Kiwiblog

Labour sent Whale Oil a vaguely threatening letter, as did Greg Presland. Both imply legal action if Whale does not destroy all the information he has.

Whale has responded to Labour General Secretary Chris Flatt. Some extracts:

In response to your let­ter dated 15^th of this month, I agree to take the steps you require on the fol­low­ing terms:

1. You resign immediately.
2. Trevor Mal­lard resigns as the can­di­date for Hutt South and is replaced by my old mate Dar­ren Hughes who has been treated so shab­bily by the Labour Party.
3. Dar­ren agrees to only wear Swazi cloth­ing for the next year, and gets his uncle to take me shooting.
4. Fred Dagg gets his right­ful posi­tion at the top of the Labour Party List. In perpetuity.
5. Helen Clark becomes Dame Helen in the New Years Hon­ours list.

You can see the full list on Whale’s blog. I wonder how many months Whale can keep this going.

Have just returned from the Iranian Embassy, which hosted a function for Jill Worrall, the author of Two Wings of a Nightingale – a travel book about Iran.

I mentioned the function and the book on The Panel prior to the function and was amused that it seems half the people at the reception heard me mention it. Shows how strong Radio NZ is in Wellington.

Readers may recall I visited Iran in 2009, hence my invite to the launch. Like Jill, I found it a wonderful country, nothing like what one might expect. The people are wonderfully friendly and hospitable, and the sights are magnificent. If it is shame that so few New Zealanders travel to Iran (under 100 a year probably).

I’m definitely going to return one day, and recommend those curious abaout it read Jill’s book.

Next time I visit, I plan to stay for at least two weeks. There is so much to see.

My call for contributors has seen Blunt spring back into life with his cartoons. Note that the cartoonist has editorial independence – they do not necessairly represent my views, just as a cartoon in the Dom Post is not the same as an editorial in the Dom Post.

NZ Herald reports:

“If he had have been stood down at the outset that would have been against the presumption of innocence I think every New Zealander – whether you’re a sports star, politician or radio journalist – are entitled to,” he told Radio New Zealand.

He said the presumption of innocence is “fundamental” to the justice system.

What nonsense. Thousands of people get stood down while allegations are investigated. Helen Clark did it on many occassions. A stand down does not in any way go against a criminal presumption of innocence.

“He was entitled to have his case investigated properly, as it was by the police, without the sort of allegations, wild allegations, that were made concerning him and the situation that in the end he felt made it impossible for him to continue in his role.”

You mean unlike Richard Worth, who had Phil Goff jumping up and down making all sorts of wild allegations against him?

The hypocrisy is just so immense.

The Boundary Road Brewery said:

Applications are open for discerning beer lovers (999 to be exact) who know a good brew from a bad, appreciate a malt hops balance and fancy themselves a beer aficionado to become a Boundary Road Brewery Beer Taster.

To gain a coveted position as a Boundary Road Brewery Beer Taster, serious beer lovers can apply at www.TheChosenOne.co.nz  where they will need to pass a beer knowledge test. The first 999 beer lovers successful in the test will be sent a tasting pack of three variants of Boundary Road Brewery lagers which they will put through a rigorous testing process before passing judgement on their favourite.

The most popular brew as voted by the tasters will be released for sale as The Chosen One, along with an ale, pilsner and ginger beer by The Boundary Road Brewery to a thirsty and grateful public from 1 August 2011.

Beer lovers need to get in quick as applications close 30 June 2011 and applicants must be 18 years or over and be able to demonstrate a sound knowledge of beer.

What’s more, one of the lucky 999 will win the title of Chairman of the Beer Tasters and will take home a Williamswarn Personal Brewery worth $6,000.

I got sent a pack of the three beers as media, and I have to say they were most pleasant. I’m not sure how many they have left of their 999 sample packs, but go for it if keen. My preferred one was Beer C.

This must be the worst excuse ever. Elizabeth Binning at the NZ Herald reports:

A teacher who was caught with more than 3000 pornographic images of naked young girls said he needed them to help produce sperm samples while dealing with infertility problems.

That’s his excuse? He used this line with the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal. It is a pity he didn’t use it at court, as I suspect the Judge would have then given him more than two years’ supervision and 250 hours’ community work.

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

I’m trying to think of a worse excuse than his one. It must be hard to beat.

Labour’s security issues go beyond the fact they left their entire server contents available for anyone to see if they went to one of their campaign websites. Their passwords are now in Google.

Whale blogs:

Com­menters at Kiwiblog and other sites quickly realised what I did long ago and that was that Google and other bots had archived Labour’s open site exten­sively. All their data is still in the cache and will be for quite some time.

Doing a sim­ple cache search of the root domain with the word “pass­word” added shows just how bad their secu­rity was.

The prob­lem how­ever was much worse than that. Way worse. Remem­ber that Chris Flatt the Labour Gen­eral Sec­re­tary sent out a let­ter and email to their donors assur­ing them that their credit card details were safe. He shouldn’t have been too hasty with that assurance.

In the MySQL data­base files there were also plain txt strings that con­tained other data­base pass­words along with the user name and pass­words of their credit card provider.

Oh dear.

This shows the appalling lack of secu­rity not only for the donor and mem­ber­ship details but also with regard to user­names and pass­words for other secure areas.

I never accessed those areas, to do so would have been ille­gal. But given that their sys­tems were open and exposed long enough that Google and 9 other bots were able to cache the entire direc­tory sys­tem there is a good chance that Rus­siam or Niger­ian scam­sters also were able to obtain access to the data­base and credit card pro­cess­ing passs­words that Labour left exposed. Chris Flatt can­not give any assur­ances that their donor details includ­ing credit cards were safe and secure.

Their credit card passwords have been sitting in Google for several months. Need more be said.

God it annoys me when people go on about the purchase age for alcohol, and confuse it with a drinking age.

The latest is the Chair of Kings.

Let us be very clear. NZ has no drinking age at present. It is absolutely legal for 12 year olds to drink spirits. I think this is crazy, and why I support there being a drinking age. And at present it is also legal for an adult to give a 12 year old a bottle of spirits.

The Government’s proposals go part of the way towards having a drinking age. They make it illegal to supply alcohol to someone under 18 without parental consent. However they don’t make the actual consumption of alcohol without consent an offence.

The purchase age is the age at which you can purchase alcohol. It is currently 18. When a 16 or 17 year old gets into trouble with alcohol, it has nothing to do with the purchase age and everything to do with the lack of a drinking age – or at the least the lack of a law preventing supply to those under 18.

What happened at Kings has nothing to do with the purchase age of alcohol being 18. The dead boy is aged 17. We won’t know until the Coroner reports what happened that night, but I have heard from multiple people that this was not primarily an alcohol issue. I am amazed the Chair of Kings is raising what is arguably a red herring.

Well that didn’t take long. I blogged about the ads yesterday and today they are gone. Andrea Vance at Stiff reports:

The Green Party has pulled “Gone Off Phil Goff?” ads – and apologised to the Labour leader.

The online notices were placed this week but were not authorised by the party, which was alerted to them via social media.

Although the Greens would like to attract disillusioned Labour voters, co-leader Metiria Turei said earlier this month that it would support a Labour-led government following the November 26 election.

Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said the ads were placed as an “experiment” by a member of the party’s campaign team. He apologised to Mr Goff.

The ads were up for “a day or so”, he said.

“It was a very small-scale experiment by a member of our campaign team that actually wasn’t authorised.

 If the advertisements were not authorised by the party, then the team member who placed them has committed an offence under the Electoral Act. I hope the Electoral Commission will investigate, as it is a serious offence to place an ad on behalf f a party without authorisation.

The advertisement also did not appear to have an authorisation statement, which is potentially a seperate offence also.

National Party President Peter Goodfellow was quoted as saying:

National had no inter­est in Labour’s infor­ma­tion of that kind and was not look­ing for it.

“We don’t con­done that sort of behav­iour at all.”

He declined to com­ment on Slater or his actions.

“I don’t have any con­trol over him. If you see what he has writ­ten about me you would prob­a­bly say I prob­a­bly don’t have any con­trol over him. I mean you are talk­ing to the wrong guy there,” he said.

Peter denying he has any sort of control over Peter would normally be the funniest thing in print. Most people will recall that Whale spent several months trying to get Peter not re-elected to the Board.

But Whale’s response is even better:

Damn right they have no con­trol over me, no one does, not even me.

That must be the most perceptive thing Whale has ever said

The PR people for HP asked me a few weeks ago if I wanted to try out and review their new HP Photosmart Premium printer, as it allows you to print from your iPad etc.

I actually have a current wireless printer – the Brother MFC-255CW. I do not have a desktop PC, so wanted a wireless printer so I don’t need to plus the laptop into a cable everytime I want to print. The Brother isn’t bad, but has been a bit frustrating as my firewall software often blocks printing to it. Also you can only print to it, when connected to the same wireless network.

So I said I would get the HP e-printer a try. A big box turned up a couple of days later and I unpacked it. The instruction manual was missing for it, but that actually proved sort of useful as it tested me on whether I could get it to work, without needing to RTFM.

Setup was pretty simple. A couple of the parts needed some firm encouragement to fit into each other, but overall nothing too difficult. Then after one has tested the physical printing, it was time for seeing how it prints wirelessly. To connect it up, you just detect your wireless router connection, and connect to it with the password. Again, pretty simple.

Then I discovered the key difference with my current wireless printer. The Brother requires you to then install the drivers and software on your laptop, so you can print to it. The HP e-printer actually has a unique e-mail address assigned to it – at an HP domain. So all you have to do is e-mail the photo or document to that e-mail address.

I e-mailed a letter from my laptop to its e-mail address. Started printing within seconds. Did the same with a photo from my iPad. Now this is a photo printer so it comes with a postcard sized printer tray, and 100 or so photo cards. It automatically printed the photos onto the photo card.

The one negative was that the colour settings seemed a bit out – the prints were red tinged. I’m sure it is solvable, but was noticeable.

Back to the iPad, it really does work well with them. Because once it has printed once to the e-printer, then the printer is listed on the iPad as a printer. So from then on, you can use the print rather than e-mail function.

The really good thing about it, is you don’t have to physically be at home to print to it. I tried printing a photo from the iPad from town – it was waiting for me when I got back. This means I can have a quick glance at a document on my Blackberry or iPad, and if I want a hard copy, instruct it to print to my home printer immediately. That’s a great feature, as it means you can print when you see it, not have to rely on finding the e-mail later on the laptop.

It occurs to me that if one was doing a big overseas trip, you could give this printer to your folks, and as you travel around you could e-mail a couple of photos a day to their printer, and they would see the sights you are seeing. Anyone who knows its e-mail address can print to it, which can be useful for flatmates etc.

The printer is relatively compact and my one is a nice shiny black. As someone with no desktop PC, I find it pretty brilliant. Printing used to be quite a hassle, and now it is literally as simple as e-mail, and can be done from anywhere.

The official HP page on the printer is here. I suspect in the future more and more printers will be like this one – printable from anywhere or anything.

Am very amused by this story on Stuff:

In the spotlight over whether the taxpayer has funded Labour’s party activities, deputy leader Annette King has taken a pot shot at right-wing Stuff blogger David Farrar. …

King said Labour was very careful about what its staff did during paid time at Parliament.

”We have looked at it and we have made sure they are doing what is appropriate for them to do.”

Other parties should also check their staff, she said.

”Because I have no doubt that in the past someone like David Farrar setting up his blog, a lot of it was done within Parliament.

”I’m not accusing him of using Parliamentary time but every party has to be careful of what they do in their own time, in their own equipment and in Parliamentary equipment.”

Farrar admits he was working at Parliament when he set up the blog in 2003, and over the nine months he spent working in the National Party’s leader’s office he occasionally blogged from Parliament.

”But the blog was hosted on the NZ Pundit server in Dunedin. No Parliamentary resources were used.

”I worked an 80 hour week, they were getting free time from me, so the taxpayer didn’t pay for my time.”

I literally laughed out loud when I heard Annette was talking about eight years ago in 2003. And as I told Danya, my blog was never hosted on servers paid for by Parliament. Gordon King from NZ Pundit hosted it back then.

I definitely did blog from Parliament during the nine months cross-over with working there, but did this openly and under my own name. I actually think parliamentary staff should be encouraged to blog – so long as they do it openly like with Frog Blog.

But with me, it was very much as an individual. I did not seek permision from, or even inform in advance, any MP or staffer that I was starting a blog. For me it was just continuing on the debates I had been having in Usenet since 1996.

Stuff reports:

Legislation to set up a lobbyists register has been put forward by the Green Party.

Green MP Sue Kedgley today released a copy of Lobbying Disclosure Bill, which she said would go on to the member’s ballot at the next opportunity.

Well thanks to Labour filibustering, there won’t be an opportunity before the election, and as Sue is retiring it means the proposed bill will never be drawn unless another MP adopts it after the election. Its a good reminder of how Labour’s tactics are depriving all other backbenchers from having their bills considered.

Turning to the substance:

The bill would set up a register and a code of conduct for lobbyists.

As in Canada and other western countries, lobbyists would have to publicly notify all meetings with MPs.

I’m not entirely sure what problem this bill seeks to solve. All meetings are discoverable under the OIA. Do you need a law when an e-mail every six months will achieve the same with regard to meetings.

The proposed law also requires lobbyists to disclose their clients. Now look I’m not saying there is a problem with having a register, but it is already pretty well known who represents whom.  And some firms, such as Saunders Unsworth, actually list their clients on their website.

I’m not aware of any behaviour when a lobbyist has not disclosed whom they are acting on behalf of.

So while I’m not against a register of lobbyists, I don’t think it is the most pressing issue facing the country. but members bills are about backbench MPs proposing what they see as important, so Sue has done that.

”The public has no way of knowing who is lobbying their politicians or what they are being lobbied about. There is also no information available on which lobbyists have special access to Parliament granted to them by the Speaker,” Kedgley said.

This fixation with special access to Parliament mystifies me. Hundreds of non parliamentarians have ID cards for Parliament. Dozens of party office holders have them, as do dozens of the youth wings who often come in to volunteer. Family members have them, as do hundreds of govt officials.

We have security at Parliament not to make it hard for people to see MPs, but to stop terrorists coming in and blowing the place up. My view is that anyone who is a regular visitor to Parliament (say more than 2-3 times a year) should be able to get a ID card so long as someone will vouch for them.

I’ve had an ID card since 1996. I was staff from 1996 to 2004 and after I left I’ve kept a card as I usually come into Parliament once ever couple of months or so and it is handly to avoid going through the metal detectors.

In the last few months, most of my visits have actually been to meet Labour, Green and ACT MPs over the copyright and telecommunications bills (where I have in fact been lobbying for them to support changes that National was against), plus been attending meetings about the reporting of suicides chaired by Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne.

If there is a register of lobbyists, a key issue will be how you define lobbyists. 90% of lobbying is done directly by staff working for corporates. I would suggest they should be listed, not just the external lobbying firms.

Arguably I could be regarded as a lobbyist for InternetNZ. For many years I chaired their Public Policy Committee as Vice-President of InternetNZ. As VP I had a small honorarium of $12,000 a year. I’ve retired as VP, but still chair the now titled Policy Advisory Group. This involves literally chairing the monthly meetings, but also meeting with policy staff regularly to help develop submissions, pro-actively identifying policy issues etc. I am now technically a contractor, as I am no longer an officer, and still get $12,000 a year for it.

Now for the last seven years or so, I’ve been one of the InternetNZ people who speaks to our submissions at select committees, and meets with MPs to advocate for what we regard as good for the Internet.

One could argue I am a paid lobbyist for InternetNZ in my current role. I don’t quite see it like that because my advocacy is based on my beliefs of what is good for the Internet, which coincide with InternetNZ. But under the proposed law, I might be classified as a lobbyist. Now that doesn’t worry me at all, but it seems strange to me as I’m not like a lawyer or lobbyist who will argue for a client regardless of their own beliefs. If ever INZ adopted a policy position I disagreed with, I would not take part in the advocacy around it.

Now depending on how you define a lobbyist, my advocacy on behalf of InternetNZ might be deemed lobbying in my role as a contractor to them, but how about when I was their Vice-President? I was doing much the same then, as I was today. I would argue you should say that if I am deemed a lobbyist as a contractor, I am also a lobbyist as an office holder.

Now if you do take that definition, then just be aware that an awfully large number of people will now be classified as lobbyists. I’d suspect 1,000+ people would fall into that definition.

As I said at the beginning, thanks to Labour this bill will never see light of day. If it ever gets adopted by another MP in future, then a very interesting issue will be that definition of a lobbyist.

I blog at Stuff on the Te Tai Tokerau poll. My conclusion is that it is a good poll for Labour’s Kelvin Davis.

Tracy Watkins in the Dom Post reports:

Labour is appealing to the privacy commissioner about lists of supporters and donors falling into the hands of a right-wing blogger.

Details of 18,000 people were on the databases downloaded by blogger Cameron Slater, severely embarrassing Labour, which had to email donors and people who had contacted it through its website to apologise for the breach.

Slater has revealed on his blog how he obtained the databases, which appear to have been publicly available and easy to download without needing to hack into the site.

It is good that Labour is talking to the Privacy Commissioner. But rather than appealing to her, they should be begging mercy.

The good Commissioner could do worse than read Danyl at the Dim Post who translates technical stuff to English:

• Labour registered another site called healthyhomeshealthykiwis.org.nz, also hosted on this server. But when you visited this address you didn’t see a normal web page – you saw a directory listing of the Labour Party web server. This let you browse Labour’s server and read any file you wanted, just as you can with your own computer.

• This is considered so undesirable and such an egregious breach of security that the web server software Labour uses (Apache) disables directory listing by default. You have to go into a configuration file and switch it on manually. So I guess that’s what they did.

• It gets worse. All organisations back up their sensitive data – usually onto a backup server and/or tapes, which are then kept in a highly secure location. Confidential data like, say, financial records are always encrypted and password protected. But someone in the Labour Party decided to back up their donor database onto their web server – the only server in their organisation accessible to the general public, so by definition the last place you’d put any backup files.

• So all you had to do was enter healthyhomeshealthykiwis.org.nz, click on a few directories and you could download Labour’s unencrypted donor database.

Danyl’s conclusion:

Like the Darren Hughes fiasco, this is yet another sign that Labour is not a healthy organisation. It’s a party of perpetual incompetence that’s in deep denial about this obvious fact – to them they’re always the innocent victims of endless right-wing media conspiracies. A party that cannot run itself should not be allowed anywhere near the machinery of government.

If someone really had hacked the Labour website, exploiting a recent vulnerability, then my attitude would be very different. Few websites are immune from a totally dedicated expert hacker. But this is the exact opposite of that – this is listing all your private files on the frontpage of a website.

Tom Cardy at Stuff reports:

One of the big questions hanging over Sir Peter Jackson’s Dambusters film has finally been answered – the dog Nigger will be renamed Digger as it might offend Americans.

The film’s script writer Stephen Fry revealed the change in an interview with the BBC.

In the original 1955 film the name of pilot Guy Gibson’s black Labrador is spoken 12 times as a code word to report successful dam breaches to the RAF’s bomber command, it was reported.

Fry said: “there is no question in America that you could ever have a dog called the N-word. It’s no good saying that it is the Latin word for black or that it didn’t have the meaning that it does now – you just can’t go back, which is unfortunate…Digger seems OK, I reckon”.

They were probably going to be damned, no matter what they decided. Fry makes a good point about how unacceptable that word would be playing to US audiences. However I don’t like rewriting history. Shakespeare has a bit of anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice, but God forbid if someone ever tries to rewrite it, because it is not acceptable today.

Generally audiences can appreciate that in our past, attitudes and names were very different to today.

What I would have preferred is that they kept the original name, but maybe had a brief message at the begining of the film explaining the use of the name.

I saw this on on Whale Oil’s blog and thought it was worth commnting on. At the least it is a clear campaign to win voters off Labour. At worst it is a declarion of no confidence in Goff from the Greens.

I can’t recall too many examples of an small opposition party so directly targeting their ideological ally previously. I wonder how long these ads will run for, and will they be just online or might we see some billboards also?

The usual suspects have been trying to say that Labour’s website was hacked or cracked, or some sort of vulnerability was exploited.

But the video done by Whale shows how they had their entire server directory listed on the front page on their campaign site www.healthyhomeshealthykiwis.org.nz. No guessing directory names, no clever tricks. All you had to do was type in the URL and instead of getting an index.html page, you got the server directory.

Whale blogs on the background in further detail here.

Phil Quinn has called for the Labour Party General Secretary to resign over this. I’m not sure who is the appropriate person to resign, but I think someone does have to be held accountable for such a total failure of even the most basic security.

If Labour don’t hold someone accountable, then the only message you can take from it is that they don’t see this as serious enough.

Stephen A’Court was kind enough to invite me to have a look at his latest photographic display, which is on at the Toi Poneke Gallery, 61 Abel Smith Street, Wellington.

I went along with Sports Girl, and was blown away by the photos. The gulf between photos that amateurs do, and these photos is just huge.

The collection of 21 photos are of graduates of Toi Whakaari, the NZ Drama School. They are of actors, actresses, directors, producers, technical crew etc – some very famous, some less so.

This is one of Stephen’s photos, of actress Brooke Williams, who people may recognise from Outraegous Fortune and The Almight Johnsons. It’s taken on the steps backstage at Downstage. This was my second favourite photo because it captures Williams’ almost doll-like beauty so well.

My favourite photo was actually of Ruth Pretty (yes she is a graduate of Toi Whakaari) in her living room. I didn’t blog that photo because to be honest you couldn’t do it justice with a screen resolution and size. The colour is so perfect in her photo, you really need to see it for yourself.

Stephen has done a wonderful tribute to the theatre and film world. He grew up amongst theatre people – his grandmother was an operatic-style singer and his sister is the well known actress and comedian, Michelle A’Court. He also photography for many of the plays put on in Wellington.

If you have a spare hour in Wellington, and you appreciate great photography, I absolutely recommend you pop in and see the exhibition on Abel Smith Street. The photos are great, and the potted backgrounds of each person profiled were also very interesting.

You can see some of the photos at Stephen’s website, but trust me its not the same as seeing the original prints.

With work so busy for me, plus the pressure of regular columns on other sites, I’m finding it difficult to do as much as I would like to on Kiwiblog. I’m not going to, and never would, do an Iain Dale and stop blogging – I enjoy it too much for that.

But what I am going to try, is to see if there are any readers interested in helping out with Kiwiblog. These are not paid roles, but volunteer roles. A chance to contribute, and if you really want have a fancy title

These are the roles which I have identified as most useful to me for now.

Sub-Editor

• Do regular posts of political events – who’s on Backbenches, Q+A, The Nation as we receive them, and iPredict newsletter updates.
• Set up the General Debate to appear at 8 am for each day
• Correct any obvious typos in my posts
• Approve any comments held in moderation (normally from new posters)
• Clear the spam queue
• Embed a Daily Dilbert Cartoon
• Feed quotes into the Quotes Collection

Data Monkey

After someone who is a whiz on Excel. Don’t need to know all the fancy advanced features, but is good with data. I’d like to do more data analysis on Kiwiblog, but don’t have as much time to to do it all myself.

An example of what I am after is the planned series of posts on Electoral Reform. One of the posts will be on how porportional each of the five systems are. So what I am after is someone who can use the Gallagher Index to calculate the proportionality of the result for each election from 1996 to 2008, and the average over the five elections.

Then ideally to also model what the results of each election would have been under SM 90/30 and FPP, and to also calculate the Gallagher Index for each of those scenarios. Then one can compare the average proportionality (or not) of FPP, SM and MMP.

None of this is particularly difficult – it just takes time to enter in the data for 5 elections, create alternate results for 10 further scenarios, and then calculate the index for each.

Cartoonist

Kiwblog used to have a regular cartoonist. If you want to take up the spot, send me a couple of cartoons.

Photographer

We have the wonderful nature photos by Chtonoid every Friday. But what I am after is someone in Wellington and probably someone in Auckland who can attend significant political events (marches, rallies, demos etc) and take some photos for Kiwiblog.

So if you are interested in helping, e-mail me.

All teeange deaths are tragic. The families never recover, the friends are traumatised, and a life full of potential is wasted.

I had two classmates die in a car accident in Year 11. It took a long time to get over that, and even today I think of them several times a year.

The James Webster death was due to alcohol, and few would disagree that the ease of supply of alcohol to under 18s needs to be changed – and there are law changes proposed around that.

In relation to the death of David Gaynor, Labour have said:

Labour is calling on the Government to implement all of the Law Commission’s recommendations on alcohol reform in the wake of the death of a King’s College student following his school ball.

I have to be very careful here as there are strict legal restrictions on what I can and can not publish. However what I can say is that I do not believe alcohol was a major, or arguably even minor, contributor to this awful tragedy. To the best of my knowledge this is not a James Webster case, or even particularly similiar.

So politicians who use the death to demand particular alcohol law changes are, I will be charitable, potentially misguided.

My sympathy goes out to the family and friends of David.

Poor bastards in Christchurch. Three more after-shocks today, and some further damage from the shallow one.

Sounds like no serious injuries, and property damage minimal. But I know the psychological damage is a lot larger.

UPDATE: The latest aftershock was at around 2.25 pm and I could feel it in Wellington. Sounds like this one may have done some significant damage, and power out in some areas.

GNS say it was over a six.