Tag Archives: Phil Twyford

This is not the discussion you are looking for

Posted on by
5

“They are so many, and our country is so small. Where will we find space to bury them all?”

— Finnish soldier during the Winter War, 1939

“We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead.”

— Red Army general during the Winter War, 1940

With their horrendous Chinese housing investment analysis Labour hoped to start a discussion. Well, they’ve done that. For 11 days until yesterday, the story led, or nearly led the news. The question is: are they happy with the discussion they’ve started?

They may really have wanted a discussion about race, dressed up as a discussion about housing, or they may have genuinely wanted a housing discussion with a slight racial frisson. Regardless of their hopes and ambitions, the party at this point has to have a long, hard look at their choices, for in reality, they’ve had neither of these two things. What they have had is an excruciating public discussion about one of the most boring and alienating topics it is possible to imagine: research ethics and methodology. For eleven straight days, during most of which time they had the agenda to themselves because the Prime Minister was out of the country, Labour has unsuccessfully defended its commitment to good social science practice.

Unsuccessfully, because yesterday, 11 days on, an increasingly frustrated Labour leader was still defending the data. “This is how the debate gets out of control,” said Andrew Little to Patrick Gower — and for once, he was right. “The Auckland housing market is not a morality play,” said housing spokesperson Phil Twyford, and he was right, too, but that’s all anyone has been talking about for 11 days.

Earlier in the day the party’s statistical guru Rob Salmond
half-arsedly apologised, on the fourth page of comments on a blog post, for misrepresenting three of his most rigorous methodological critics in a column published in the Sunday Star Times, which is read by somewhere north of 100,000 people. Three critics — Keith Ng, Tze Ming Mok, and Chuan-Zheng Lee, all of whom just happen to be Chinese, and who seem, horrifyingly, to have been misrepresented so as to give Labour the ability to say “look, we can’t be racist, here are these three Chinese people who agree with us!”

This is a horror show. Quite apart from giving unreconstructed racists an opportunity to pretend outrage, and appropriative neo-colonialists grounds to go around trumpeting about the coming race war, Labour has spent 11 days debating the definition of “is”, losing, and looking like mendacious buffoons into the bargain. Quite apart from the vileness of this exercise, it has been handled even more badly than I have come to expect.

They need to just stop. There is no ground to be won by these means, and further fighting will mean more dead to bury. The only poll since the announcement has them effectively stagnant, following a poll taken mostly before the announcement, which had them well up. Pretending nothing is wrong with their work, that their high-minded-if-admittedly-risky project has been hijacked by a mendacious media and the leftist-liberal fifth-column is no kind of strategy, even if it were true. The keys to the twitter accounts need to be taken away and, as much as possible, a dignified silence maintained. Go away and get some evidence, find a way to return the discussion to the issue of housing prices and non-resident investment, because those are serious issues about which we deserve a serious discussion which Labour’s delusional incompetence has rendered impossible.

L

Yours, not mines

Posted on by
7

Labour’s campaign against mining Schedule 4 land looks strong, especially at the iconographic level.

The slogan and to an extent the photo frames the issue as a matter of identity, echoing Phil Goff’s “the many, not the few” and Phil Twyford’s “not yours to sell” (though the visual style has come a long way since that campaign, and there’s some subject-object confusion). It also echoes Iwi/Kiwi, undoubtedly the most effective campaign of this sort in recent memory. The hard economic matters — the cost-benefit analysis between mining and tourism and so on — are there, as they should be, but backgrounded to the symbolic concerns.

Goff is clear that he’s not anti-mining, but wants to focus on the 60% of mineral resources outside the DOC estate. That’s the crucial point to make because it draws a bright line between acceptable and unacceptable which is still well north of Schedule 4 — to cross that line the government must first gain electoral consent to mine DOC land, and having done that must gain consent to mine the most precious areas of that estate. The point isn’t that mining is all bad; the point is that mining conservation land is worse than the alternatives. The job of the opposition, environmentalists and anyone who loves the fact that NZ still has wild places which are sacrosanct, or who thinks of those places as a part of them, is to relegate the idea of mining them to the political too-hard basket.

Labour and the Greens are also well-coordinated on this, with Metiria Turei pointing out the government’s duplicity in not revealing its intent to mine areas on Great Barrier Island which are under Treaty negotiations. The māori party should get in on this, as well. It looks good.

L

Traction

Posted on by
16

hide-rort

The story of Rodney Hide’s ministerial fundraiser is making headway — at present, it’s the splash spot on stuff.co.nz and is pretty prominent on the Herald site as well.

This image is strong. Close-ups are rarely flattering, and this one has an unctuous, indignant defensiveness which evokes, well, just about every crooked politico in history. The text, leading with the universal refrain of officials on the take and following up hard with that beloved word ‘rort’, gives the audience all the necessary context. This is a position Hide has spent his political career avoiding, and one which he was once merciless in prosecuting. It’s a long way to fall.

It seems that the credit for this should go to Eddie, who drew together its various strands into the narrative we now have. It’s been picked up by a few blogs, including Red Alert, where Phil Twyford published his own clearly-derivative-but-not-attributed riff on the topic earlier today, complete with Goff’s press release which forms the basis for the NZPA story. And it looks like Eddie even chose the photo which Stuff ran with — only one is flipped on the vertical. Well done.

Update: Lyndon in the comments points out that the threads were in fact drawn together by North Shore mayor Andrew Williams in the first instance, and published on Scoop.co.nz – so Frist P0st credits there, although the Labour response seems more derivative of Eddie’s work than that, so my point largely remains.

L