Kiwiblog

You’re the Mayor of Auckland and one of your largest commercial facilities in paralysed with industrial action. Even worse, it is a facility owned by your Council.

Over several weeks you have seen Auckland’s economy get battered after first Maersk and now Fonterra announce they are abandoning Auckland for Tauranga and Napier, due to the militant industrial action taken by the Maritime union.

So it should be a no-brainer to come out publicly and lean on the Maritime Union to stop driving businesses away from Auckland. I mean ever Wellington’s Celia Wade-Brown stood up for the wellington creative industries when a militant union looked set to destroy them.

So why has Len been so silent and non-commital? It didn’t make sense.

Well it didn’t, until I read at Whale Oil that the Maritime Union was one of Len’s donors. They also donated to Mike Lee.

I guess that was one of their better investments.

A very nicely done video by Whale of a duck counting numbers in caucus. If the numbers are accurate then Shearer would win 19 votes to 16. I presume there are 35 votes as it is not yet known whether Burns or Huo are in caucus.

Whale also has a conspiracy theory that almost all of Shearer’s endorsements have come from those who were at Matthew Hooton’s bbq last Sunday. Of course I wasn’t at the bbq (I was celebrating with friends down at the Viaduct), and have said I think Shearer represents a better chance for Labour to win in 2014.

Whale is running a live chat tonight where you can ask him anything. Guaranteed to be fun and no censorship. Starts at 8.30 pm.

Whale Oil has a great scoop.

The Waikato Times had a big article on a family struggling to make ends meet in Hamilton. The mother is quoted as saying she could never vote National, used to vote Labour but this time thinks the best option for her is to vote Greens.

Nowhere in the article do they mention her partner, and father of her child, is the Green Party candidate for Hamilton East – Max Dillon.

This is not a trivial oversight. It undermines the entire article.  It means either the Waikato Times never asked if they had a political affiliation, or they knew and didn’t care.

I think the fault lies not only with the newspaper though. To agree to be interviewed as a typical struggling family, who have decided to vote Green, without disclosing the father/partner is the Green Party candidate is rather unethical.

UPDATE: This appeared today:

This is very interesting. First it tells us that this was pretty much a Green Party sting. Even worse according to the Waikato Times they say they specifically asked Ms Campbell if she had any links to the Greens.

It is interesting that they used Twitter to obtain interview subjects. It makes it far more likely those with a political agenda will be interviewed as they are more likely to volunteer. Once upon a time media would have used networks to hunt out a family to profile. Better to profile someone who does not volunteer but somewhat grudgingly consents. They are more likely to be genuine.

If the Waikato Times did ask Ms Campbell for any links to the Green Party, then one can’t hold them responsible for being lied to. However we don’t know exactly what they asked and exactly what the answer was. I think there is still a lesson here – they could have searched Twitter or used Google and discovered the link quite easily.

Whale blogs:

Trevor Mal­lard is host­ing a Live chat tonight at 7pm.

You can ask your ques­tions & fol­low my answers via the ‘LabourLive tab’ on the New Zealand Labour Party Face­book page or by going here.

It is on from 7pm Wednes­day for about 30min.

Your mis­sion should you choose to accept it is to ask ques­tions, like these suggestions:

• When you retire, which Labour MP do you think should inherit your seat?
• Who is a bet­ter leader, Helen Clark or Phil Goff?
• How do you think the Labour Cam­paign strat­egy is get­ting on?
• Do you think Paul Quinn’s list posi­tion is indica­tive of the lack of diver­sity in the National Party?
• Has he ever felt like hit­ting Tau Henare again?
• What’s more impor­tant; diver­sity or competence?
• Is 24 years in Par­lia­ment too long?
• Why do you think social media is more impor­tant than door knocking?
• Did Chris Carter get a fair trial, or has he been proved right?
• Was there ever an Amer­i­can bagman?
• Does you think Shane Jones will make a good Labour leader?
• What’s it like know­ing you are going to lose the next election?
• Can he give an uncon­di­tional assur­ance to Hutt South vot­ers that he will go full term if/when Labour loses, or should they vote for Paul Quinn?
• How many pairs of under­pants has he stolen so far?
• Which polling com­pany do you trust the most?
• What does Blue State Dig­i­tal think about your social media strategy?
• Do you think Win­ston will get back in?
• Why did Win­ston lie to the select committee?
• Are you a mem­ber of the gaggle?
• Is there a mean­ing­ful role for a straight white male in mod­ern Labour?
• Is Phil Goff a corpse-cuddler, just like Helen was?
• Will you apol­o­gise to Pansy Wong?

There are a few, I am sure loyal Army mem­bers can come up with a few more to fill in the 30 minutes.

As an election gets closer, a party normally gets more disciplined. MPs are usually well versed in not offering views on issues that are not party policy, as a party won’t get elected if it has different MPs saying different things on what they want their party to do in Government.

Labour seems to be going the other way. Whale has audio of Trevor Mallard saying that you shouldn’t have an earthquake levy, and within 24 hours also Shane Jones saying you should have an earthquake levy.

Congrats to Trevor Mallard who won the 60 km bike race against Whale Oil by several kms at least. He’s just crossed the line. Trevor has done a very good job of downplaying expectations, and exceeding them on the day.

I did note earlier this month:

I’d have to say that Trevor would be considered the favourite and Cameron the underdog.

Trevor is basically a professional full-time cyclist, an amateur part-time blogger and an occasional MP. He did the 160 km Taupo cycle race in under 5 hours in 2009. Off memory he was in the top 5% of cyclists for his age group.

Cameron got on a bicycle around three months ago for the first time in 10+ years. Now Cameron has been training pretty hard, doing 20 km rides most days. But Trevor used to be able to do 20 kms in around half an hour. Whale does have a slight advantage with the course being local to him.

Now of course the big factor is Trevor’s bike crash and broken bones. If Trevor had not had his injury, it wouldn’t even be a contest. What we don’t know is to what extent Trevor is still injured. The crash was just over four and a half months ago which normally would be enough time to rebuild some of the leg muscles etc. And I suspect his overall level of fitness is still pretty good.

I was tempted to joke about what an achievement it is to beat a sickness beneficiary who hadn’t been on a bike for 10 years, until three months ago, but that would be unfair to Trevor who did have a pretty nasty injury to overcome. Full credit to him.

In one sense I think the race has been a win-win. It gave Trevor the motivation to get back on the bike seriously, and it gave Whale the motivation to get seriously into shape and be better both physically and mentally.

Anyway congrats to Trevor and Cameron, and I look forward to donating $1,000 to the CCS far more than I suspect Cactus will enjoy donating $1,000 to the Labour Party!

David Fisher in HoS:

In a year of mismatched and painful political races, tomorrow’s is likely to be the silliest.

The blogger known as Whaleoil will face off against the “bovver boy” of the Labour Party in a 60-kilometre bicycle race in Auckland’s eastern suburbs.

In a sport often called “chess on wheels”, the bike race between Cameron ‘Whaleoil’ Slater and Trevor ‘Duck’ Mallard will hear little mention of the word “mate’”.

There is mutual loathing.

That’s a little tough. More opponents than enemies.

The contest came after Slater goaded Mallard by calling him “cripple” over his badly broken leg.

The elder statesman of the Labour Party lashed back, calling the comfortably-padded Slater “blubber boy’”.

“I bet he is too chicken,” Mallard said.

Well, he did accept.

It is worth remembering that Trevor did challenge Whale and call him chicken. So Whale had little choice but to accept.

And Slater – known for obsessively hounding issues – has turned his compulsive nature to the race and cycled about 15kg off his frame.

Best thing Labour has ever done for Cameron.

Slater, who Mallard calls an “obsessive character”, is relentless.

“He is a cripple. And he’s running a crippled campaign.’”

Slater has been in training and, as his physical fitness improved, so did his mental health.

Slater had publicly struggled with depression, and credits getting off anti-depressants, good vitamin B levels and a good diet with the improvement.

I should see if Trevor would challenge me to a half marathon – could be just the motivation I need

Otago University zoologist Philip Seddon said whales in the wild would always be faster than ducks.

“Almost whatever kind of whale you thought about,” he says.

Seddon – who runs the university’s Wildlife Management Programme – said smaller whales were faster.

Slater’s time could, perhaps, dictate whether the blogger was truly small and dangerous.

“Maybe he’s an orca… a killer whale,” said Seddon.

I love how they went to a zoologist for a comment!

The race starts at 1.30pm tomorrow, at Musick Point reserve at Auckland’s Buckland Beach.

If you’re up in Auckland go along to view the fun!

Yesterday Bomber Bradbury blogged at Tumeke:

Take Auckland as an example, 35% of households in Mangere and other south Auckland electorate’s have landlines, 50% in Mt Albert and other isthmus electorates have landlines, close to 80% in most North Shore electorates have landlines. A decade ago those differences were less than 10% and all electorates had the majority of people on listed landlines, now they don’t and you can easily see by that breakdown in Auckland alone how biased these cheap brainfart telephone polls can be.

There is no reference for these figures. Whale Oil responded quoting the latest census statistics:

But if you look at some real facts, not just the one pulled out of his rec­tum you find:

Man­gere: 76% of house­holds have landlines

Mt Albert: 89% of house­holds have landlines

North Shore: 94% of house­holds have landlines

If you go through all of the Auck­land seats, you can’t find a sin­gle one that even remotely matches Bombers fig­ures. So Bomber is say­ing (I sus­pect he invented the fig­ures from his rather large and expand­ing arse) than since the 2006 cen­sus, 40% of House­holds in Man­gere have given up their land­line and 39% of those in Mt Albert have also given up their phone lines.

Bomber doesn’t do his ten­u­ous grip on real­ity any good by spout­ing totally made up fig­ures. He should retract his lies and apologise.

Bomber then posted again, just repeating his numbers, without any reference on which they are based.

So Whale has responded with this challenge:

I issue a chal­lenge to Bomber then, that if he can prove his num­bers, cat­e­gor­i­cally, then I will donate the equiv­a­lent of a 5 year mem­ber­ship to the NRA to the Mana Party. But if he can’t pro­duce any proof of his asser­tions then he has to join the NRA for 5 years.

I bet he isn’t man enough to accept this challenge.

Sounds fair to me.

Whale Oil blogs:

I am writ­ing to lay an offi­ical com­plaint about the brochure the Labour Party has recently sent to elec­tors in West Auck­land. I have attached a scan overleaf.

(Image 1, Image 2)

It was dis­trib­uted on 20 July 2011 in and around the Hen­der­son, Auck­land area.

It does not have an autho­ri­sa­tion state­ment, which I believe is a legal require­ment for any elec­tion advertising.

The Labour party also under­took to dis­con­tinue to send out these types of brochures in a press release of 9 July shortly after the Elec­toral Com­mis­sion referred another brochure to the Police for pros­e­cu­tion. Their spokesman, Grant Robert­son said:

So on 9 July Labour said they’ll stop using unauthorised election advertisements, yet on 20 July they were caught doing exactly that again.

Elizabeth Binning at NZ Herald reports:

Kindergartens have increased fees, put playgrounds on hold and made staff redundant because of Government funding cuts – but many have large sums of money in the bank.

A search of the charities register reveals many kindergarten associations have shown surpluses in their annual returns.

An excellent story, and piece of investigative journalism.

It is of course pure coincidence that on Monday, Whale Oil blogged the bank balances of the major kindergarten associations.

Trevor Mallard blogs:

Turns out it was my cockup that resulted in an email intended for supporters getting out into the blogs and then the MSM.

I added a few friends and acquaintances who are interested in politics to a list to get the package stopping asset sales and doing a tax switch to my normal supporters list. They got that on Thursday as the embargo came off.

Unfortunately for me I used that list again instead of my normal supporters list on Friday evening when I described the positive response to the package.

On it inter alia was David Farrar.

My bad. I’m sorry.

It is true I received Trevor’s e-mail. But I did not pass it onto Whale. I glanced at the first sentence and deleted it unread as was too busy to read Trevor’s propaganda in detail. I did not see all the juicy stuff about Trevor saying the public don’t care about the details, and suggesting lines for supporters and MPs to use on Twitter (which many of his faithful colleagues then used).

If I had seen that, I would have blogged it myself – not given it to Whale!

Whale got the e-mail from someone else, not me. And good on him for taking the time to read it!

If in future Trevor sends me secret supporter e-mails, I’d appreciate it if he puts the juicy stuff up the top, so I actually see it!

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.

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.

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 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.

I recommend people check out Whale Oil on Monday.

On Friday Trevor Mallard got upset that Whale Oil had called him a cripple and challenged Whale to a bike race, saying Whale would be too chicken and if he accepted he would not have a chance.

Yesterday Whale accepted the challenge so long as he can get provided a bike and that there be a second sport of his choosing – preferably boxing or shooting.

Cactus Kate has also jumped in, and offered $1,000 prize money. It goes to Labour if Trevor wins and ACT if whale wins. Kate also challenged me to match her grand.

I’m not overly keen to donate to ACT or Labour, but have agreed to donate $1,000 to charity based on who wins.

My $1,000 donation is dependent on Whale and Trevor actually agreeing to details of the competition (such as whether it is one sport or two) and actually competing. No donation if one defaults and it doesn’t happen. I’d also insist on them agreeing on an independent Judge to determine the winner.

If Whale wins I will donate $1,000 to the Mental Health Foundation.

If Trevor wins I will donate $1,000 to the Crippled Children Society, now known as CCS.

Whale Oil blogs:

Trevor Mal­lard has issued a chal­lenge. As is usual for the crip­ple he has picked the one sport he is good at it (if you can all it a sport) and he has also picked on the wrong per­son for a challenge.

So Trevor, I accept your chal­lenge

Excellent, and this will give Trevor a real incentive to get back in shape.

Firstly, I need a bike, not just any bike the same bike you use. We have to race using exactly the same equip­ment. It is only fair. The only dif­fer­ence will be the rid­ers. A Crip­ple vs a Whale.

Sec­ondly, the race will be on August 15 and I pick 60kms for the dis­tance, if you are going to go, go big.

I suspect there will be a large media contingent following the race.

Thirdly, since you picked a sport that you excel at, it is only fair that there be a counter-challenge and I choose box­ing. You men­tioned your “fear” of my exces­sive bulk. I cur­rently weigh 105kg. You stated in the com­ments on Red Alert that if I got train­ing then I would lose 30kg and you’re are prob­a­bly right, there­fore there should be no rea­son other than your cow­ardice for reject­ing a box­ing match 8 weeks after our cycle race.

I understand that the boxing match will be pay per view, and that all proceeds from the match would go towards helping the recovery in Christchurch.

The Labour Party Campaign Manager has come up with a genius way for Labour to win the election.

Trevor has challenged Whale Oil to a cycle race.

Now Whale does not have a cycle, and isn’t going to buy one just for Trevor, but I understand he does like the idea of a sporting challenge between him and Trevor. He has proposed two sports, and is willing to let Trevor choose his preferred one – shooting or boxing.

Whale has an unusual guest poster at Gotcha – Labour MP Clare Curran.

I wonder if the deal is reciprocal, and this means Whale gets guest posting rights at Red Alert?

A superb post by Whale exposing lies by Phil Goff about the DPS.

Goff claims that it is unprecedented to have the DPS actually within Parliament.

Whale has blogged half a dozen photos of Helen Clark in Parliament with the DPS next to her – including in the Cabinet Room – the most secure level and room in the complex.

So Whale has shown that Labour are not just lying, but they are so shoddy they don’t even spend five minutes on Google to check how easy it is to disprove their lies.

Whale Oil blogs on the McCully air force plane to Vanuatu:

I thought I was defi­nately onto a bash­ing of immense pro­por­tions here. But as I learned from a cou­ple of screw up over the past few years, fact check­ing is paramount.

I checked inter­na­tional flights into and out of Van­u­atu. This is where the story started to come un-raveled. The tim­ing of the meet­ing meant that inter­na­tional flights didn’t pro­vide use­ful con­nec­tions. I think from mem­ory that if they had used com­mer­cial flights then all the Pacific diplo­mats in atten­dence would ahve had to have stayed over 3 more days before the next com­mer­cial flight out from Vanuatu.

Although the RNZAF Boe­ing may have gone over next to empty and con­fig­ured for VIP travel at short notice, how­ever it returned with a greater num­ber of pax on the return leg to New Zealand (I didn’t receive any pas­sen­ger details, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find out who has used the ser­vice after the fact if one was that inquis­i­tive), one can only spec­u­late at to who they may be, but as even politi­cians don’t repli­cate that fast it seems log­i­cal that for­eign dig­ni­taries were using the ser­vice and New Zealand as a trans­port hub, which is hardly unheard of, and hardly the travel rort which the first leg made it appear.

Whale has shown no hestitation putting the boot into National MPs over perks, when he thinks it is justified. In fact i doubt any blogger has been as consistent as he has, in attacking MP spending. So when he says this is no big issue, I tend to believe him.

I had a similiar issue to McCully when I was in Noumea. The lack of commercial flights meant I had to stay for six days, for a two day conference. I’m pretty sure Murray would have been happy to holiday in Vanuatu for a few days, but instead he did some diplomacy by transoporting a few of his pacific peers back with him.

I recall Helen Clark got an air force flight back from Australia when there was a problem with Ansett, so this faux outrage at use of air force is fairly tiresome.

An interesting interview with Chris Trotter by Whale Oil.

His thoughts on Labour are especially insightful:

On Labours “Get John Key” campaign:

“Com­pletely mis­taken, did not read the man at all well”

“One sus­pects that they despair of find­ing some other way through.”

On how mod­ern Labour can become more appealing:

“It does very well when it plays to the best, in New Zealan­ders, when it booths artic­u­lates and asks peo­ple to respond to the bright side rather than the dark side of the NZ way of doing things.”

“When they find some­one who can artic­u­late them, as they did with Michael Joseph Sav­age  as they did with Nor­man Kirk, as they cer­tainly did with David Lange, then they are very hard to beat, but if those two things are lack­ing, if they lack some­one who is able to artic­u­late that appeal to New Zealand’s bet­ter angels, to bor­row Abra­ham Lincoln’s famous phrase and if they aren’t dri­ven in a sense by adverse eco­nomic winds then Labour does find it dif­fi­cult his­tor­i­cally to win.”

On Phil Goff:

“He hasn’t demon­strated to date, either the rhetor­i­cal skills nec­es­sary to make that appeal, and cer­tainly to date he hasn’t been able to emote in a way that New Zealan­ders can believe.”

On Labour entic­ing bet­ter candidates:

[They need] “life expe­ri­ence which you cer­tainly don’t get in any great breadth on the ninth floor of the beehive”

Whale reviews his 2010.

If anyone thinks blogs do not have influence, then go ask Andrew Williams.