Tagged: Waihopai
This government should (but probably won’t) be over
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!
Democracy is so 20th century
John Key: New Zealand’s pre-eminent post-modernist
The endless popularity of the Key government represents everything that’s wrong with post-modernism.
John Key is completely unphased by passé modern phenomena like expert opinions and statistics.
Statistics say he’s not fulfilling pledges to catch up to Australia, let alone those 170,000 jobs he promised … but Key is more interested in his own personal subjective experience of “many Australians” wanting him to “go over and be their Prime Minister”. Well shucks, when you put it that way, why are we wasting so much time and money on the drab modern rationality of statistics and research?
Experts highlight the racist undertones of Key’s constituency … but Key, ever the post-modern relativist, chimes in with the inexorable subjectivity of all truths that impact badly on his government: “Racism is subjective.” (Just like poverty is ‘merely relative‘).
Those pesky experts have been at it again this week… Current New Zealander of the Year Dame Anne Salmond joins the Law Society and the Human Rights Commission in raising alarm about the “assault upon the democratic rights of New Zealanders” that is the GCSB bill currently being rushed through Parliament.
Salmond says “When a body as authoritative and dispassionate as the Law Society feels forced to report to the United Nations that the Government in New Zealand is acting in conflict with the rule of law, all New Zealanders should be very worried.”
Don’t they realise that we enlightened post-moderns are skeptical of so-called experts, authority and dispassionateness?
John Key dismissed the Law Society like flies with a simple “I don’t agree.” His personal opinion is worth just as much as theirs!
And, like Paula Bennett before him, he’s given the Human Rights Commission the same treatment. Never mind that they’re worried enough to use their rarely used right to report directly to the Prime Minister. He doesn’t even care enough to note the difference between this report and a select committee submission!
In these post-modern times, the Human Rights Commission are just another bunch of irrelevant experts that can be safely ignored and even de-funded because Key and Co. know NZers won’t get off our couches about it.
I’ve said the popularity of this government represents what’s wrong with post-modernism. But Key’s cynical manipulation of post-modern subjectivity is only part of the problem.
The other side is the apathetic population who swallow this hollow ‘post-political’ ideology because we like his smile, or wish we too could go from Hollyford Ave to multi-millionairehood, or submit to the lazy self-fulfilling prophecy that we can’t change anything … or simply don’t care about anything beyond our personal experience as individual consumers.
As John Key himself said in 2007, “A quiet, obedient, and docile population; a culture of passivity and apathy; a meek acceptance of what politicians say and do – these things are not consistent with democracy.”
Sleepy Kiwis’ casual surrender of democracy is the chilling confirmation of this truism. We are turning Key’s words from a prophetic warning to a Machiavellian political strategy. And we will reap what we sow.
