Dirty Politics - Election 2014

There isn't enough popcorn in the world for this.

I assume you changed the title. Thanks, should have had that at first.

Yeah thought we might as well have an election thread.

get your gloves on.

Be a shame if nearly all the people who can control the message on here had the same political bent...

http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/2014/08/8gb-stolen-data-...

Doloras is that you?

Why?  Our PM says it's all just a big non event, so there can't be a story here, plus its stolen anyway, plus it's lies plus left wing media, plus did I mention at the end of the day it's no big deal.

Although I may have been slightly sarcastic in the above post, I certainly wouldn't be holding my breath for anything groundbreaking coming from that.

Remember Social Credit and Bruce Beetham? The Values Party? McGillicuddy Serious Party? Remember when National were far right and labour were far left, then right with Roger Douglas, then left again?

Watches this thread with interest. Always fascinated with how many votes the Leagalise Cannabis party gets. One of the querks of having a democracy. 

You missed out an All Blacks analogy. 

Hamish McKay wouldn't have. I think that guy wears AB undies.

"What the people in Dirty Politics are trying to do is kill the good in politics and turn it into something completely toxic that destroys any hope of meaningful debate, discussion and conciliation, all so that their side can "win". If that sounds melodramatic and over the top, it isn't. You can read them saying that this is what they want in their own words. And that is a terrible, terrible thing to seek to do. Because if they win – if the way we conduct our politics and manage our differences and decide our common path becomes their vision of how "the game" should be played – then we all lose something very valuable. Basically, we lose our future."

Source:

National looking to sign CCM management and FFA drones for regulatory oversight if re-elected..."I've seen and done some BS, but nothing on the scale of the Michael McGlinchey saga"- Cam Slater

The owls are not what they seem.

I tend to vote green anyway so I haven't been following the dirty politics thing too closely but that blog post is really really revealing/disguisting.

I think most people would look quite shit in one way or another if all their personal communication was made public. Finger needs to be pointed at those that hack and print IMO

No - most people don't say things like that, at least I don't. There might be things in my email to make me look bad but nothing remotely like those direct quotes. 

They have been leaking the actual emails on Twitter so more politically motivated people than myself can read them and find context. 

As I said I vote green, that hasn't always been the case but it was in the last election and will be in this one, I only started to look at them after the more extreme members were replaced - as far as I can tell they aren't implicated so I haven't been paying it close attention.

I used to vote centre right but after working in Christchurch during the earthquake I heard some nasty stories from people who dealt directly with John Key and his office, I won't repeat them in a public forum because I don't want to implicate the people or companies involved (in the unlikely event that someone sees them) but it was enough for me to change who I vote for.

Another indicator is the fact that Wellington has quite a high labour voting percentage, certainly the local mp's are mostly red. The fact that a high percentage of Wellingtonians work for the government and choose to vote Labour is quite telling. I can see two arguments, one is that they all want to keep their jobs and that is more likely under Labour than National, the other side is they work directly with the MP's and see how they operate.

like what ?

or who makes decisions based on ideology and who basis it on evidence.

It's neither. Basically all capital cities vote left wing. Most of the voting trends could be explained by demographic factors. I find it hard to believe that your competence as a politician is reflected by what size you think government should be.

I'm in the Black Lodge with Wynhdam. 

Labour's proportion of the party vote in Wellington Central was 26.46% which was lower than its total proportion of the vote (27.48%)

http://www.electionresults.govt.nz/electionresults_2011/electorate-59.html

Though the total combined of Greens and Labour In Wgtn Central was 54.04% compared to the combined total for the country of 38.54%

I was making an assumption based more on the Wellington region electorates which apart from Dunn are all Labour.

But those numbers are interesting, allot of people cite voting for National because they don't want a government with Greens in it, but I get the feeling that they don't really know what the Green's policies are, and are thinking more about the Sue Bradford era of the party.

For all the big talk on email, this National "attack unit" really didn't have many big wins did it?

Can't understand why Collins and Ede aren't under a bus right now

Hager's big problem with this book is that as a piece of investigative journalism it's fairly poor quality.  The emails themselves are of course interesting, but he's not attempted to independently verify the allegations he makes, and has relied on the stolen emails in totality.  That means (1) it's easy to retort with a charge of hypocrisy that the emails were stolen and (2) some of the stories in reality were less interesting than implied by the emails which puts a question mark around the whole thing.  Slater is a rat bag and a pretty unpleasant individual but he talks a far bigger game than he walks

I just saw John key on the news.

No chance in hell I will vote for him this time with how much he looked like he didn't give a fluck.

I think it's the opposite.  The Greens have released a lot of new policy designed to attract new voters, some of which is very reasonable.  But if you look at what they fundamentally stand for (i.e. not their policy but their ideology) a lot of people aren't buying it

Allot of people are buying it. They are really the third major party now rather than a minow or perhaps it's own category of a medium size party.

the people that work in my govt dept are all douchebags so hey probably empathise with Labout MPs

I do find it interesting what people's perceptions are of political parties.

John Key, Gerry Brownlee, Judith Collins, Hekia Parata, Chris Finlayson, Paula Bennett, Anne Tolley, Nick Smith, Simon Bridges, Paul Goldsmith... the National List is douchebag central.

The information being wrongfully obtained doesn't justify what it reveals. Someone hacking Cameron Slater doesn't make it okay that National have been engaging and assisting bloggers to run smear campaigns.

+ they "hacked" labours database in the first place. There is a saying about glass houses and stones that could be considered apt.

I doubt this was hacking, more likely it was leaked by a pissed off associate of Slaters. 

Hacking is actually really hard, if it was hacking it would be either via a dictionary attack or perhaps there was an element of social engineering, likewise labours database wasn't hacking it was just guessing a URL for an unprotected file.

Moral of the story is use lastpass.com

Hager has made a pretty good fist of explaining this. If he had sought comment prior to publication, he would have been tied up in injunction proceedings indefinitely. The book would never have been published.

So yes, it makes it easy to knock back as a "smear" but he didn't have a load of options.

And it was information that had a genuine public interest, which he released in a thoughtful and contextualised way. Rosemary McLeod in the Dom today has fired up and said that she doesn't consider Hager a journalist, just a commentator. That is enormously unfair and quite wrong. I find it ironic coming from a masthead like the DomPost which doesn't really do journalism any more.

This is a good read for anyone who is interested, it's written by Hagar's lawyer.

Did Nicky Hagar "Make Stuff Up?"

I believe also it is Hager, sounds like lager

Without corroboration is it journalism?  I'm not sure...these just amount to accusations really.  It would be interesting to hear from an Editor as to whether a paper would have published this story in the form he has done without some form of additional evidence.

I think the stuff relating to Slater and how he runs his blog and who his other clients are is interesting as far as political gossip goes.  But overall, to me this doesn't amount to a while lot really.  

Unless there is evidence that the National government misused the organs of the state to harm its political opponents, a charge I don't see proved beyond Ede speaking with bloggers, what is the public interest angle here which justifies the theft of the emails (I'm pretty sure no-one interested in NZ politics wants to start a process whereby people are stealing each others emails unless the revelations are genuinely serious, unconstitutional or criminal?)?

I found this an odd defence, he just repeats the accusations in the book

I came in to say this:

If you are going to leak emails/personal information of others, you do not, DO NOT.. USE YOUR OWN EMAIL ADDRESS. Surely this is leaking info 101 ?????

Create a different email and disguise yourself then go to an internet cafe. Honestly......Very disappointed.

Says Whoooooo from his local internet cafe.