Poll Dancer by Keith Ng

As promised, here's a guy who actually knows what he's talking about. Steven Price is a fellow in law and journalism at Victoria University, and an accomplished journalist in his own right.

A journalist *and* a lawyer. Of course you can trust this man.

I asked him a few questions today, and here are his answers, for those of you who are still interested in the case.

I said yesterday that whether Clark had confirmed the "that won't be necessary" quote was immaterial. Price disagrees:

"Well, there is an argument (which the SST was going to run) that whichever particular words Doone was said to have used, it didn't make much difference: the guts of what the PM and the SST said was that Doone intervened inappropriately, and that's what he did. That is, it was essentially true, and even if a minor detail was astray, it didn't affect the basic truth of what the PM and SST said.

"[However,] I think it's worse to say that Doone told the rookie cop that a breath-test wouldn't be necessary than it is to say Doone merely said 'I'll be on my way'. The second doesn't involve any implication that Doone saw a sniffer and directly headed off its use. So it's a more defamatory statement.

"It will also be harder for the PM to argue the defence of truth if she got a fact materially wrong. Likewise, it would make it tougher for her to argue the defences of qualified privilege or honest opinion (i.e. fair comment)."

As for Helen's claim that she specified that the evidence was contested?

"There's a bit of a hair-splitting argument for Clark that goes like this: 'All I told the SST was that Doone was *alleged* to have said that phrase. And that's all they published. And he really was *alleged* to have said it.' Oskar Alley's brief shows he was pretty convinced from his other sources that police were discussing that phrase. Audrey Young (whose reporting on this has been terrific, I think) has written that the phrase may have been withdrawn before the final police report.

"There's room for the argument that it *was* being alleged during the investigations that Doone said it. The courts don't usually like such hair-splitting, and generally say that if you pass on a rumour, you're liable for anything defamatory in it - you can't duck responsibility by chucking in the word 'allegedly'. But it is sometimes possible to say that you passed it on in such a fair and balanced way ('Doone contests it, and I don't know who's right') - that the defamatory sting may be removed. This might depend on the tenor of the conversations, which in turn might depend on how good the evidence of those conversations is..."

Is it unusual for the suit to go all the way to the source, rather than the paper? Are sources generally liable, along with the publication, for defamatory remarks?

"Everyone involved in the publication of a defamatory statement is liable for it. And 'publication' has a really wide meaning in defamation law. For instance, if I gossip to you in the pub, I've 'published' that gossip to you. So the police sources, the PM, the journalist, the subeditor the editor and the publisher are all potentially liable in the Doone case. Usually, people sue newspapers rather than their sources because it's the media companies that have the money. Sometimes they sue both. Sometimes (as here) it's not initially clear who the sources are."

Thank you Steven!

Another 30 questions from the Gallery about Doone at the PM's press conference today, sparked by Rodney "Putting-the-Bust-in-Ombudsman" Hide.

Clark took a new tack, saying that, "really, who gives a toss about what Doone's exact words were - either way, he stopped a cop from carrying out his duties, which is more than enough rope to hang a police commissioner on. By his nuts. So there. Piss off."

I didn't call to confirm that quote, but I'm sure I wouldn't be wrong.

Actually, I agree with her. First, the details are irrelevant. She says she was confirming "the thrust of the story", and that she pointed out explicitly that the quote was contested evidence; they say that she said he said "that won't be necessary" - but are the two really substantively different? Ultimately, she gave confirmation knowing that it would allow a story to be published that would force Doone's hand. Whether this constitutes "causation" is best left to the metaphysicists, but the quote itself was immaterial - with or without that quote, she confirmed the story. So jebus, can we get over it already?

And bollocks the Sunday Star Times wouldn't have ran the rest of the story if they didn't have Helen confirming the quote. This is the SUNDAY STAR TIMES we're talking about. And Oskar Alley. They had Helen Clark confirming the crux of it - they'd have ran with it. The quote was just gravy, which they're now holding up as the magic bullet that Clark gave them. That's bullshit, and bullshit that their own egos would have scoffed at if not for the defamation suit.

But let's put aside all the relevance issue for a second, and focus on what Hide is *really* getting at: That Helen is a filthy liar. That depends on what she meant, what she said, and what was said before and after. And how are they trying to establish this? Not with transcripts or tapes, because they (presumably) don't exist, but with the records of testimonies of recollections of interpretations of off-the-record hint-hint-nudge-nudgery five years ago.

At heart, I think Hide's take of events is based on a very flawed assumption - that people actually assume, or expect, politicians to tell the truth for any significant portion of the time. Sure, Clark probably did use dirty sophisty and lawyery definitions, twisting words and spinning events in her favour. But, um... does he really expect anyone to get outraged by that?

If anyone is outraged that politicians are stretching the truth - you haven't been paying attention.

--

I was rather looking forward to what Campbell had to say about the thing - after 3 News conveniently forgot to mention Helen's vigorous and repeated insistence that she followed-up "you wouldn't be wrong" with "but the evidence is disputed". It was kinda important. And if I hadn't gotten back to the office so late today, I would have asked a defamation lawyer about this, too. But where the hell did the interview run off to? LAWS101?

He asked the question in his introduction, "should we really care"? Hell, that's what I want to know. But it went from "what is defamation" to SST to defences against defamation to speed dating. Grrrr.

I've fucking had it with TV3 and their royal family, sensationalist, lifestyle bullshit - that's right, TV3, I'm leaving and I'm taking my phat twentysomething demographic and vast disposal bling (an extremely large handful of high-denomination coins) with me. I'll be watching taped Simpsons from now on. And skipping the ads. Take that, CanWest!

What was really excruciating about the whole experience was watching Helen at the press conference pretend to laugh every time she repeated the "you wouldn't be wrong" statement.

"And I said... g... ga... h... h-a, you wouldn't be wrong." (Repeat.)

So can we please stop it now, before we make Helen try to laugh/hoik up dead frogs again?

[Really, the only reason I wrote this blog was because I couldn't stand the idea of that headline going to waste.]

Fewer and fewer students have been receiving student allowances since 2001 - 23% fewer! (40,434 in the first quarter of 2005, compared with 52,465 for the same period in 2001.)

As if the staggering decline in absolute terms wasn't bad enough, the number of students rose 28% between 2001 and 2004, meaning that the decline in the proportion of students receiving an allowance is actually much higher: 32%!

(This is worked out using mid-year enrolment and allowance data from 2001 and 2004, since the 2005 enrolment numbers are not available yet.)

And as if that wasn't bad enough, Helen said in her Budget speech last year that "for this second term in government we signalled that more students would get student allowances". The number of students receiving allowances has dropped every single year for the past four years.

And as if THAT wasn't bad enough, in the same speech, Helen proudly announced that 36,000 students would benefit from the changes made in the 2004 Budget, including 28,000 who would go from getting nothing to getting something. The changes took effect the beginning of this year, which means that the results should have been seen in the quarterly figures. But instead of 28,000 more students receiving an allowance, it was 3,000 fewer.

Somebody made a boo-boo. A 31,000 boo-boo. And when only 60,958 students got an allowance last year, a 31,000 boo-boo is a pretty fucking big boo-boo, indeed.

Phew. I think that's bad enough now.

Trevor Mallard, who has been on a schmooze mission around India and the Middle-East, was in Riyadh last week. The Government, he says, knew about this trend, and blamed it on the fact that the parental threshold for student allowances (i.e. The amount a student's parents can earn before they stop becoming eligible for an allowance) has been fixed since 1992, and not increased since. Not even to adjust for inflation, which has quietly compounded to 28% between then and now.

The changes in the 2004 Budget (the one that, ahem, benefited 36,000 students) was supposed to fix this. It didn't.

"This is a particular concern and was surprising," said Mallard.

"The forecast that 36,000 students were expected to benefit from the change was based on economic forecasting, and student enrolment behaviour that existed at the time, when the policy changes were made. By its nature, forecasting is not an exact science."

I don't know what kind of tea those economic forecasters were drinking, but if my tealeaves made a prediction that was that much off the mark, I'd change brands.

Then Mallard pulled off a rather impressive piece of rhetorical acrobatics: fewer people are getting student allowances, he said, because Labour has done such a fantastic job of managing the economy.

"As you know our economy has been performing very strongly, and this has raised income levels.

"As incomes have risen during this time, the proportion of parents within these parental income thresholds has fallen, so the number of students qualifying for allowances also fell.

"The rate of fall-off accelerated as the effects of the stronger economy have been felt - as unemployment has gone down and pay has increased, the numbers getting allowances have fallen - despite the increasing numbers in tertiary study."

In a nutshell: Fantabulous Economy overflowing with jobs = more choose to study part-time and work + parents rolling in $$$ = fewer students getting allowances.

It makes perfect sense for explaining why, given a static threshold, the number of students receiving an allowance was going down. What it doesn't explain is why Labour has sat on its ass for four years allowing the numbers to drop each and every year, and why, when it did realise the extent of the decline, it only made token efforts which has had such stupendously little effect.

And now that they know that their solution did sweet bugger-all, are they going to do anything? I guess it's at the stage now that they can't do anything except promise some bling after the election, but given that they managed to do the exact opposite of what they promised last time, it'll have to be a pretty concrete and juicy offer, stapled to someone's chest (i.e. they'll have to publicly and solidly stake their credibility on this) before it'd be taken seriously.

So, Mr Mallard... can I have an interview this week?

Hopefully this story will get some good traction. I linked in all the stats to make it easier for you, Dear MainStream Media. But in case our good friends, the MSM (yeah, you heard me, 27 True Authors of DogBitingMen) forgets to mention it, this is a student media scoop. ASPA. Aotearoa Student Press Association. That's ASPA. Ass-Pa.

Just so you know.

Break out the pop-corn! A source just told me that the date for the election will be announced immediately after the Budget, to be held just over 6 weeks from then. This would make it 2nd of July.

[Shortly after this hasty post, Conor Roberts informed me that this date coincided with the All Blacks vs Lions match in Wellington.

Indeed, Molesworth and Featherston has mentioned this before, saying that the only likely date around this time was the 9th of July (which coincides with the AB vs Lions match in Auckland). There were reasons that discounted the other dates around that time, but I didn't keep those old copies.

Incidentally, in their 5 April issue, which I did have a copy of, M&F said that they "believe an election before September is highly unlikely", since there's none of the hint-dropping or other groundwork like that which accompanied the snap election last time, and that there is no real excuse for an early election.]

Could the Budget be so yummy that Labour suspects that a "here's the money, now, about this voting business..." line would work? Or is it an attempt to draw attention away from the details of the Budget by getting the Gallery to scramble to battle stations? Or is the Budget so boring that they figured that, since they were going to call an early election anyway, they could get more bang for their buck by linking the Budget with the election announcement?

I'm not a great fan of idle speculation, but hey, what are political blogs for? Guess we'll see closer to the time.

P.S. Check back on Monday at noon for a completely unrelated (but infinitely more well-founded and substantive) scoop!

"Paper's for wimps," Toby said. He leans over the pool table, drafts a few paragraphs of the State of Union address in his shiny head, then sinks the next ball. "Now that's cool," I thought to myself in bed this morning, while drafting my big scoop in my head. It was pretty good, but then I fell asleep again and lost it.

Damnit. I can't write articles in my head AND I can't play pool. At least I have hair.

But are they really that cool, the pros behind the candidates? Are the candidates just airbrushed products (some airbrushed better than others) who get rolled off the production line in an election? What are elections really about?

Tony Sutorius, the Director and Producer of Campaign, would know - he was a fly-on-the-wall during the 1996 Wellington Central race, when MMP was new, Jim Bolger was in charge, and ACT had a chance of reaching 5%.

(Interview was conducted via web-based chat. Emphases have been unchanged. Links are added by me. I thought about HTML-ing them, but really, I'm an old-fashioned kinda guy. Call a *spade* a *spade*, I say, not a spade.)

Keith: Jordan Carter, the Campaign Manager for Marian Hobbs, says that "Elections are about voters, not pundits. They're about candidates, not campaign managers." Do you agree?

Tony: Well, that's sort of like saying customer service is about customers and not the people giving the service. I agree if he means the voters have the real power in the relationship, but not if he's suggesting his own role is as a neutral conduit.

Keith: How much of the campaign managers and the external influence (e.g. commentary in the media) showed through in how the candidates carried themselves?

Tony: I think, and this may sound hard to believe, that many people (including candidates) actually UNDERestimate the extent to which local political campaigns are almost entirely about what is reported in the media.

Keith: Well, what *do* they think it's about? *Them*??

Tony: Political candidates have an extraordinary ability and propensity to believe what they want to believe. If they feel their worldview is not coming through in the media they tend to believe that the media is a third party to their direct relationship with the electorate. They say things like "that just doesn't reflect what people are saying to me at meetings". They are kidding themselves!

Tony: I don't say that as a put-down, by the way, it's just that their message is FAR more important *to them* than it is to the public at large.

Keith: What about the campaign managers and the people behind the scenes? Are they the same, or do you think that they're pretty clued up - but just don't tell the politician?

Tony: I suppose some campaign managers would see part of their role as "telling truth to power"... I didn't see this much in '96, though. I'd say the campaign managers reflected their candidates quite closely.

Keith: You mean they were 'yes men'?

Tony: No... well, maybe, in effect. But not cynically. In the campaigns I saw, a LOT of time was spent "reading the entrails". I think the effect of this is that, while they may get it right or wrong, the key players within a campaign tend to be in approximate agreement.

Tony: The inside of a campaign is an echo chamber. once an idea takes hold it becomes self-reinforcing as people keep repeating it to each other!

Keith: What about on matters of real substance? Do you think that the candidates... for lack of a better way of putting it - do you think they have principles? Principles on which they stand on their own, despite what their managers, or the media, or anyone else says?

Tony: Yes. What trips them up is the fact that these are not often very relevant to the electorate.

Keith: So what do you think that the electorate really cares about in a campaign?

Tony: I have enormous respect for the sophistication of electorates. For example, in 1996 Prebble was elected because many people saw the logic in his simple line "6 MPs for 1 vote". He argued that a vote for him gave a leveraged result if you wanted a right-wing government. It was a clever and credible thing to say.

Tony: The problem MANY local candidates have is that people know full well that they will either be a backbench government MP, or in opposition, or they'll get in anyway on the list. Voting for them will often seem "pointless" - and it often is!

Tony: I think the challenge for any local candidate is to mount a credible case that, if elected, they will be in a position to do anything significant. Doesn't make much difference what their values are if they won't be in a position to do anything about it!

Keith: Are electorate candidates elections anachronistic?

Tony: "Anachronistic" might not be exactly the right word... perhaps "irrelevant in many cases"?

Keith: Do you think who they *are*, and the personality that they present is more important, given the small difference their election makes in the grand scheme of things?

Tony: My observation is that successful campaigns establish two or three good reasons in the mind of as many voters as possible why its a good idea to vote for their candidate. Personality sits around this (like, do I believe this guy?) but is not in itself a very strong reason. Take Nandor for example...

Keith: So you don't think Nandor can win an electorate seat?

Tony: Nandor could, but not just because he's Nandor!

Tony: Most (like, nearly all) local campaigns fail because their messages are FAR too diffuse.

Keith: Do you think that might be because there generally aren't any hard issues that a candidate can push on?

Tony: I think its more an issue of "don't" rather than "can't".

Keith: Why do you think they do that?

Tony: Lack of imagination? Damien O'Connor on the West Coast is a great example of someone who has pulled this off...

Keith: So, how do you think the Hobbs/Blumsky campaigns are faring so far?

Tony: I think Blumsky made a *great* start with his campaign launch.

Keith: How so?

Tony: Blumsky? Well, his choice of film was outstanding, and displayed keen irony... or something...

Keith: Does sense of humour and a set of eyebrows win elections?

Tony: No.

Tony: ...if its up against something tangible.

Tony: To be completely honest I'm not sure what either candidate will do that will make a difference for Wellington. It's early days of course, but if anyone has a three-point bullet list I haven't heard it.

Tony: BTW: If I were Marion Hobbs, I'd say something like "Elect me, and I will stop the road race, get transmission gully actually started, and make public transport free at peak times to easy road congestion"... or whatever. But three solid, definite, practical things. And then she should say them 27,000 times, and not say much else, on the campaign trail. And recognise that the media is who she is really talking to.

Keith: Do you think that their campaigns, which I gather are much more well-resourced than their counterparts in 96, will bear any resemblance to the ones we saw in Campaign?

Tony: I can't say for sure, but I imagine they'll be near-identical!

Keith: In that the behaviour of the candidates will be similar? Won't the money and the profile make a difference?

Tony: Candidates are generally good, honest, sincere people who want to make the world a better place.

Tony: But innocent.

Tony: And often woolly.

Keith: Even Blumsky and Hobbs? They've been around for a while....

Tony: Hobbs, yes, I'm afraid so. I REALLY like Marion personally, she's been kind to me, but she is NOT good at clearly and in a disciplined way explaining what the point of voting for her is. I would note that this doesn't mean I think she'd make a bad MP... just not a great campaigner.

Keith: So is that where the campaign team comes in? Having a manager there to crack the whip whenever she goes "off-message"?

Tony: The first step is having a strong and clear enough message to stay "on". Every candidate *should* be able to answer this question: "If you are elected, specifically what will change in Wellington as a result in the next three years?"

Keith: Good point. I'll ask them!

Tony: And any answer involving "listening" or "consultation" or "a voice" are just not good enough.

Keith: That's a bit like getting them to give an answer without using the letters "e"!

Keith: Just want to ask you about tactical voting and backroom deals. In one of your previous interviews, you said that you were uncomfortable with the way the Bolger screwed over Mark Thomas to prop up Prebble, and that it "left a pretty filthy taste in the mouth". Do you think that other people, further away from the action, saw it like that too?

Tony: I think Bolger acted against the culture of the National Party in doing this, not against the "rules of politics". Important to note that his call only worked because a lot of people saw the sense in voting tactically.

Keith: But do you think that voters are turned off by these kind of backroom deals? (Now, that is, not in 96.)

Tony: How was it a "backroom deal"?

Keith: In that voters want parties to be addressing voters and dealing with voters, rather than other parties and trying to prop them up for tactical purposes.

Tony: Bolger was telling people who wanted a right wing government how he thought they could best get one. Many agreed, and did it. I doubt there was any interaction between ACT and National in advance of Bolgers pronouncement - there was no need. Prebble's campaign argument, that a vote for him could secure six MPs and a right wing government, was credible, and many voters who wanted that outcome decided to do it. Bolger released some more from the shackles of "tribal" loyalty, allowing them to do the same.

Keith: Do you think that the lack of these kinds of interactions in this election will mean that it's more boring?

Tony: Hmmm... might be too early to assume none, both ACT and the Greens could find themselves in very tricky positions with the 5% threshold...

Keith: You think Hide could pull out the same "6 for 1" line in Epsom?

Tony: Guaranteed.

Keith: You think it'll work again, now that voters have had so much more experience with MMP?

Tony: Not sure it'd get him elected, but I think it's as true now as it was in 96. It's one reason I find the Greens' decision to rule out local candidates rather odd.
[The Greens are, in fact, standing electorate candidates - Keith]

Keith: Just one last question: By the end of filming Campaign, how did you feel about the candidates and the people behind the campaign?

Tony: I liked them... even the ones whose politics I loathed. They were keen, willing to put themselves out to make the world a better place. Made me feel far more confident about our democratic future.

Tony: I think politics is intrinsically about idealism colliding with raw power. It's a triumph that we don't generally kill each other over these issues any more!

Keith: Thanks a lot Tony!

Tony: Been fun, Keith.