Farrar Tui 1: Trivial little coup really!

This was sent in from one of our very clever regulars - our very first Farrar Tui. Farrar Tuis will be a semi-regular theme in 2008, feel free to submit you own:

Link-blogging: Outted again

Oliver Woods’ Quest for Security blog is left-leaning but non-aligned, with a focus on economic nationalism. He posted yesterday supporting the EFB and taking aiming Davey’s new billboards:

They’re funny, but the real problem is that the person running this campaign is none other than National Party blogger and office-holder David Farrar. (Read on.)

Colin James on politician of the year and the EFB

Colin James might be reasonably described as NZ’s preeminent political journalist. He’s been there and done that for considerably longer than most and has a incisive mind and deft hand. So it’s interesting to review his pick for politician of the year, Green co-leader Janette Fitzsimons.

Despite heaping praise on Clark, saying she is effective domestically, internationally, well briefed and tireless, James says she is let down by too many errors by her team. He also, somewhat surprisingly, gives Key a pass mark. However, he is clearly unimpressed with our mate Davey and his rabble saying:

But National’s hands are muddied in the electoral law fiasco, too. The “free speech” crusade stalled at the rent-a-crowd rally against the Electoral Finance Bill at Parliament in November.

A video on YouTube depicts the crowd shouting down Jeanette Fitzsimons and at one point someone bellowing: “Turn the microphone off.” Voltaire, quoted by National’s Lindsay Tisch in the House last Tuesday, would have been aghast. Yet none of the many National MPs present (including Tisch) saw the irony and intervened.

Ouch! The full item is available here.

Ironywatch: Herald suppresses free speech on EFB

I’m sure given his volume of posting on electoral finance reform, Davey will be giving appropriate coverage to this, which is currently getting prominent placement at Scoop:

The New Zealand Herald has censored parts of a 200 word article that the Greens were asked to submit on campaign finance reform for yesterday’s edition. They deleted the opening paragraph that was critical of the Herald’s coverage of the issue, and replaced it with their own commentary at the end of the article. More

An Assault on Economic Royalism

Gee, Davey, I thought “even Chris Trotter says Kill the Bill”? 

The Electoral Finance Bill, by threatening to starve the conservative elites of the funds they need to ensure that popular deference to wealth and privilege remains ingrained in the electorate, constitutes a direct threat - not to democracy, but to its polar opposite, Economic Royalism - the aristocratic ambitions of those whom President Theodore Roosevelt described as “malefactors of great wealth”.

These are the people who, failing to strong-arm a majority in the House of Representatives, now propose to substitute the Legislature of the Streets. In place of reasoned debate, they offer inflammatory slogans. Rather than sift a multitude of truths, they have mobilised a legion of lies. No longer trusting in the calm deliberation of Westminster, they seek to unleash the tumult and violence of Venezuela.

And herein lies the threat to constitutional democracy.

Read the full column in the inimitable Trotter style, here.

Does Money Equal Free Speech?

I got a couple of slightly puzzled responses to my last post: why bring the United States into a discussion of electoral finance reform and its opponents?

Well, for one thing, they (the opponents that is) started it. Just about everything about the current campaign against the ERB is drawn from the efforts to prevent campaign finance reform in the U.S.: the tactics, the key lines and, in particular, the persistent attempt to frame restrictions on spending as an attack on ‘free speech’.

This last bit wasn’t inevitable - finance reform opponents could have chosen to base their arguments on property rights (‘it’s my money and I’ll do what I like with it’). But instead, for many years now, the Right in the U.S. have tried to portray any attempt to limit the influence of money on elections as an assault on free speech. And their New Zealand equivalents have followed that lead. 

The aim of those opposing electoral finance reform

Some people accuse Davey and his Act and Libertarianz mates who are campaigning against the reform of electoral finance of defending the status quo.

In reality, they are far more ambitious (TM John Key 2007) than that. What they, and many in the parties that they represent, really aim for is to move the Kiwi electoral process inexorably in the U.S. direction.

The New York Times therefore provides a timely warning to us in an editorial last Sunday entitled Campaign for Sale. It begins:

The sticker price for next year’s presidential and Congressional elections is rocketing toward $5 billion, shocking even political professionals who figure the ante in the opening Iowa round may cost out at $300 per caucusgoer. When you consider that the votes taken at those caucuses actually have no direct effect on who is nominated by either party, the cost should be ludicrous by the laws of economics, never mind politics. 

But the campaign is harvesting record amounts of money, seeded by the front-loading of the primary schedule with major contests in the first six weeks of the year, watered by the willingness of candidates and party machines to ignore the spirit of the law, and fertilized by the bottom lines of television companies.

 

And perhaps of particular interest:

Even if the Supreme Court has started treating the cash of wealthy corporations and special-interest groups as free speech, there are responsible ways to put brakes on a runaway money train that promises to generate little in the way of voter turnout or issue elucidation. 

The Federal Election Commission, normally weighted with machine loyalists from the two parties, has to become more of an enforcer of the law than an enabler of law-evaders. It must crack down harder on such blatant abusers as the noxious “527 committees” of 2004 that tapped illegal fat-cat donations to pass off bare-knuckle partisan operations as tax-exempt initiatives. (More) [emphasis added]

 

This is not a track we want our country to take next year.

But it is where the astroturf opponents of electoral finance reform, in thrall to the dirty tricks prescriptions of US Republican campaign gurus, want to take us.

Graciousness as spin

Well, that was nice of him — wasn’t it??

The Ambitious One scores a massive own-goal by trying to rip off Coldplay for his DVD, as discussed by Mardy earlier, and Davey is gracious enough to give kudos to our mates at the Standard for their work in exposing this goof. (No direct mention of our own Wat’s part in it or the Sprout’s of course, though Tane at the Standard is kind enough to acknowledge them).

Gosh, maybe he’s a fair and balanced guy, after all!

Yeah right. Regular readers may have picked up that we’re not huge fans of Davey - but even we give him points for cunning. Let’s look at how he framed that hat-tip: “It also a testament to the role the blogosphere can play.”

Davey’s in it for the cause but he’s got his own personal agenda, too, and it never hurts to remind HQ about how important the blogs (read: and especially his blog) will be in election year!

Another example of Davey using this technique: my buddy Colin Espiner does a column that knocks Labour for the ERB but also says:

There is also no doubt that the debate has been effectively hijacked by Right-wing supporters of National such as David Farrar and John Boscawen, who have even appeared in the media as “independent” commentators, despite one being National’s Wellington Central campaign manager and the other an Act Party fundraiser.

I suspect mocking the gullibility of Fairfax’s media competitors is probably Colin’s main aim here. But anyway, Davey’s smart enough to nestle his attempts at rebuttal in a post that presents itself as praise. Sneaky, sneaky!

IrishBill: On the money

IrishBill over on The Standard has an excellent dissection of Espiner’s most recent article.

Like IrishBill, we too have come to believe DPF’s involvement in the shockingly poorly managed anti-EFB campaign and his association with bottom dwellers like Cam Slater is ablating Davey’s credibility at a rate of knots.

The EFB certainly had flaws when it was first introduced (since recognised by the Select Committee and government changes) - but Davey’s anti-EFB campaign was never a grass roots - it is, as IrishBill describes it, classic ‘astroturfing’.   I can well imagine people genuinely concerned about what they had heard about the Bill visiting the ‘Kill the Bill ’site and being instantly turned-off by its obvious nasty partisanship. The site and the campaign just lacks credibility.  It has no class or gravitas.  Any serious analysis and argument being put forward by Davey or Boscowen are being drowned out by the efforts of the human bilge pump, Whale. DPF’s egregious chummy just can’t help but turn anything he’s involved with into a sleazy cess-pit reflection of his own site and DPF haplessly permits this.

Rodney gags on the EFB

Source: New Zealand Herald - (http://media.apn.co.nz/webcontent/image/jpg/rodney2.jpg)

Now here’s a fashion statement I approve of. Maybe we should petition Rodders to make this a permanent addition to his wardrobe?

By the way, putting aside whether the Auckland protest march was 1300 - as shown by Jaymam’s photographic evidence or 6000 as asserted by the protest organisers - it is kind of nice to see a cross section of New Zealanders getting involved in political activism. It seems there were a wide range of people at the protest. There were National people, ACT people, National/ACT people, ACT/National people, floating voters who err between National and ACT - you know, a real cross section.