True Colours

And so the sun sets on the penultimate day of the New Zealand Labour Party's premiere leadership primary. For most of the past month, the primary has led the politics columns. This has allowed National to get on with business, undisturbed by the turbulence that has rocked in for the rest of the year. For everyone's sakes, I hope this circus was worth it.

For truth be told, Cunliffe had this one in the bag from the start, the caucus ABC's be damned. The Labour cowmatua gave it a gamble with Shearer. That outsider didn't work out, and might have brought to a head the rank and file disgruntlement in the form of the new primary rules.

Cunliffe is a relatively safe bet in comparison to the Shearer gambit and, besides, it's his turn. That's Labour logic through and through.

Grant Robertson has done his next stab at the job no end of good, raising his visibility beyond the loyal Beltway. Jenny Michie did no foul to him, yet this loyal and hard working Labour Party stalwart's treatment at the hands of Cunliffe foreshadows future fickleness.

The Devil in Mr Jones has rehabilitated as much as he is ever going to. It's sad to see that Shane "Te Dude" Jones was the best option that the Pragmatic Labour caucus had to throw into the contest. Such is the debilitating effect Helen Clark had in sowing salt within their ranks.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if Helen Clark's name appeared on the voting ballot. I reckon she'd still be top of the pops with the base, five long years since the voters threw her out.

There's a lesson there, but whether Labour's rank and file grok that is another story. After all, no-one can accuse Chris Trotter of being a neo-Marxist. There's nothing new at all there. Yet he has no qualms about muddying the name of liberalism with a neo prefix.

This is what happens when you sow the Fourth Labour false narrative into the myth:



Here's Dangerous Minds with a balanced retrospective of Split Enz's Mr Philip Judd.

Ouija in Kiwi is Yeah, Nah

Contemporary society scoffs at the Victorian era quacks, who believed such nonsense as phrenology, the art of determining a person's character by the shape of the head. Today's quackery is much more sophisticated. It's called psychometric testing.

Like the original Ouija board, psychometric tests such as the Myers Brigg Type Indicator might be wholesome entertainment, but I wouldn't like to stake my career on one of them. So it's good to see this black box bigotry is getting challenged, because this HRD voodoo has to stop.

It's culturally biased and loaded with false positive discrimination (maybe the subject likes opera because they're gay, maybe the subject likes being alone because their workmates are discussing X Factor).

It loads recipients with expectations of certain self-censoring behaviours, and then wonders why their workforce is scoffing anti-depressants (At least Freud knew repression was bad).

But worst of all, it creates an underclass borne of superstitious orthodoxies which can't be challenged.

Lost in the Damascus Experience

Adam Curtis not only looks at the the hands behind Syria's modern history, but also at the terrible misunderstandings that deaf people can bring to a diplomatic incident:

The Americans had been planning another military coup, code-named Operation Wappen. The CIA man in charge was called Howard "Rocky" Stone, and he terrified the Syrians because he always stared intensely at them. But Stone did this because he was almost completely deaf - and he was trying to read their lips.

This is one of the many reasons I never applied for a job in MFAT.

The Man Who Would be Twerking

Shane Jones. Often beaten, never kippled.

Primary Colours

Rodney Hide cannot resist putting the boot into Labour's leadership primary in his column today in the Herald on Sunday. Which is a bit rich coming from a former party leader who gained his thorny crown from Act's leadership primary in 2004.

Here's me describing Act's season of Dancing with Leaders back when the Greens were looking for Rod Donald's replacement:

Fortunately for the Greens, there is precedent for them to go off. The leadership scrap in Act showed how not to do things. Like the Greens, Act believe (or at least used to believe) in direct democracy. The primary race, while good on paper and ideologically sound, is a dangerous thing for a niche party to do in practise. I re-joined Act when it became clear that Prebs was standing down. Like most Act members, I had made up my mind who to vote for way before the big day. I joined so I could vote for Rodney and keep Stephen Franks and the Rabids from taking over.

I went along to a Meet the Candidates meeting anyway, just to be certain of my decision. Speaking order was very fairly decided by random ballot. One by one, the four contenders stood at the podium and gave absolutely no clue why they would be the best leader for Act. Oh yeah, everyone got the blurbs, the CVs, the former glories. Staying true to Act's core values was mentioned more often than the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi are mentioned in statutes. The meetings didn't change a thing. They only provided media fodder to highlight rifts in Act.

Which is it, Rodney? Amnesia, willful ignorance or just plain old tribal shit-stirring?

In Act's primary, half its then-caucus stood for leader; Rodney Hide, Stephen Franks, Muriel Newman and Ken Shirley. You could say each faction had their hat in the ring. The populist Libz, the conservative Rabids, the nutty Rabids and the moderate Libz (for Libz and Rabids definitions, please see here).

The Labour primary also has all three tribes of the Labour caucus represented; Careerist Labour, Union Labour and Pragmatic Labour. Needless to say, Pragmatic Labour is the underdog by a long shot. For a party three times the size Act ever was, it still has fewer divisions than Act did.

If there's any criticism to be aimed at this Labour primary, it is the Byzantine voting procedure that's as clear as mud. The Greens and Act have a clean vote for their leaders, one vote per person. Whereas Labour has this mess of weighted votes that may well render a victory so opaque, it might have well been decided in a back room deal in the first place.

I suppose that's what happens when Labour tries to retrofit a true democratic system onto a representative one. As the saying goes, a horse designed by committee is called a cow. A horse designed by a Labour committee is called a cow's ass.

Cunlife

Confidence is a preference for the Labour Party Leader
Of what is known as
(Cunlife)
Electoral defeat can be avoided
If you take a route straight through what is known as
(Cunlife)

John's got defensive he gets intimidated
By the pesky journos, they love a bit of him
(Cunlife)
Who's that trader fooling?
You should cut down on your Cunlife mate, go to Hawaii

All the people
So many people
They all go hand in hand
Hand in hand to choose Cunlife
Know what I mean?

I get up when I want except on Tuesdays
When I get rudely awakened by the Chief Whip
(Skippy)
I put my lei on, have a cup of kava
And I think about leading the House
(Cunlife)

I feed the unions I sometimes feed the activists too
It gives me a sense of enormous well-being
(Cunlife)
And then I'm happy for the rest of the day safe in the knowledge
There will always be a bit of my id devoted to it

All the people
So many people
And they all go hand in hand
Hand in hand to choose Cunlife

Cunlife
(Cunlife)
Cunlife
(Cunlife)

It's got nothing to do with
Autobahn technique you know
(Cunlife)
And it's not about you sloggers
Who go round and round and round
(Cunlife)

All the people
So many people
And they all go hand in hand
Hand in hand to choose Cunlife

All the people
So many people
And they all go hand in hand
Hand in hand to choose Cunlife

Adding insult to manslaughter

As if it's not bad enough that the cops have shot an innocent civilian and breached confidentiality agreements, the Plodders have to go and short-change the Naitoko family too.

The cops blurted all and sundry details yesterday with what was supposed to be a face-saving press release. Instead, they ended up looking like a bunch of bullies blundering through the delicate fields of raw emotion.

Nothing unusual there, of course. It's just that this time it's no villain they're tickling, it's a bone fide honest citizen's death and the hole left in their family. There's no Garth McVicar pantomime to plead their case in the media. These victims are too brown for that clown, eh.

If I read between the lines of that Police PR shill correctly, it's not a stretch to presume that the AOS button man shot what was believed to be the right man, due to either garbled communications, loud wops from the Eagle chopper fogging the Comms, or institutionalised racial assumptions. In Copthink, what were the odds that the white guy was bad and the brown guy was good?

Anyways, back to the cheap blue line. Aside from the thousand apologies still owed by the cops to the Naitokos, the NZ Police still owe the Naitoko family another three million, two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in blood money.

That is the difference between what the cops have coughed up so far, and the $3.5 million statistical value of a human life in NZ (2009 prices). This figure is used to plug everything from Joyce's Roads of Notional Significance through to the Drowning Toll, so I can't see why it isn't used to recompense manslaughter by the state as well.

Maybe Greg O'Connor could be useful for once and have a whip around his union for the shortfall.

Who's Next - Behind Blue Eyes

Ed Milliband had better look out. Labour Parties in the bigger Commonwealth nations have a case of the jitters. Rudd stabbed Gillard in Canberra with a boomerang (a useless stabbing tool, but when life hands you lemons, etc.). David Shearer has just planked himself in Wellington before his useless crew mutinied. If UK Labour can't stop the bleed to UKIP and other protest votes, Ed Millibot's political career might as well jump in a peat bog as well.

It's a sure bet that David Cunliffe will become the third NZ Labour party leader in as many years. Putting aside that iPredict has him out in front by a Pinocchio's nose, there's the party membership and union bloc vote that almost guarantees Cunliffe's coronation. Pity the poor bloody caucus that has to live with it.

It's nothing personal against Cunliffe. My old man was well hated within his Labour party caucus too. Usually, this displeasure is rewarded with placements on the fringes, not the leadership. If Shearer felt undermined by his peers, Cunliffe as leader had best tread lightly.

Frankly, the leadership is not Labour's biggest problem. The party has become infected with Alliance party nomads, and the dead wood of caucus might be the only buffer keeping these nutters away from even worse damage. It seems the party has given up on electorates and destined for the minor party ploy of going only after the party vote.

No-one in Labour has any idea of grand strategy. What Labour really needs right now is some strategic nous, and Cunliffe is almost certain to deliver a large jump to the the Left, where none of the votes are at.

Here's The Who with Behind Blue Eyes, before Limp Bizkit ruined it:

A Willing Sucker, A Willing Shanker

There's plenty of Schadenfreude to go around Parliament right now.

Press Gallery muppets, formerly in thrall to the government spinners and shakers, have revolted over the Vance revelations. The scalp of the head of Parliamentary Services was offered on a platter, apparently for not telling National's Chief of Staff to go fuck himself before he would release Dunne's data. Fresh from voting for the second reading of the GCSB Bill, Peter Dunne is seeking legal advice over the privacy of ministerial communications.

In a forlorn effort to shut the whole thing down in an officialese version of the DDoS attack that took down several National party websites this week, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet dumped a redacted email trail late Friday afternoon.

The dump is repetitive and narrow. For example, it doesn't list the correspondence between DPMC, National Chief of Staff Wayne Eagleson, and the Henry Enquiry, Parliamentary Services and Ministerial Services. Curiously enough though, the DPMC's disclosure signature appears scattered throughout the email trail.

I hope the Parliamentary Privileges Committee gets access to all phone logs, notes from F2F meetings and emails between all these actors, in their inquiry into the inquiry into the leak.

The dump itself reminds me of working for Telecom's *123 mobile helpdesk back in the day. There's elements of The Office at play in there, as well as the usual bureaucratic Chinese Whispers and Pavlov Expectorations. There's occasional flashes of geek curiosity and BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) elation:

Annie was surprised. This is the level of novelty that the Henry witch hunt entailed. This is uncharted constitutional territory, and DPMC is drawing the map as it sees fit.

I suppose it is too much to ask for Dunne to reconsider his vote for the third reading of the GCSB Bill. Anything for yet another rigged game in Ohariu, eh.

2+2=5

All hail the birth of Prince George of Orwell, third in line to the throne of Airstrip One, Defender of the faith of the Church of England and Patron Saint of women's magazines, lazy newspaper editors and the vacuous live cross-promotional soapbox theatre sock puppets of TV news.

# We have always been at war with *CLASSIFIED*:

The US refuses to name its clear and present antagonists in the War on Terror on the grounds of national security.

# Truth is Treason

Nicky Hagar reports on Stuff that the NZ Defence Force, GCSB and SIS were among the people tracking and tracing freelance journalist Jon Stephenson in Afghanistan:

An internal Defence document leaked to the Star-Times reveals that defence security staff viewed investigative journalists as "hostile" threats requiring "counteraction". The classified security manual lists security threats, including "certain investigative journalists" who may attempt to obtain "politically sensitive information".

The manual says Chief of Defence Force approval is required before any NZDF participation in "counter intelligence activity" is undertaken.

What lengths would the NZDF go to in order to save face on the basis of national security? Would they nobble a civilian jury, for example? I have met Defence Force PR people in the past. It's a safe bet that what they know about ethics could be written on an SD card in crayon.

# Hard is Soft

Rachel Smalley loses her 2012 Loki Award for the cross-promotional fluff that has infected The Nation. Who gives a rat's fat crack about X Factor on an alleged hard news program?

# Arbeit Macht Frei

The welfare reforms continue to bite. It's early days yet, but cracks are beginning to show. If the UK experience in outsourced welfare is anything to go by, big problems should be evident in time for next year's election.

Mainstream Monomania

After bearing witness to the passing of the Psychoactives Act into law, albeit via modem, a few observations can be made.

1) The MSM tend to focus on their own pre-conceived narrative to the exclusion of all else.

The day the Law Commission released the generational review on the Misuse of Drugs Act, all the MSM buzzards wanted to talk about was artificial cannabis, a slender part of the broad spectrum review. Cannabis? Stuff what the Law Commission said about that. Synthetic cannabis was where the heat was at.

This time, instead of focusing on the new rules over the lolly weed, the MSM fixated on animal testing. Fair go and all. The Greens' Mojo Mathers should chalk up the interest in that as a win, but it's far from the entire story.

2) Speaking of that Law Commission report, Colorado and Washington State's cannabis legalisation roll outs make a mockery of the Commission's blinkered terms of reference regarding the UN Conventions.

3) Is this new law really world leading? Wasn't the world leading legislation really the Schedule D of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which created an R18 schedule for recreational substances way back during the Clark years?

4) It's amazing how such fluff as the Pakeha "Party" rakes in the headlines, while everyone ignores the elephant in the room wearing the Rastafari tricolor. Steve Braunias is right. This is NZ's lamest decade since the 1950's.

The beige bastards and vanilla people might have won this round, but it'll be all on in 2020.

Could be worse

Just as Sky City gets permission to buy out the last small player in the casino market in Queenstown and become the monopoly casino provider in NZ, details over the Shon Kee Convention Centre haggling process spill out into the open.

The voodoo economists in Treasury failed to see the merits of either convention centre or Sky City concessions. Clearly, logic and reason had nothing to do with it. More likely Keynesian economics, corrupted by tender favoritism.

This is conviction politics at its most cynical. If the government must throw money away to create temporary jobs to juke the stats, and minimum slave wage temp jobs to suck up the aftermath, there are no whiter elephants than a Mega Convention Centre. Especially seeing how the financial hub brainfart was stillborn and all.

Much fuss has been had over the foul concessions negotiated between the Nats and Sky City, with good reason. Still, it could have been worse:

# Sky City didn't ask for an expansion of table games to include Russian Roulette or Cock Fighting, hosted by Mike Hosking.

# They didn't ask for a Juice Bank, where punters could exchange blood, sperm, or DNA copyright for printed gambling tickets.

# They didn't ask for an on-site pawn shop, where punters could hand over house and car keys for credit.

# They only got TVNZ land. They could have asked for first right of refusal to purchase Auckland CBD land in perpetuity, in fitting with the thousand year plan to take over the entire city. The gutters would be lined with pokie machines, while a Skywalk above conveyed important people to yet another meeting.

# They didn't ask for $40 million from the government each year to fund a 24 hour carpark childcare centre and library.

Submarine Bells

It was well worth rooting the data cap to watch the Nethui panel on state surveillance the other day. Big bang for buck was also had with Campbell Live's long form look into the time line, hard power, and soft targets behind the GCSB Bill.

Stuff covered the Nethui revelations with the Koru Club angle. On them, even if Ferguson was stating the bleeding obvious there. Hospo is a great way to meet the movers and shakers and check the vibe. That's how I bumped into Ferguson, after all. Long live the tolerable level of chaos known as food and beverage, lest the Soccer Mum puritans shut them all down.

One thing is clear from the panel debate, and reinforced by the Campbell Live piece. There needs to be a review of the security services before any expansion of their powers. They have lost public confidence.

This began long before John Key fucked the dog for Hollywood, although that certainly didn't help. As with any secret squirrel department, only the really stupid security screw ups make it into the public arena. All the rest get buried deep. The public is left to judge SIGINT incompetence over the stuff that can't be hidden, such as the Munchausen fantasist Stephen Wilce, or the creative enhancement of Maryanne Thompson's PhD going under the radar.

The Kitteridge Report backed up what Ferguson said about Wolfensohn, a spymaster overburdened by mission sprawl, and marooned by singular knowledge. Sage counsel is sorely needed. Any oversight panel should remain in the Judiciary, and not be subject to the prime minister's whim as the current Bill wishes. I would suggest not only a retired High Court Judge, but a current Supreme Court and High Court judge sit on any oversight panel. Hell, I'd even be happy with District Court Judge and IT wonk David Harvey helping keep an eye on things.

Paul Buchanan's comments over the dangers of NZ withdrawing from or reforming Five Eyes are worth bearing in mind. His comments regarding NZ having a bob each way over the US China thing is relevant too. Having gone through the Cold War experience, neutrality might be worth a go in the future. Dithering is not going to be an option.

Showdown at Big Sky

If there's a quantum of Kiwi Geek in your DNA, you really should be a member of Internet NZ.

Whether you're a Press Gallery journalist pondering their Parliamentary swipe card with ambivalence, a teeny bopper VPNing their way to whatever currently bounces their bed, an entrepreneur trying to crack the big one without patent trolls leeching their ideas, or just a concerned citizen wishing to expressly help draw the border between security and privacy, join Internet NZ.

They throw out amazing bang for their buck. Take NetHui, for example. It's stuff like this that makes me wish I lived in Wellington again. Fortunately, they have video streams catering for the world's fastest dialup (Joke created by Raybon Kan, riffing Stephen Fry, who ripped Telecom, etc. xkcd isn't the only one into infinite ripples).

Internet NZ has lined up a fine panel for tomorrow morning's panel discussion on state surveillance:

Former Director of the Government Communications Security Bureau, Sir Bruce Ferguson will tomorrow participate in a NetHui 2013 panel discussion on state surveillance and the GCSB.

The panel is titled ‘State Surveillance of Online Communications’ and will be held at 11.30am at the Wellington Town Hall Auditorium. Discussion will revolve around the proposed legislation that would expand the powers of the GCSB in monitoring private communications, including online communications.

Sir Bruce will join three other distinguished panellists, all of whom have expertise in the area and are frequent media commentators on the subject. Cloud consultant Ian Apperley, solicitor Michael Wigley, and Dr. Paul Buchanan, whose expertise is in security, comparative and international politics, will join Sir Bruce.

In the meantime, why not ponder Jon Stephenson's ongoing defamation trial against Defence Force chief Lieutenant General Rhys Jones.

The Body Politic might be frozen, but the eyes are wide open.

Minority Report

Plenty of real and virtual ink has been spilled over a Labour Party remit over mandated female representation. I've just waded through 61 pages of it, courtesy of Bryce Edwards' summary of the latest gender skirmishes.

Once again, Tag Team Farrar and Whale have put the headlights on Labour. Once again, Labour have stared at the headlights in a hypnotic stupor, before faceplanting into the radiator of public opinion. Labour's struggle for traction against National continues to look like the lop-sided and fatalistic narrative of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.

My guess is that the Labour Council-endorsed remit is an attempt for the Women's Council to regain some power after the unions screwed the scrum last year with the new Byzantine rules on the leadership, which left the unions with disproportionate clout.

It goes to show that not all the blame for Labour's dismal poll ratings are David Shearer's fault. And, if Labour's other Councils catch on to the power play, there could be more infighting ahead.