8 comments on “Time to do the authorisation notice ”

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1. Daniel 1

   17 June 2014 at 10:14 pm

   Just so you know, the notice is not visible on the mobile site (I’m using an iPhone 4S, iOS 5.1.1, tried it on Safari, Chrome and through my RSS reader)
   • lprent 1.1

     17 June 2014 at 11:56 pm

     I will correct in the morning.

     Figures though
2. Pete George 2

   18 June 2014 at 2:49 pm

   lprent: This is a copy of a post by Pete George on YourNZ. Since he was complaining that he was currently banned, I’ve put it here for him using his details for completeness. Basically it is the usual mindless lack of attention to details and a blind unawareness of what constitutes “fact”. My response from YourNZ follows.

   Standard election authorisation notice

    <div class="post-text">
   
       The Standard is trying to cover electoral advertising rules by having it&#8217;s own authorisation notice. This may not cover all authors and posts.</div>
   

   The Electoral Commission on the ‘regulated period’ for the upcoming election.

   SIGNIFICANCE OF THE REGULATED PERIOD
   The regulated period for the 2014 General Election will start on 20 June 2014 and ends with the close of the day before election day (19 September 2014).
   What is the significance of the regulated period? This can be a source of confusion. The answer is that it is significant for election expenses and Parliamentary Service funding.
   In terms of election expenses the regulated period is the period during which the expenditure limits for parties and candidates operate. Currently these limits are: $25,700 for candidates and $1.091 million plus $25,700 per electorate contested for parties.
   However, it is not the only time that the other rules regarding election advertising apply. The requirement for a promoter statement and the requirement for written authorisation to promote a party or candidate apply at all times.

   A post in typical lprent fashion at The Standard:

   Time to do the authorisation notice
   This site frequently has opinions from authors and comments promoting promoting political positions and telling people who they should vote for or not vote for, and why.
   Because of whining in previous election periods by some of the more obnoxious fools around the blogosphere, you’ll notice that we now have a notice at the bottom of the site.
   

   Here’s an example of some whining by an obnoxious fool (love the irony) coming up to a previous election period, in July 2008 – Why is Labour so hypocritical on transparency?

   Then in 2007 The Standard burst into life. They would have you believe it is a totally independent collection of activists who just happen to not like National. The reality is somewhat different.
   The Standard says they are all independent bloggers. However the following e-mail has been forwarded onto me:

   From: xxxxxxx xxxxxxx
   Date: 11 June 2008 12:24:42 PM
   To: labourmembersofparliament@parliament.govt.nz
   Cc: pm@ministers.govt.nz, mike.williams@labour.org.nz
   Subject: The Standard Blog
   Dear all
   I have a serious issue to raise with you all. It has come to my attention that two Ministerial staffers – Chris Elder and Andrew Kirton, both political employees – are blogging anonymously at the Labour-hosted, anti-John Key blog the Standard, http://www.thestandard.org.nz.
   Given that a large number of these posts (most notably those by Chris Elder or all_your_base, a communications staffer on the ninth floor) occur during office hours, do you all believe it is appropriate that political employees are spending their time blogging anonymously? Is this approved behaviour?
   Kind regards
   xxxxxxx xxxxxx
   

   After I was forwarded a copy of the e-mail by a parliamentary staffer, I asked the e-mailer the basis of the information, the e-mailer replied “A young Labour person I know who is also a blogger”
   It has in fact long been speculated that Elder blogged as All-your-base as this was allegedly a favourite saying of his (referring to the tag line of a famous hacking group). He has denied being involved with The Standard, and it is of course impossible to prove or disprove without computer logs.
   But it is likely that two of the bloggers are Beehive communications employees, and a third is the Labour Party Head Office Communications Manager. A fourth and maybe a fifth are employed by the EPMU – Labour’s largest affiliated union.

   The Standard still promotes itself as a collective of independent activists, although admitted at one stage

   We set The Standard up as an independent left-wing blog in August last year. As you probably remember by about November our traffic had got so large our server was crashing every day, sometimes for hours at a time. We put out a call and at the end of last year someone from Labour emailed us and offered us some temporary server space until we worked something out.

   They have worked that out long ago and have also worked out a number of operation matters. Pseudonymous authors have come and gone. Like ‘Zetetic’, who coincidentally posted not long after lprent.

   John Key on Iraq in the Herald today:

   We are not a country out there looking for a fight.

   John Key on Iraq 2003:

   That links to a video on Youtube that was first uploaded leading into the 2008 election by ‘greenwoman’, who loaded seven videos around that time all critical of John Key. Zetetic must have a good memory.

   Back to the lprent post that warns of the consequences of “comments left on our site”:

   Thereafter I will consider that that comments left on our site about our conformance to the Electoral Act 1993 and the Broadcasting Act 1989 about any content on site will in themselves constitute unwanted advertisements on our site, and I will take the appropriate action. This is logical extension of our existing policy about handling people who try to tell us how to run our site.
   Perpetrators will have their comments deleted and will be banned until after the election.

   It’s interesting doing a search at The Standard on ‘banned until after the election’. The most serious offences tend to be challenging what authors post, speculating on the identity of authors and (allegedly) diverting from the message that authors want to promote.

   From The Standard ‘About’:

   We write here in our personal capacities and the opinions that are expressed on the blog are individual unless expressly stated otherwise (see the policy). We do not write on behalf of any organization.

   That links to:

   The authors write for themselves with the following exceptions.

   1. If we are putting up material from a guest poster, then it will go up under “Guest Post” and may or may not have a name or pseudonym attached.
   2. If the site is reposting material from another site with no opinion or minimal opinion from an author, then it will go up under the name of “The Standard” (aka notices and features).
   3. There are some routine posts like the daily OpenMike that will also go up under the name of “The Standard” (aka notices and features) because they also offer no opinion.

   The bar is high because we like robust debate, but there is a bar.

   One could imagine their barn door:

   The bar is high because we like robust debate, but there is a bar on debate we don’t like.
   

   There’s been a number of other coincidental posts from the independent authors recently. Try this search:

   http://thestandard.org.nz/?s=david+farrar&isopen=block&search_posts=true&search_sortby=date

   lprent has frequently been accusing David Farrar of being a paid operative of the 9th floor of the Beehive.

   It’s interesting that lprent has decided to put a blanket ‘authorisation notice’ on The Standard. But that’s under his own name.

   The key messages are:

   • Publishers and broadcasters must ensure that election advertisements or election-related advertisements published at any time, in any medium, contain a promoter statement.
   • Publishers and broadcasters must ensure that any election advertisement that promotes any candidate and/or party has been authorised in writing by the candidate and/or party secretary(s) before it is published/broadcast.

   (Part 1 Election Advertising)

   But lprent is registering as a ’3rd party promoter’:

   1.3 Registered promoters
   Any individual or group who is a third party promoter who spends, or intends to spend, over $12,300 (including GST) on election advertising during the regulated period (20 June to 19 September 2014) must register with the Electoral Commission.
   The following cannot be a registered promoter:

   • a constituency candidate,
   • a list candidate,
   • a party,an overseas person,
   • a person involved in the administration of:

   – the affairs of a candidate in relation to the candidate’s election campaign, or
   – the affairs of the party.
   http://www.elections.org.nz/third-party-handbook/part-1-third-party-promoters-and-parliamentary-elections
   

   So he must not be involved in the affairs of any candidate or party (he has previously been involved with Labour and with Helen Clark).

   What I don’t know is how lprent’s site authorisation statement affects anything that could potentially be posted or commented at The Standard by candidates, parties or persons involved in the administration of candidate or party election campaigns.

   But it seems logical to me that parties, candidates and any person involved in the administration of campaigns would still need their own authorisation statements.

   If they were being honest and transparent. lprent concludes his post:

   In my opinion this policy should neatly eliminate some of the nuisances that we have had in previous elections.

   It would be a nuisance if an author or commenter who disguises their connections and their intent by using a pseudonym would have to use an authorisation statement.

   The use of pseudonyms at The Standard is strongly defended. It is explained that it doesn’t mean they are anonymous, the identities are known to the blog administrator.

   So lprent should know which authors and posts may not be covered by his own authorisation statement, if any. He said:

   So if you think that there are issues to do with how we have done this, you now have between now and prior to the start of 20th of June 2014 to comment in this post and only this post.

   I can’t comment on his post, I’m currently banned from commenting at The Standard, but lprent will see this post. He could clarify by stating that any post at The Standard by anyone or on behalf of anyone associated with a candidate or party campaign will have it’s own authorisation notice.
   • lprent 2.1

     18 June 2014 at 2:53 pm

     lprent: My response at YourNZ follows.

     Personally I think you are a credulous fool who never bothers to check facts thoroughly, prefers to believe your biases and simple bigotry rather than any facts that are presented to you, have a strong tendency to believe lies from anyone if they fit your strange world views, and who appears to ‘forget’ anything that challenges your world view.

     This post offers some clear examples of that.

     Chris Elder and Andrew Kirton

     But hey, I’ll violate our policy since Chris Elder has already categorically said that he wasn’t an author and make a simple statement.

     I’ve met Chris Elder once on the street in Wellington after getting a staffer to show me how to get to a meeting (ie get through security) at parliament chaired by Claire Curran on copyright in 2009. Chris Elder has never been an author either when employed by parliamentary services nor in a private capacity that I am aware of and I’d almost certainly know.

     So you’re just repeating someone else’s lies.

     To my knowledge, I have never met or talked to Andrew Kirton on any medium. I have no idea who he is.

     It appears to me that you are so credulous whenever anything fits your view of how things should be in your distorted wee world, that it distorts your ability to deal with the facts.

     In this case based on a relatively common phrase for people who grew up with the net?

     It has in fact long been speculated that Elder blogged as All-your-base as this was allegedly a favourite saying of his (referring to the tag line of a famous hacking group).

     Please tell me that you aren’t that much of a complete moron. Other people read taglines as well. They are broadcast all over the internet…

     We put out a call and at the end of last year someone from Labour emailed us and offered us some temporary server space until we worked something out.

     It’d be nice if you linked to your random quotes. Too much of an effort? Did I mention that I also consider you to be lazy and pretty damn good at selective and misleading quoting as well?

     As has been explained previously many times. We’re labour activists (not the small ‘l’). As well as the NZLP we also asked unions, my work, and damn near anyone we knew where we could find some very cheap (ie near free) processing and bandwidth grunt because the server I was running on a ADSL line simply wasn’t keeping up.

     We couldn’t easily shift to somewhere like wordpress because we’d setup as a standalone installation with quite a lot of non-standard plugins and it would have been a major operation to convert. Not the type of thing that a political blog wants to do in election year. We had several offers, but the suggestion from NZLP suited our needs perfectly.

     The NZLP HQ put us on to an activist who was running some old donated servers on the local net backbone whose use had been donated to the NZLP, and which they had no ability to use. He was running a number of websites on the servers and we hopped our site there as well.

     The NZLP had never paid for those servers, wasn’t paying for any of the running costs, and wasn’t operating the servers and they had the capacity we needed for election year. They had donated their use to the activist who was running them, who then offered us space. So I copied the images across and configured a single file and we were back up and running.

     Of course this hasn’t prevented myth makers like yourself forever after lying that we were running on the NZLP’s servers (which is a bit of a laugh as their own servers made my personal server look like a mainframe).

     That links to a video on Youtube that was first uploaded leading into the 2008 election by ‘greenwoman’, who loaded seven videos around that time all critical of John Key. Zetetic must have a good memory.

     Or google does. Search for ‘youtube “john key” iraq’. It is the first video link.

     If you read the dialogue that went on in the NRT post from last night and many others through the years, you’ll find references to that video. It arises whenever John Key is involved in foreign policy.

     Mind you; not everyone has your ability to forget things. I’ve seen you manage to forget things on The Standard within hours and a day. Having to repeat them to you over and over again is pretty damn irritating. It is especially irritating for moderators.

     It’s interesting doing a search at The Standard on ‘banned until after the election’. The most serious offences tend to be challenging what authors post, speculating on the identity of authors and (allegedly) diverting from the message that authors want to promote.

     Sure I don’t have any particular time for idiots as you are personally aware, but we ban according to the policy and we ban for whatever period that seems appropriate to remove idiots violating those policies from commenting on our site. When that involves people repeating things that they have been for warned about or banned for previously, then I tend to solve the problem of possible re offending (and the additional work that causes me and moderators) by making sure that they cannot add to our unpaid workloads.

     After all we routinely get more than 15k comments per month, and that rises dramatically before an election.

     lprent has frequently been accusing David Farrar of being a paid operative of the 9th floor of the Beehive.

     And it is my belief based on several strands of evidence that he is is at least partially paid directly or through his company or a trust under the authority from the 9th floor and the PM’s department.

     You’ll notice that he hasn’t deigned to respond to that even in a statement that circumvents about what he is paid for. FFS the guy has had a permanent pass for a long time for the beehive that includes that floor. They aren’t handed out lightly.

     So he must not be involved in the affairs of any candidate or party (he has previously been involved with Labour and with Helen Clark).

     Sure I have been. However the key words are the ones that curiously you forgot to mention. “promotor” and “administration” . This is pretty typical of your sloppy approach towards facts. You selectively quote to create a lying statement. (my italics below).

     The following cannot be a registered promoter:
     …
     a person involved in the administration of:
     – the affairs of a candidate in relation to the candidate’s election campaign, or
     – the affairs of the party.

     In our case the promoter is The Standard Trust. I am merely its representative. But even if I was an individual promoter…

     The highest office I ever held was a year as the chair of the Sandringham branch of the Mt Albert Labour party. That is because I didn’t attend the annual meeting and got elected in absentia. The following year I was the secretary, and that was because I convinced the someone else to stand and the deal was that I’d help her out for that year. That was about 1993. In other words more than 20 years ago and was the last time I was ever involved in the administration of anything inside the NZLP.

     Of course I have been a volunteer on campaigns since. But by 2005 that consisted only of providing the Mt Albert and a number of other LECs with some help on collecting and massaging data for campaigning. Which isn’t anything to do with administration as I hold no offices nor do I receive any pay.

     I have never been paid by the NZLP for anything. Indeed I pay the NZLP some money every month on direct credit to be a member of the NZLP.

     If being a member or volunteer of a party violates the promoter statement, then most of the political blogs wouldn’t be able to function. And I’m going to be very curious to see what David Farrar puts up on his site this year.

     The authors write for themselves with the following exceptions.

     We also insist (which isn’t listed in the exceptions because it has never come up as an issue) that people who are currently candidates use their own names. Like Ben Clark in 2011 and James Dann this year.

     Therefore the authorisations for whatever they put up on our site is authorised by The Standard Trust.

     But it seems logical to me that parties, candidates and any person involved in the administration of campaigns would still need their own authorisation statements.

     Ah no. They are not the promoter on our website. The Standard Trust is. The reason that the authorisation notice is put up under my own name and in that particular format is because that is what the Electoral Commission requires.

     http://www.elections.org.nz/third-party-handbook/part-3-election-campaigning-third-parties

     (my italic-bold)

     3.2 Election advertising

     All election advertising must contain a promoter statement

     All election advertisements irrespective of when they are published must state the name and address of the person that has initiated or instigated them (‘the promoter’). [See section 204F of the Electoral Act].

     To meet the requirements of the Electoral Act, promoter statements must include the name and address of the promoter and make it clear who has initiated or instigated the advertisement. The form of words recommended by the Electoral Commission is:

     “Promoted or Authorised by [promoter’s name], [promoter’s relevant full street address]”.

     If the promoter is unregistered, and is an incorporated or unincorporated body, the promoter statement must also include the name of a member of the body who is the duly authorised representative of the promoter.

     For example:

     “Promoted or Authorised by [duly authorised representative’s full name], [promoter’s name], [promoter’s relevant full street address]”.

     For an incorporated or unincorporated body it can be the full street address of the body’s principal place of business or head office.
     

     The Standard is run by The Standard Trust, I am the trust’s authorised representative. I am currently contactable from home 9am-5pm at that address.

     Perhaps you should closely read the documents that I helpfully provided a link for instead of mindlessly droning about what you want to believe. Then you’d be in possession of the facts – something that you are not notable as seeking for partucularly hard for very hard (as this post proves).

     I can’t comment on his post, I’m currently banned from commenting at The Standard, but lprent will see this post.

     I’ll be generous and put your post and my answer up on TS in the comments section since you feel like this is an important. issue.
     • blue leopard 2.1.1

       18 June 2014 at 7:22 pm

       @ lprent,

       I don’t understand the issue that Pete George has, it certainly doesn’t appear to be something you (lprent) are responsible for.

       If, (that is if, not that there are) government workers or people employed by the Labour party are commenting here, what responsibility is that of yours lprent?

       It seems to me that there is a movement to silence left-wing conversation completely.

       It is like there is a move to make it illegal.

       Like the move to make it so that journalists are not allowed to be politically active in their hours outside work.

       Surely any person is entitled to discuss political views pseudonymously* regardless of their employment?

       Talk about a cracking big movement to silence people.

       Don’t think, don’t speak, don’t collect together to share ideas. This is really becoming very oppressive.

       (*I think there is more chance of a conflict of interests if the person uses their own name because it is my understanding public servants are not supposed to speak their political views publicly)
       • lprent 2.1.1.1

         18 June 2014 at 8:14 pm

         That was why I didn’t address it apart from saying that he was wrong in his lies about a particular person.
   • McFlock 2.2

     18 June 2014 at 2:54 pm

     so many words, so little point…
     • lprent 2.2.1

       18 June 2014 at 3:08 pm

       You know the fool. If he doesn’t get a comprehensive answer, the fool just keeps repeating his fairytale elsewhere over and over again.

       Time to write a post on another fairy tale. The Herald’s story from the National party research unit about a form letter.

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