governance in a way that is likely to greatly reduce the ‘Environmental Watchdog’ role of the the current Regional Council
removed Auckland’s metropolitan limits and opened the gateway for unfettered urban sprawl
defended internationally the importation of rain-forest-wrecking palm kernel and stood silent while Federated Farmers called Greenpeace “terrorists”
stood silent while Godfrey Bloom, a Member of the European Parliament and infamous Climate Change Denialist, publicly rejoiced in the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior – who was doing so while standing on a dock next to the replacement vessel
took a 0% emissions reduction target to Copenhagen. Yes, seriously, that isn’t a misprint – that was the lower bound of their negotiation platform – then missed the 01/02/10 deadline for commitment to action it had agreed to – meanwhile 55 of the 80 countries which attended did make the deadline
secretly cancelled the internationally recognised scheme for the mandatory labelling of exotic woods to ensure the timber has not been taken from rain forests in direct contradiction of its own statements made at the 13th World Forestry Congress in Argentina
supported the Department of Conservation’s decision to open up the pristine Cathedral Cove to an ice-cream franchise
given the Department of Conservsation $1.7 million to further develop commercial activities on DOC land and started an “off set” plan allowing company’s to damage the conservation estate if they agree to improve land elsewhere – no monitoring regime has been suggested on put in place
left DOC director-general Al Morrison to announce that DOC is to charge for services that had been free and, to soften the public up to the idea that there will be more “energy generation schemes” operating on DOC land
taken no action to reduce existing pollution pouring into the Manawatu River and is “leaving it up to industry” to come up with solutions to heal the river which was described by the Cawthorn Institute as “one of the worst polluted in the Western world”
announced a $1.1 million industry subsidy to kick start marine farming without identifying no-go areas nor putting in place a consultation process for individiuals, communities, and other general coastal users
blamed New Zealanders after a Japanese whaling ship deliberately smashed into a smaller, more vulnerable craft in the open sea
was forced to release documents under the Official Information Act which confirm that DOC has “giving up” on ecologically valuable high-country land in the Mackenzie Basin because of funding cuts. The released documents cite “statements made by ministers”, “diminishing funding” and the Government’s new high-country policies as reasons for the changed stance – the comments from DOC were made after Land Information New Zealand (Linz), which manages the tenure review process, ignored DOC’s previous conservation recommendations for the farms
used former National Party minister and current director of Open Country Cheese – a company convicted of filthy farming practices – Wyatt Creech to head up an enquiry into Environment Canterbury which had been standing up the dairy farmers’ demands for more and more water resources and less and less regulation. The Creech report recommended the Environmental Canterbury be sacked and replaced with government appointments and the voters of Canterbury do without democracy until the water situation had been resolved. The Canterbury area holds 50 percent of New Zealand’s fresh water reserves and 50 percent of the water required for hyrdo energy. The Creech report said Environmental Centerbury put too much focus on the environment.
Despite international condemnation for knowing next to nothing about the parlous state of the New Zealand fisheries, National Ltd™ bucks international trends, pours more acid on the 100% Pure brand and increases the bluefin tuna quota.
New Zealand is subject to international criticism for its backing of commericial whaling which National Ltd supports
Government-owned company Solid Energy runs an essay competition entitled “The role of coal in sustainable energy solutions for New Zealand” for school children. First prize is a trip to New Zealand’s largest coal customer, China.
Supported access fees for entrance onto DOC walkways – fee introduced following cuts to DOC’s budget.
New Zealand’s environment would profit from mining national parks, Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson says.
Department of Conservation director-general Al Morrison said the conservation estate created “opportunities to do a whole lot for a lot of different people. We’ve got to get away from this idea that somehow we have to protect one-third of New Zealand for a certain constituency and put it in a jar of formaldehyde and leave it.”
State coal miner Solid Energy could get an extra slice of the action if highly sensitive conservation land is opened to gold, silver and other prospecting. Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee said Solid Energy’s work could be widened to include other minerals and resources, or it could form part of a new state-owned enterprise to maximise government returns from any mining. He did not rule out the company, which produces 80 per cent of New Zealand’s coal, having a role in mining gold and other minerals on Great Barrier Island and other conservation areas being eyed by the Government http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/3519703/Golden-possibility-for-state-coal-miner
. . . there’s plenty more I need to add.
Nice work BLiP, where you been?
What felix said. And the more you can fill in your list with links to sources, the better it gets. You should send it to us as a guest post some time…
. . . there’s plenty more I need to add.
Please do and I’ll put it up as a page. In fact I really need to make it a database generating a page.
>removed a proposed efficiency standard (MEPS) on incandescent lightbulbs <
I posted a lot of mercury bombs into parliament, spreading mercury vapour throughout the postal system and parliament buildings, and it was legal, the bulbs tended to break as they went into the post box.
But it got the idiot law stopped 😉 … maybe?
Norman gave it a go
10.5.11 – Question 6: Dr Russel Norman to the Prime Minister – Part 1
But alas forgot to mention that Kiwi Saver is dependent on destroying the environment, via every means possible, as long as it makes MONEY.
@BLiP! – excellent stuff, i’ve been trying to pull together a summary like that for some time. Request permission to shamelessly borrow/promulgate.
Despite the almost non-exhaustive nature of that list, it’s pretty much a lot worse than that.
try: Sacked ECAN councillors claiming ‘dysfunctional’, but OIA documents reveal Carter, Brownlee and Key up to their eyeballs in pushing officials to get rid of ‘hurdles’ to ‘accelerating large scale water storage and irrigation in Canterbury’. Guess what the two hurdles were identified as? Water Conservation Orders and Council Processes.
What do we see come out of the toothless NPS on freshwater this week? a fund entitled “Irrigation acceleration fund”. Subtle? not very.
For those of you not up with the play, while the media spotlight played out on the sacking of ECAN councillors, the true fatal thrust to water in Canterbury was the amending of Water Conservation Orders (essentially National Park like status given to rivers that met the required tests under the RMA) so that there is no longer a right of appeal.
and NOBODY in the MSM whispered a word… sigh.
Of course, permission granted.
The comments here have spurred me into tidying the list up and adding more to it. I’ve been busy with mahi – the evil, foreign-owned multi-national I work for has decided the best way to increase productivity is to not replace staff who leave. That means the rest of us have to pick up the slack. Do you think our salaries have gone up to reflect the extra work? Like fuck.
SOMEONE needs to put this up on Youtube and pass it on to the New Zealand media or else no-one will see or hear about it except for us geeky lefties that will not vote for the brat anyway.
There is a lot more to this interview than the freely available highlights online.
I followed someone’s instructions here and downloaded it via a hidemyass proxy but i don’t know how to convert it to youtube friendly …
Try one of these http://download.cnet.com/windows/video-converters/
Also if that doesn’t work, if you don’t mind would you be able to upload it to http://www.sendspace.com and post the URL for us
http://www.sendspace.com/file/nyun3h
there’s the link for the beeb’s file. good luck trying to remove DRM.
you might be better off with a UK ip address from hidemyass.com and a screen ripper as suggested above. unless you already have a good DRM remover.
Please post the youtube/othervideosite link if you manage to! cheers.
Made total mincemeat of him. Makes you realise how pathetic NZ current affairs TV is. Can’t we get Stephen Sackur to come to NZ for the election campaign?
richard you are right. current afairs in NZ is pathetic and that is the way these people want it. they know they can stand up to the hair and teeth jobs shoulder tapped by TVNZ and the others so to save themselves the bother they just dont have any current affairs at all! very convenient and then they say that the public isnt interested. well they would be if there was some blood on the floor every now and again instead of the saccharine hucksterism that passes for investigative journalism these days.
You know that there’s something wrong with the MSM when, confronted with scientific research, they go and get a businessman to cast doubt on the scientists research.
That’s disgusting! Phil O’Reilly, one of the Hollow Men is he not?
Thats because in the early 21st century businessperson somehow makes you an oracle on any subject…
HA! Whilst I was listening to the interview in the above clip my 14 year old daughter was sitting on the sofa behind me mucking about on facebook or whatever and she suddenly piped up and said, ‘Why can’t he just answer the question!’
Yeah, he’s got an excellent mind and intelligent speaking abilities for photo-ops.
It is now on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfUozKMgA-Y&feature=player_embedded
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/aidanleenz#p/a/u/0/_0canC4MM9I
Robert, you the man!
Re: the question whether NZ will let Crafar being bought – I can mostly hear that slurring guy trying to buy interview time while figuring out how to answer, nay, avoid the question.
This one that NZ elected as PM in 2008 shows himself to be very mediocre, nay, an embarrassment at coming up with responses when he is interviewed.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/video.cfm?c_id=1&gal_cid=1&gallery_id=118540
wow at the Herald cuts…
are they the ministry for propaganda?
Cut out the explanation of the research- cut out the journalist saying you aren’t answering the questions and end with the journalist patting Key down…
ffs
John Key should be immortalised ” Compared to other countries we are 100%” compared to sum I achieved 100% in School cert English 🙂 !!!
I only wished that JK was min of education when I was at school !!!!!
This is pure magic and should be aired many times. The unfortunate thing is that this will be lost on many. Still even so late in the day nice to have a chuckle. Pure magic
Anyone know when the full interview will be on again and where. There maybe some more gems that were missed on the 3 minute clip
The BBC site now has the audio which you can listen to worldwide:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00ggyh3/Hardtalk_11_05_2011/
Another classic part is near the end, where Key goes on about NZers supporting the monarchy based on a poll that said 85% of people here supported bringing back knighthoods. Shortly afterwards, Sarkur points out that a poll he has seen says around 40% of NZers want a republic. Key responds by saying “There’s always some random poll that you can draw from but…”
OOOHHH I get it now! That is why they’ve been keeping him to photo ops!
Doh!
Everytime i watch Key’s answers my face meets the palms of my hands at regular intervals. I know NZ does have some decent journo’s but could you imagine Key getting that type of grilling with more regulararity. His tenure as PM would’ve been finished long ago. Since Muldoon’s over the top treatment of any journo’s not giving the Nats favourable treatment back in the early 80’s there seems to be an utter lack of consistent probing invesitgative journalism in NZ putting chancers like Key under real public scrutiny. That coupled with the severe scaling back in NZ based newsrooms.
Sackur is not known as one the BBC’s hardest interviewers. But he was doing what any investigative political journo does well. Puts his subject under pressure and see’s how they react. In Key’s case not very well. Sackur having dealt with the seasoned Westminster politico’s for years was always going to have done his research on Key and most of it was not going to be favourable. As oppossed to the Herald who have just gone to their default position of being the Nat’s propoganda leaflet. The Herald article almost seems to hint that the big old nasty BBC had no right to harrass NZ’s glorious leader. Plus going to a NZ business bloke to refute the claims of a respected scientist must surely be the Herald’s idea of a piss take.
Key must be asking himself “why can’t all international TV invites be as intellectually challenging as Letterman”?
Having watched the full interview, I actually think that your average viewer would think that Key does OK. Don’t get me wrong imho Key is evading questions, contradicting himself (most notably with the whole “academics and lawyers” and republic v monarchy statistics) etc
But he is very good at doing it while smiling without ever getting aggressive and taking the bait. Most people, when proven wrong like he is, a few times just in this interview (!), or when caught out lying, e.g. the whole Kiwirail shares thing before the 08 election, would go on the attack or get really flustered. He just sticks to some semi-evasive waffle, might even partially concede a point to conceal the fact that he is getting caught red-handed, and remains mild-mannered.
How does he get away with it? Well, in NZ, the casual mild-mannered approach is king. It’s a cultural thing. Politicians like Clark and Goff who are too serious, too intellectual, or too earnest invoke suspicion – they must be full of themselves if they aren’t constantly in self-deprecating humour mode or if they use technical vocabulary (tall poppy syndrome) – and are called “robots” “hapless ideologues” “ivory tower types” and so on. They are not “one of Us”. Key on the other hand is your “average white businessman familyman golfplaying aucklander” type who speaks the language of low-level corporate office. He ticks all the boxes for the Herald, most journalists, tv, etc. as being “one of Us” so he has significantly greater leeway on any subject anyway. He fits into what the Nats would see as the “mainstream NZer” mould quite nicely. Add to that his casual, friendly mild manners and our journos hesitate to attack him because they would be attacking a friendly one-of-us type bloke – they will be the ones seen as unreasonable aggressors. Even Sackur when he nailed him couldn’t bring himself to go all the way.
Invoking “pragmatism” also gets him off the hook. This is an anglo-saxon misnomer to conceal a dominant ideology in this case a watered down neo-liberal approach. Neoliberals can afford to be conservatives in NZ, in the literal sense of the term, because we are not that far off a neoliberal paradise anyway. And Key like many other politicians will avoid rocking the boat by any means possible. This “conservative” line is seen as both “moderate” and “reasonable”.
So the nicknames “teflon” “slippery” are all well-founded. Unless a respected journo nails him with an unrelenting line of questioning on prime time telly – and the PR boys will avoid that at all costs – he will remain our friendly PM whose policies go unnoticed and unchallenged behind the artificial veil that is his Image. If only they would show a few more vids on the news of him sneering and jeering nastily in the house, that could go a long way to undermining his “nice-guy-not-a-politician” persona. His honeymoon with a befuddled media is not even over yet and it’s almost election time so there is little hope of that happening…
It takes the BBC – a leading overseas media organisation – to show the true face of our useless “leader”. Again this proves the uselessness of most NZ media. Apart from a few exceptions the NZ media has become so useless and pre-occupied with “image” and “presentation” that no matters of substance are reported on in-depth. Like with our supermarkets we have something like a duopoly owning the newspapers, magazines and some TV and radio stations. Public broadcasting gets treated worse year by year.
So many in NZ are so brain-washed, they do not get a chance to see “real” questions being asked to our leading politicians. Many do not even bother informing themselves, because they have grown up in a society where commercials on radio and television take up a per centage of broadcasting times, so that any program gets fragmented and listeners and viewers constantly distracted and otherwise brainwashed to simply be “consumers”.
This interview should be a revelation of how useless John Key really is. He dodges questions all the time, contradicts himself, denies facts and make a total fool of himself. Sadly hardly anyone in NZ bothers watching or listening to Hard Talk!
So no wonder we get election results that make critical and informed people wonder how that came about.
At least one tv program showed a 45second extract of this – Media7 on TVNZ7
TVNZ7 the best news in the country at 8pm where they take time to interview people and get to the bottom of issues unlike the tabloid headlines prevalent on TV1 TV3 Prime.
TVNZ7 the channel discarded by our beloved national govt
no surprises there – Key and Coleman are conducting their own Glorious Cultural Revolution
with the motto “Kill Public Service Broadcasting”.