The revelations last night (and leaked during the day) SHOULD end this government.

In brief:

1) Even if Key is telling the truth (which is pretty far-fetched and increasingly unlikely given Snowden’s testimony), they still:
– legalised what they’d already been doing – spying on NZers;
– while it was still illegal, made a “business case” and got a plan underway for mass surveillance; and
– worked on it for a year until John Key (claims he) “limited its scope.”
(Note how he’s changed his story within a day from “there is no ambiguity – no mass surveillance” to “there was a plan but I scrapped it” to “the plan got underway and then I ‘limited its scope’ a year later”).

Key claims to have offered proof with his self-interested declassification of information, but in fact this information pertains to a completely different programme – the release served no purpose but to divert and mislead. Occam’s razor, international experience and reliability records suggest he’s not telling the truth, and the implications of that are huge.

2) Kim Dotcom completely screwed up his big reveal of alleged proof Key knew about him before he said he did, and opened himself up to accusations it was faked. Failing to offer water-tight evidence did more harm than good. In fact, the theatrical way Kim’s gone about this whole event has been self-defeating.

Nonetheless it still seems likely Key also lied about his knowledge of Dotcom, and put “political pressure” on Immigration to grant him residency so they could more easily extradite him to the US. If this is NOT true, they need to somehow explain why procedure and official advice wasn’t followed, what the “political pressure” referred to in the immigration e-mail was, and David Cunliffe is certainly right that “if Mr Key wants to show the email is a fake, he needs to release meeting records and all documents with correspondence with Warner Brothers dating from 2010 which needs to be “immediate and full”.” Something tells me we won’t get to see those records.

Unfortunately these revelations probably won’t end this government. They would only do so in a society where truth and government accountability were valued.

Key’s usual pattern is to simply disagree with the experts, banking on the fact that the general public have more trust in his smiling face and apparent financial nous than some tall poppy experts with their high-falutin “statistics,” “evidence,” “research” etc. It works spectacularly well in post-modern New Zealand.

A few years ago, under pressure in an interview by British media that (unlike ours) actually hold politicians accountable, Key slipped and described the strategy a bit too frankly:

“He’s one academic, and like lawyers, I can provide you with another one that will give you a counterview.”

Unfortunately, NZers’ trust in the man is such that he can say something like that, and the worst people will think is “Well, the other side are probably just as dishonest, so I’m going to disregard this. He still seems like a good bloke, and he and Bill English seem to be good with money.” Which is of course exactly what their PR is designed to make us think.

Please prove me wrong, New Zealand!