TV3’s Patrick’s Gower blog on Judith Tizard, Labour and the blogs has attracted a fair bit of attention. Gower states:

Labour and Phil Goff got scared into defusing the Tizard bomb because of two right-wing bloggers.

That means Goff is scared of the blogs.

Yes, you heard me right: Goff’s office (aka the ‘Goffice’) and the Labour Party hierarchy decided their Judith Tizard strategy because of what they read on Kiwiblog and Whaleoil.

That means Labour is scared of the blogs.

I don’t really attribute it as Patrick does, but I do think Labour have handled the whole Tizard issue incompetently. I’ll explain why later on.

Judith herself also seems to credit or blame Whale and me. The Herald on Sunday reported her as saying:

Those reasons … and to “stick it up them”.

Stick it up who? Phil Goff?

“I was actually thinking of David Farrar and Cameron Slater, et al. I wasn’t thinking about my former colleagues,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a particularly worthy thing to say, but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t.”

I’ll also come back to exactly what I have and have not said about Judith. I’ve checked through all my posts about Judith, and as far as I can tell I’ve never called her nasty names, denigrated her performance etc. Here’s my first post on 16 December 2008 about the Tizard issue for the Mt Albert selection.

But here is the problem, Twyford is already an MP. So what happens if he wins the Mt Albert by-election? Well he would then resign his seat as a List MP, and that would bring in the next person on the Labour list. And who is No 38? It’s Judith Tizard!

Now Helen has won Mt Albert with some big majorities, but a lot of that has been personal. The party vote has been much closer. And if Mt Albert voters works out that voting for Twyford means Tizard returns to Parliament, then the seat could fall to a good National candidate.

I actually had a Labour MP tell me that my analysis was correct, and mirrored conversations that Labour had already started having about Mt Albert – prior to my blog post.

I blogged again on the issue on 16 February, 25 March and 26 March. So three posts over three months. Not exactly over the top.

On the 1st of April, the NZ Herald used the phrase “Tizard time-bomb” in a headline (note reporters do not write the headlines – sub-editors do).  They reported that:

Ms Tizard said Labour would be silly to buy into the “Tizard dilemma” and try and keep her out.

“If there is not a place for a 53-year-old woman who has been in elected positions for 26 of her 31 years, I guess I would want to know what the problem was.”

Ms Tizard said she had not yet been approached to stand aside, nor had she gone to the party to ask if there was a problem.

So four months after I first blogged about it, Labour had not even talked to Judith Tizard. How incompetent is that? The very first thing Labour should have done is make sure someone was regularly talking to Judith, and working out a joint strategy with her for dealing with the issue.

Labour leader Phil Goff said the Tizard dilemma was a “red herring”, but refused to openly back her return.

So again, no strategy on how to respond, and no agreed lines. But it gets worse.

On the 13th of April, it is reported that Labour ran focus groups asking Mt Albert residents what they thought of Judith Tizard.  How pissed off and insuting is that to their next on the list? For they did it without even talking to her.

The moment we started blogging on this issue, Labour should have had someone in constant dialogue with Judith. They should have been working out agreed lines that both Goff and Tizard would use until Judith made a decision about whether or not she would want to return if Twyford did win Mt Albert.

In National the person next on the list is treated as an MP in waiting. Someone senior (the President or Chief Whip off memory) is meant to chat to them every couple of months to see how they are doing, and to ascertain what their preference would be if a vacancy came up. It’s simple person management.

Instead they spent tens of thousands of dollars on focus groups behind Tizard’s back.

Then on 22 April, Labour made Twyford withdraw. And I bet you that Judith Tizard found out about this from the media – not directly from Labour. from what I can tell, neither the Party Leader or President spoke to her in the last two years.

Even after Hughes resigned, Andrew Little went to the media saying he wanted Louisa Wall in – before he spoke to Tizard.

So if people are angry about the treatment of Judith Tizard, they should direct their anger at Labour. Even a small degree of competence could have averted this all two years ago. They just had to talk to her and meet with her, and work out a position that didn’t involve them crapping on her from a huge height.

There has been comments on a number of blogs that Tizard was unfairly maligned, as she was not the worst MP in Parliament. I agree with that. In fact I blogged on her in May 2008:

Judith is somewhat controversial, but I have to say that my professional dealings with her on Internet issues have always been cordial and constructive, and she has been a very regular attendee of the Parliamentary Internet Caucus.

And I stand by what I said. On the issues I had direct engagement with her on, she was constructive and supportive. The worst name I think I have called her on the blog was a “plonker” and in fact that was referring to the next five candidates collectively.

The blog that has probably lampooned her the most viciously (but with humour) has been the Dim-Post.

I didn’t create the perception that Judith was not the most popular or hard working MP in Parliament – I just reported a pre-existing perception (Patrick Gower suggests Matt mcCarten first popularised it). If you wanted to ask me why this perception existed, I’d state two factors:

1. Tizard spent the entire nine years of the 5th Labour Government as a Minister outside Cabinet. Ministers outside Cabinet are meant to be for up and coming Ministers or for about to retire Ministers, not as a permament halfway house for Ministers who can’t get elected to Cabinet. She was seen as protected by Helen.
2. Tizard got given Auckland Issues, but never given any power, budget or authority in that role, so it became a joke, and the portfolio eventually abolished.

It is certainly true that there were other MPs in Parliament whose parliamentary careers were no more stellar than Judith’s. Most of the next four on the Labour List fall into that category. The Mt Albert dilemma may have come into play for Martin Gallagher, just as it did for Judith, if Gallagher had been next on the list.

In summary, Labour could have saved itself a huge amount of bad headlines and acrimoney, if they had picked up the phone two years and just talked to Judith Tizard, rather than run focus groups on how unpopular she might be.

Went to the opening night of The Spy Who Wouldn’t Die Again at Downstage. It’s a first class production that gets everything right, and was hugely enjoyable. The plot, the cast, the set and the gadgets were all superb.

It’s a wonderful parody of James Bond, with a Kiwi setting.  If you’re a James Bond fan, you’ll love this play – and even if you’re not watched any James Bond movies, you’ll still find it a hoot (Auckland Girl who went with me has never seen James Bond but loved the play).

The play is set in 1985 and Agent 009 (Stephen St Clair) is dispatched to New Zealand to gain a perpetual motion device, which threatens the world’s energy industries. Hence the French, Russsians and Australians are also hunting for it.

The play starts with a wonderful combat scene, that was almost more Kill Bill than James Bond, followed by several minutes of some very naughty and untraditional James Bond credits, using shadow figures. Their use of shadow figures at various stages of the play, is very well done.

It’s a very Kiwi play, with Rotorua motels and geysers, the Silver Fern train, and even a guest appearance from David Lange. Lange, hilariously, wants the perpetual motion device destroyed as if it survives there will be no need for nuclear power, and then New Zealand will no longer be special as the world’s only nuclear free country.

The play has a number of Bond like gadgets which are a delight. By far the best is the tent with a “spare man” in it. Just trust me, that you’ll be almost crying with laughter as he is activated.

Nick Dunbar plays Stephen St Clair. The other three actors play a variety of roles each but primarily Darlene Mohokey is the beautiful and sexy Dominique Le Fleur, Bryon Coll is inventor Gerald Boke and the spare man, and Tim Spite is the rogue agent 008. They performed their main roles with ease, and were comic genius in some of their minor roles.

The set design was also excellent. I loved the Rotorua motel, and the car was so cute, Auckland Girl wanted one for herself.

As with many of the plays from Tim Spite and SEEyD, there are some political messages and themes in the show. The nice things about his productions is they are done with subtle grace, so the play remains enjoyable, even if you are not in political alignment with the message.

After tonight’s performance of the play, I’m moderating the “Meet the Artists” session on stage at 8.30 pm. This is where the audience can ask the cast and crew all those things you’ve wanted to know, or discuss some of the themes that ran through the play. Not sure if there are any tickets left for tonight, but whether tonight or any time before 24 April, I recommend you see the play if you want a good night out,.

Brian Fallow writes in the Herald:

ACC has reintroduced experience rating to the calculation of levies for employers and the self-employed.

ACC Minister Nick Smith says it will make ACC levies fairer and provide better incentives for business to improve workplace safety.

The Council of Trade Unions, Labour and the Greens argue that it will encourage employers to pressure workers to lie about whether an accident occurred in the workplace or somewhere else.

I really wonder why the professional politicians of the left hate business so much. They smear and defame basically the entire business community with their claims that employers are criminals who will break the law in return for a small cash incentive. They do the same with their opposition to allowing employees to choose whether or not to trade in one week of leave for cash. They claim employers will break the law and coerce employees into taking the money instead of the leave.

Experience rating ACC premiums provides an incentive to employers. For “good” employers the incentive is to have a safer workplace, to reduce their ACC premiums. For “bad” employers the incentive is not to make their workplace safer but to break the law and “bully” staff into lying about where their accidents happened.

Now if one had to divide all employers into one of those two categories, how many would actually break the law and bully their staff into lying? 5% perhaps, if even that? Yet Labour and the unions want all employers punished and treated as if they are all criminals.

For smaller firms – with an annual ACC bill below $10,000 – there will be a no-claims discount of 10 per cent if they generate no compensation claims. If they generate more than 70 days’ compensation claims they will incur a 10 per cent loading on their levies. For those in between there is no change.

The vast majority of employers will have ACC bills of below $10,000 – this is a wage bill of under around $5 million.

Your ACC premium is around 2% of your wage bill. A 10% reduction means that a company will save 0.2% of its wage bill, if it gets the no claim bonus. Does Labour really think scores of businesses will break the law just to save $2 on every $1,000 of wages.

For firms with an ACC bill larger than $10,000 the system is more complex and could mean adjustments of up to 50 per cent, up or down, in their levies. There are two layers to the adjustment.

The more important, the experience rating modification, compares the firm’s performance with the other firms in its levy risk group, with a 75 per cent weighting for rehabilitation costs, including income compensation, and 25 per cent for medical costs.

That could result in adjustments of up to 35 per cent either way in a firm’s levies, depending on their relative performance.

Now consider you are a larger employer, and you have ACC experience rating. Here the incentives are larger to keep claims down. However it would be near impossible to “fiddle” the system with a larger number of employees making claims.

In a small business, it is conceivable that you might get one employee to claim an accidient happened outside the workplace, and get away with it.

But in a large workplace, you’d need to have many injured employees agreeing to break the law and file false details on their claim (remember the employee files, not the employer). And it takes just one employee to blow the whistle and say their employer asked them to lie.

Also the employer needs to have a corrupt safety officer on staff, who will falsify the accident log, and not record workplace accidents if the employees agrees to lie about where it happened.

Now sure there may be a handful of venal and corrupt employers who will risk criminal penalties by engaging their staff in a conspiracy to defraud ACC. But that is no reason to not provide incentives to the vast majority of employers, which rewards them for having safer workplaces.

The average employer reacts rationally to incentives. Oh if we have fewer accidents, we pay less to ACC. So what can we do to minimise accidents. Labour and the unions are defneding a system where an employer with no workplace accidents at all pays the same premium as a company (same size and industry) that has multiple workplace accidents.

Just got e-mailed this clip by a friend. All I can say is that dangerous weapons like that should be licensed 🙂

The show appears to be Germany’s Got Talent. What I love most of all is the looks of shock on the judge’s faces.

David Armstrong writes in the Dom Post:

If Labour was a cricket team, it would be 60-7 chasing 260 to win with 30 overs to go. When Darren Hughes quit, I scanned the Labour list, desperately hoping someone like Richie McCaw may have put his name forward. No such luck. After Mr Hughes was Judith Tizard, Mark Burton and Mahara Okeroa. Jesus. There’s more talent in the Zimbabwe late order.

Ouch – that is a harsh comparison.

The trouble with Mr Goff is the trouble with Labour – their legacy. Watch Alister Barry’s excellent documentary, Someone Else’s Country, and you’ll see Phil in the 1980s hysterically defending Rogernomics – a thirty-something, Treasury-crazed, moustachioed nut. By comparison, even Michael Laws comes off as compassionate in the documentary.

And that’s an even harsher comparison 🙂

If only there was the technology to morph different Labour politicians into one. Imagine a Labour leader with Jacinda Ardern’s looks, Trevor Mallard’s mongrel, Shane Jones’ blokie-ness, David Cunliffe’s intellect and Louisa Wall’s sporting ability. Trouble is, if you left it to Labour head office, you’d probably get an MP with Trevor Mallard’s looks, Jacinda Ardern’s mongrel, David Cunliffe’s blokie- ness, George Hawkins’ intellect and Judith Tizard’s sporting ability.

Its previous obvious from Armstrong’s column that he is from the left, adn wants a Labour-led Government. Again, if this is what your friends are saying about you ….

Stuff reports:

Earthquake-hit couples will have to pay at least $190 a week and a two-week bond to stay in Government-supplied campervans.

The Department of Building and Housing has placed more than 350 campervans at Canterbury Agricultural Park to provide temporary housing for up to 1800 people left homeless.

They are available from today, six weeks after the February 22 quake hit.

The department said yesterday that the weekly rent for the campervans would be $190 for two people, $271 for four people, and $337 for six people.

Campervan occupants would also have to pay a two-week bond and power costs, and be responsible for their contents insurance.

Portacabins will be available once the Government finds a supplier.

Waimakariri Labour MP Clayton Cosgrove called the charges “bizarre” and “more than over-the-top”.

Havign some experience with motorhomes, I have to say $190/week for a couple ($85 each) is a massive reduction from their normal cost.

Going to a rental website, the prices for a week vary from $690 to $1,380. I presume the Government has got some bulk discount for them, but I’d say they are still highly subsidised.

Andrea Vance in the Dom Post reports:

State-owned power companies will be “lost forever” if they are sold to private buyers, Labour leader Phil Goff says.

Launching the party’s “Say No to Asset Sales” campaign in Auckland last night, Mr Goff attacked National for the proposed part-sale of Mighty River Power, Meridian, Genesis and Solid Energy.

In January, Prime Minister John Key floated the idea of a selloff if National won a second term.

At last night’s public meeting, Mr Goff said power prices would “skyrocket” if the energy giants fell into private hands. “The last thing struggling middle and low-income Kiwis need is for their power prices to go up at an even faster rate. That is exactly what will happen when new private and foreign owners of our electricity companies demand better returns on their investment.”

So many targets to shoot at, where do I start.

First of all it is Labour Party policy to have power prices go up by an extra 3% (on top of any other increases) through their amended Emissions Trading Scheme. Labour has campaigned on removing the current subsidies from the ETS, which will immediately put power prices up by 3%. So they are campaigning on lower power prices, with a policy which will do exactly the opposite.

Secondly their record in office is appalling. According to Stats NZ CPI index, the cost of electricity increased by 63.7% over their nine years in office. No that is not a typo – 63.7%. In the previous nine years the increase was 47.5%.

If you divide the total increase by the number of years (I know that ignores the compounding effect but let’s keep it simple) that is an average 5.3% annually in the evil 1990s and an average 7.1% under the lovely kind nine years of Labour.

And since Labour got booted out? The electricity index has gone up 8.0% over two years or 4.0% a year.

And is Goff correct in his claim private owners will demand higher returns than public owners? Well apart from the fact minority owners can’t set the price, this claim is disagreed with by the Consumers Institute:

Consumer NZ chief executive Sue Chetwin agreed with Mr Key’s assessment that electricity prices would not increase with partial privatisation.

“The power companies over the past 10 years have been rapacious in putting up their prices and I don’t see that making part of the company available for the public to invest in will make much difference there.”

However, Ms Chetwin said companies would become more transparent and would have to explain their actions to the public.

So remember whenever you hear Labour talk about power prices:

1. Their ETS policy will increase power prices by a further 3%
2. Power prices increased by 64% during their last stint in Government
3. They took in over $3 billion of dividends from the state owned power companies, despite it being a time of record surpluses
4. Consumers Institute says allowing minority private shareholders will not increase prices, but will increase transparency

Martin Kay in the Dom Post reports:

The Greens have held out a slim prospect of a post-election deal with National in a suggestion to be put to members.

A proposal on political manoeuvring ahead of the election, to go to the Greens’ annual general meeting in June, says the preference is for a deal with Labour, if it is in a position to form a Government.

But it also leaves the door slightly ajar to a deal with National – saying that a confidence and supply agreement is ”extremely unlikely” but not ruling it out altogether.

”The Greens could work with a National-led government to progress particular Green policies as we have over the last three years; but based on current National Party policy positions it is extremely unlikely that we could support a National-led government on confidence and supply,” the draft remit says.

The proposed position is different from 2008, when the Greens firmly ruled out any prospect of a confidence and supply deal with National after judging its policies in key areas.

It appears the party’s leadership is wary of slamming the door shut this time around in case the election result leaves National in a position where they have to court the smaller party’s support.

The wording of the remit also suggests options could include abstaining on confidence and supply, a position that could allow National to govern in return for key environmental policy concessions.

This is sensible stuff from the Greens, for three reasons:

1. By leaving open the possibility of doing a deal with National, they are less likely to be taken for granted by Labour. Labour has consistently gone for United Future and NZ First, in preference to the Greens, as the Greens had nowhere to go.
2. While I fully expect that the Greens would always choose a Labour-led Government over a National-led Government if they can make either come about, there may be a situation where if the Greens support Labour Parliament is hung. This means their option will be to force a new election or to possibly do a deal with National where they abstain on supply and confidence in return for some policy wins. I doubt they’d ever do more than abstain, but that might be enough to allow National to govern, of Labour is not able to.
3. Keeping their options open, even if only a but, means that they can campaign on a clear message of “Whomever is in Government, we’ll work them to get a greener Government. That could well be attractive to people who don’t want Phil Goff as Prime Minister, but would like a greener Government.

There are some dangers. The new Hone hard left party may campaign on the fact they’ll never work with Natonal, but the Greens might. However as Goff has ruled out working with the Hone party, that is less of a threat than it may have been.

In an act which reminds me of Winston’s coalition announcement, Judith revealed her decision on live television.

She’s obviously enjoyed her week of fame, and dragging it out as long as possible. I do wonder how happy Phil Goff and Labour are that they presumably had to find out from watching the TV what her decision was, rather than her letting her party know first.

Her decision is not to return, which disappoints me politically but I do make $600 on IPredict on it so there is a bright side 🙂

I presume the other four ex MPs will also stand aside and Louisa Wall will become the new Labour List MP.

From tonight until Tuesday I’m in Tora, which is on the south-east coast of the Wairarapa. It’s outside Internet and cellphone coverage, so apart from those posts i have done in advance, and time delayed, no fresh content until Tuesday.

A truly fascinating article by Phil Quin in the NZ Herald on the failed Labour leadership coup involving Phil Goff.

No not the 2011 coup that wasn’t (as no one wanted the job), but the 1996 where goff agreed to challenge Clark. It helps explain the frosty Clark-Goff relationship. Quin writes:

In 1993, Mike Moore managed to lead Labour to within two seats of clinching an unlikely victory over Jim Bolger just three years after the 1990 rout. But Moore was despised by large sections of the party, especially its senior women, who derided him and his circle of young, male advisers as misogynist buffoons.

Moore’s tireless campaigning in 1993 helped engineer his own downfall because Clark’s allies had installed candidates in almost every winnable seat. They campaigned alongside Moore primed to vote against him in the coming post-election face-off with Clark. The irony was not lost on Moore himself.

A few days out from the election, he had arrived back at the hotel after a non-stop tour of suburban Auckland marginals.

He had noticed to his disgust that the Alliance hoardings far outnumbered Labour’s.

He dragged a bunch of staffers, me included, to the home of Labour’s candidate in Onehunga, Richard Northey, who seemed to be hosting a small dinner party for friends when we arrived unannounced at his door.

“Where are your signs?” Moore asked the startled candidate, who led us to his garage containing dozens of freshly pressed hoardings.

Exasperated, Moore helped load the car with “Northey for Onehunga” signs while the candidate returned to his friends and mid-range pinot. “If he wins on Saturday,” Moore told me, in near-disbelief, “he’s one for Helen.” He did, and he was.

Poor Mike. He was well and truly shafted. As I recall thing, Clark was planning to roll Moore, even if he won the election and became Prime Minister.

After previous stints in 1990 and 1993, I had gone back to work in the Labour Research Unit in early 1996 at the behest of Lianne Dalziel who was health spokesperson at the time. I broached with Dalziel in our first discussion my fears for the party at the coming election.

Dalziel, reliably of the party’s left flank, made clear that she would rather sink with HMNZS Helen than contemplate Goff or the unspeakable alternative (Moore). It seemed wise not to raise the subject with her again.

Very wise indeed.

The key to toppling Clark was flipping six or so of her former supporters, and the early signs were encouraging: Paul Swain (Eastern Hutt), Mark Peck (Invercargill), Rick Barker (Hastings) and Martin Gallagher (Hamilton West), all of whom backed Clark over Moore in 1993, were ready to jump ship.

Peck and Barker soon emerged as key protagonists in the efforts to unseat her. Phillip Field (Otara) was also wavering, and we suspected a number of others – Janet Mackey (Gisborne), Chris Carter (Te Atatu) and even the sopping-wet John Blincoe (Nelson) – might succumb to fears over their own seats and cast their secret ballots against Clark.

“Phil, I need to tell people you’re in,” I told Goff during our Easter weekend call, perhaps for the hundredth time. “OK then, I’ll do it,” he said, without a hint of enthusiasm.

He sounds as enthusiastic about challenging, as David Parker does today.

The challenge against Clark shifted into top gear. Frontbenchers Michael Cullen, Jim Sutton and Annette King took command of strategy along with Goff, while Peck and Barker worked the backbench. Meanwhile, I oversaw phone surveys under the fictional auspices of “Data Research” in places where we felt the MP might be swayed by proof that Clark was toxic with voters.

Chris Carter’s numbers were so bad he thought I had made them up. “Nope,” I told him, “Helen is leading you over a cliff.”

Sutton, Cullen and King were nervous about promoting the largely unknown Goff so close to the election, and also feared the electorate might recoil from his hardline reputation as a Rogernomics-era Minister.

At the same time, a couple of Maori seat MPs were willing to vote against Clark – but for Moore, not Goff.

In a caucus of 41 we counted 18-all with five undecided. Every vote weighed a tonne. The decision was made to proceed with an ambivalent Mike Moore on the ballot. Goff, it has to be said, was noticeably relieved.

So the Goff coup against Clark became the Moore coup.

Would the Labour Party have been better off if Helen Clark had fallen in May 1996? Would New Zealand?

The answer is probably no.

Even if (as seems likely) Moore had performed better than Clark at the 1996 poll and in subsequent coalition talks with Winston Peters, the party would have been in turmoil. It had become by then a vehicle for Clark’s ambition, pure and simple. The leadership of anyone other than her – let alone Mike Moore of all people – would have sparked such intense and active hostility among the party’s power elite that it would surely have fractured. To the Clark-left, winning without her was not winning at all.

It would have been civil war.

Phil Goff, a politician of great skill and energy, now wrestles with the job he agreed to seek 15 years ago.

But he remains entangled in Clark’s political apparatus, and therefore lacks the authority to usher Labour into a new era.

The party is moribund, with few members and even less money. The power to select MPs and distribute favours rests with a tiny elite who jealously guard their majority control over an ever-shrinking entity. …

Phil Goff faces an impossible task as long as the Labour Party remains frozen in time, circa May 1996, as an institution whose primary function is to facilitate the ambitions of a now departed leader.

I suspect Helen doesn’t like Mr Quin and vice-versa 🙂

Derek Cheng in the NZ Herald has a profile of Grant Robertson. It includes some quotes from me. Worth noting those quotes were given a few weeks ago, before Goff’s stuffing up the Darren Hughes affair. So the context wasn’t around Grant challenging Goff (which he won’t), but over his promotion to the front bench.

Kiwiblogger and right-wing commentator David Farrar believes Robertson will be at the forefront of a leadership challenge within the next two terms, but there will be a transitional leader – maybe David Cunliffe, he speculates – before then.

“Robertson has very good political judgement, can work with opponents, is smart, and makes very few mistakes and certainly doesn’t make the same ones twice.

He is very careful with what he says about things that may come back to bite him one day. He’s already developed that instinct that you need to become a leader one day, thinking four or five steps ahead. “I do certainly see him as a potential Prime Minister.”

It’s those strategic smarts which I rate Grant for. It’s not that he is making headway against National Ministers in the House. Tony Ryall looks as unbothered by Grant, as he was by Ruth Dyson at this stage. But Grant generally is careful not to position himself somewhere that will bite him in the future.

He feels equally strongly about adequate state assistance for the vulnerable and the excluded, which aligns with his view that the Government should actively provide a level playing field, especially through health and education, so that every person has the chance to reach their full potential.

“That will mean redistributing wealth in some instances …It’s a complete no-brainer. If you have people in poverty and on the fringes of society, if you bring them in, give them education, keep them healthy and get them a quality house, they will be a good functioning member of society and the economy. Why would you want to exclude them from society?

I don’t have a problem with redistributing wealth to help people in poverty. But Grant’s party has gone well beyond that. They all too often appear to want to redistribute wealth to punish people for being wealthy, and to buy middle class votes. Labour didn’t spend one extra cent increasing benefits for those in poverty beyond the inflation rate, but spent billions on middle class welfare so more families have ipods etc.

And unlike many lefties, he supports free trade with China in spite of the human rights issues and lower wages that price New Zealand workers out of the global market. …

When pressed, he says he would draw the line at a bi-lateral FTA with Burma. (He is relaxed about the ASEAN-Australia-NZ FTA, which includes Burma, and does not prevent New Zealand from imposing sanctions on Burma).

Good to see a Robertson led Labour will be sane on trade policy.

Farrar notes Georgina Beyer’s success in Wairarapa as the world’s first transsexual MP, and believes most New Zealanders wouldn’t care. “I don’t think his sexuality would be at all a factor in stopping him from becoming Prime Minister.

“He’s gay. Some MPs make a massive issue of it, like Chris Carter. Grant doesn’t try to have it define him, but will talk when appropriate on gay and lesbian issues and show his support.”

Farrar also says writing a lot about sports – whether a deliberate tactic or not – has shown Robertson to be well-rounded, breaking the gay mould.

This is the only part where the comments as reported don’t quite reflect my intent. My reference to Grant writing about sports breaking the mould, wasn’t referring to a “gay” mould. Gay and sporty are not opposites in my mind. The mould I was meaning was the perception (arguably unfairly) that many Labour MPs live and breathe politics and it is their entire life. Mike Moore wrote about this once. By bloggins about sports, Grant shows that he is someone who cares about more than just politics and power. I’m not suggesting that Grant doesn’t genuinely love sports (he is well known to be a sports fan), just that his decision to blog about them on Red Alert was a considered one.

The NZ Herald reports:

Midway through the last decade, Fyfe was drawing admiration for classy, innovative approaches to traditional branding campaigns, working closely alongside its branding agency Colenso BBDO.

The “Nothing to Hide” commercials – featuring staff in body paint and G-strings and even featuring Fyfe in a cameo – marked a shift to a retail-focused campaign using Colenso’s retail division, .99.

Some content in spots featuring All Blacks has touched base with the old brand values.

Yet the focus hasn’t been on those traditional values but on a crude puppet specialising in double-entendres.

Last month, Rico appeared with rapper Snoop Dogg in an online clip that has been picked up by American breakfast TV, which Fyfe points out gave coverage you could not buy.

This week, 80s aerobics star Richard Simmons featured in the airline’s in-flight safety video – in a duet with polarising TV star Paul Henry.

Fyfe agrees there are risks in the marketing strategy and says that the adventurous approach could become “too successful”.

The danger is that offbeat ads aimed at niche online audiences are being picked up and, as Fyfe says, “leaching” into editorial coverage in mainstream media with a different market.

I do like the latest safety video – it carries on their quirky history, and I’ve observed on flight around 90% watch the video now, when it used to be around 20%.

The Rico creature though is stupid, and should be shot. I like smutty humour as much as anyone, but it doesn’t work with an airline brand.

Not an April Fools joke, but it seems $162,000 in return for knitting in the chamber for a few months, is going to be too hard to resist. The Herald reports:

Former Labour Party minister Judith Tizard is widely expected to announce tomorrow she will take the seat in Parliament left vacant by Darren Hughes. …

Ms Tizard is next in line on the party’s list and is expected to announce her decision on TVNZ’s Q+A tomorrow morning.

Sources said they understood she was leaning towards taking the seat despite Labour Party president Andrew Little’s clear preference for Louisa Wall, the former list MP who is standing in the safe seat of Manurewa.

If this is true, Phil Goff will be a very unhappy camper, and John Key a happy camper.

An interesting profile of David Parker by Vernon Small in the Dom Post. What grabbed my attention is:

But last week one senior Labour MP said he believed if Mr Parker moved, he could get the numbers to roll the leader.

A senior Labour MP must mean a front-bencher I’d say. It confirms what I suspect that if someone did want the job, they would have it.

The front page of Stuff has a headline “Shooting victim laid to rest” and the story starts off “Police shooting victim laid to rest”.

He is not a victim. He was not shot as an accident. He was shot because he chose to aim a shotgun at armed police officers, after earlier threatening unarmed police officers with it.

It’s like calling the terrorists who hijacked the 9/11 flights, victims.

Calling him a victim is an insult to those who are real victims of crime, and killed.

The crime stats came out today. I always ignore the headline figures about the total crime rate because it is a near meaningless figure – one murder is treated the same as one minor drug offence. Also certain categories of crime will go up and down (drug offences) depending on how much policing is done.

Hence I have always focused on violent crimes. Partly because they are the most serious – and what concern people the most. But partly because they are the most likely to be reported.

So what has happened to the four major categories of violent crimes:

• Homicides down 23.6% from 127 to 97
• Serious Assaults resulting in injuries down 5.7% from 11941 to 11260
• Serious Assaults not resulting in injuries down 6.2% from 10324 to 9679
• Common Assaults up 2.0% from 23070 to 23526

This is only the second time since 1999, the number of violent crimes has decreased.

Stuff reports:

Indian model Poonam Pandey is not the first and probably won’t be the last in vowing to strip naked if her country wins a major sports event.

Her promise to strip naked if India wins the cricket World Cup is similar to that of Paraguyan model Larissa Riquelme at last year’s football World Cup.

Riquelme chose to follow through with her promise even though Paraguay didn’t win the World Cup. …

British newspaper website, Metro.co.uk, quoted Pandey as saying: “I’m confident of my body and I’m doing this to excite our boys to play better.”

Will Sri Lanka match this incentive?

I popped into Parliament yesterday for a farewell for someone retiring from the Parliamentary Library. At the function, one of the Library staff informed me that I was still a signatory for the Parliamentary Ball bank account, which amused me greatly as I left in 2004. Sadly only $60 in the bank account though.

It’s a pity there hasn’t been a parliamentary ball for so long – I used to love them. I recall one ball which had a halloween theme, and I went as Satan – painted red, with a nice red cloak, horns and trident. A few of us met in the National Leader’s Office before we went to the ball, and I recall Bill English walking into the room, seeing me and quipping without hestiation “David, you were meant to come in costume”.

Going out to Courteney Place afterwards was lots of fun also. I found traffic stops to allow you to cross the road far more often, when you look like The Devil.

Phil Goff announced on Tuesday that his handling of the Hughes affair had in fact strengthened his leadership. In a bid to close the 20+ point gap with National, in the polls, the front bench signed off a series of further initiatives to strengthen his leadership and public appeal.

• Trevor Mallard to be arrested for the Crewe murders and Phil Goff to reveal he planted the bullet that framed Arthur Allan Thomas
• Clare Curran to be exposed as also having had a paper run in Andersons Bay, and that on the day of the Bain murders she delivered David’s papers for him. Goff to reveal he supressed this information from the public, to protect the innocent Bain
• Annette King to confess she ran an illegal brothel in her office,while Minister of Health. Evidence to be produced that four of her staff married MPs, for which King got a commission on each marriage. Goff was in on the scam as the marriage celebrant