Ralston on spin
Bill Ralston covers several issues today:
There are now more media communications and public relations staff working for the Ministry of Social Development than there are journalists working in individual newsrooms for media organisations across the country.
The MSD apparently employs 61.5 media staff. Quite what the half person does is not clear but the rest appear to be trying to put a positive spin on everything the department does. All appear to be failing spectacularly.
It may be more than that. For example spies in the Education Ministry tell me the under-report their media/comms personnel by only counting those who work in the central comms unit, but that every operating section also has it owns comms person.
Actually, I suspect the 350 policy advisers are too busy with the 61.5 media people working out how to spend your money telling you that they are working hard for you. Last year, the MSD budgeted 15 million taxpayer dollars to promote, for example, the Working for Families scheme this election year. The Government is anxious to remind you that it is looking after you – even if you don’t want to be looked after.
I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you!
With this in mind, the Government last year published, at your expense, a brochure subtly called We’re Making a Difference. It is designed to tell you how good the Labour Government has been for you and, not surprisingly, the courts and Electoral Office came to the conclusion it was campaign advertising for the Labour Party under the Government’s stunningly stupid Electoral Finance Act.
However, last week the Government started ducking and diving in Parliament about whether the brochure would be counted against Labour’s spending cap for the election. Labour Party secretary Mike Smith has been telling the Electoral Office that the breach of the act wasn’t committed by the Labour Party, it was committed by the Labour Government, or more precisely, the Prime Minister’s Office, which is entirely different, says Mr Smith.
Quite how the Labour Party’s Prime Minister and the Labour Government is divorced from the Labour Party is not clear, but members of the Labour Party must be wondering if this is final confirmation of what they have felt for years, the party’s parliamentary wing is a law unto itself and no longer has any connection with its rank and file.
The arrogance of the parliamentary wign as they pushed through the EFA was staggering, only matched by their refusal to concede they overspent by $800,000 last time.
What she is saying is that the Government rammed through an act of Parliament, put the Electoral Office to enormous expense, tied up endless amounts of police time investigating alleged breaches of the act, and further troubled the overburdened court system with litigation about the meaning of the act because Labour was worried National might put up billboards attacking the Government this election year.
Yep, this could not be allowed.
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
“Under questioning from National’s Bill English, Justice Minister Annette King fudged the issue. Instead, she gave us an insight into the amazing pettiness that drives the Government’s thinking behind the Electoral Finance Act. Apparently referring to National’s quite effective and often funny billboard campaign before the last election, she dismissed English’s questions, instead talking of “the whining and whingeing from the National Party because it cannot spend the millions of dollars that it had planned to spend on its election campaign, right up to three months before the election, pretending that it did not count as election advertising. Its billboards would have been right around New Zealand. National is not able to do that. What we get now is its whingeing and snivelling about it.”
So teh answer was to place blanket limitations on everyone for up to a year before the election??!!? excepting of course the millions spend on TV campaigns designed to spread the illusion that Labour are making a difference to
alcohol consumption, crime, child poverty, waiting lists, educational standards, real wages, inflation, mortgage rates, petrol taxes, parental discipline, child abuse, do we have to go on.
Actually I think Ralston nailed it with ‘pettiness’ as the crowning attribute of the present government.
Interestingly enough Matt McCarten made the same accusation in his article. Looks like everyone is sick to the back teeth of this bunch of clowns.
Following King’s superb speech i mean it was so entertaining that it really doesn’t matter that she didn’t answer the question – that is merely everyday form under the present Speaker – you can ignore the question and insult the questioner becasue well standards aren’t what they once were, I guess. So, was it ‘whining’, ‘whingeing’ or ‘snivelling’ which got to King the most? – it’s so hard to keep up.
Still, it makes a change from ‘lying’ ‘rorting’ and ‘corrupting’ which appears to characterise the other side of the political divide on this particular issue…
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Come now, DPF and Bill Ralston – how can you think there’s any link between the “Labour Party” and the “Labour Government”? The former is (or once was) a long-standing grass-roots organisation with an enduring interest in advancing the hard working people of NZ. The latter is (and always has been) a collection of short-sighted self-serving social engineering elitists. There’s clearly no connection!
(On a different note, there’s a difference between the spindoctor media/public communications people in govt agencies and operational “communications” people – eg: Ministry of Education has 2600 schools and thousands of teachers to “communicate” with about routine funding and teacher payroll issues etc – those operational folks aren’t spindoctors in the way you could say the corporate comms people are)
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Great statement on the Powerline blog under the “A messiah flush with cash” title about Obama’s reversal over campaign financing. Regarding US Supreme Court Justice Scalia discussion of motives for campaign financing reform – applies to NZ very well:
“Here Scalia hits the mother lode: He discovers that, in one sense, incumbent officeholders tend to have a profound disdain for politics. The ideal of incumbent officeholders promoting campaign-finance reform is freedom from criticism, especially at election time. Indeed, these incumbent officeholders seem to view elections as an inconvenience to their exercise of power. “
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:57 am
It is interesting, I have been commenting all along re the EFB, that in the USA it is the leftwing politicians that attract the biggest financial support, so the Left’s traditional antagonism to the issue of political fundraising has largely ceased to exist in the USA.
Ironically, apart from one Owen Glenn, Labour in NZ seems to have been unable to exploit the same phenomenon, partly because we do not have the same level of third-generation (and beyond) wealth whose holders have different political loyalties to those who created the wealth in the first place, and partly because we have not had the socio-economic structure under which people of “liberal left” loyalties can get rich, at least not for long enough. Note the increasing numbers of lavishly-paid bureaucrats under the Heleban. But the penny really dropped in my mind when I read recently that the biggest group of leftwing funders by vocation, are lawyers. Of course! So look at who has been given all the get-rich-quick opportunities in NZ since 1999, from the Resource Management Act to the Electoral Finance Act………….