Posts by A S
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to Paul Campbell,
Precisely!
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So, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to sum all of this up with:
1. Greenwald/Snowden information pointing to mass surveillance is highly likely to be true, and
2. Our PM released documents unrelated to mass surveillance as evidence we weren’t involved in mass surveillance.Wonder how the PM is going to get himself out of this hole?
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Agree entirely. Hence my crack about integrity. If any was present, you'd expect to have heard of a collective demand for explanation from the Cabinet. So far... Crickets...
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Hebe,
Theoretically we have a constitution (well a bunch of constitutional arrangements, albeit with a lot of it not actually written down), and apparently it can be rather... fluid sometimes.
Once upon a time, breach of the CM would have seen the transgressing minister quickly sanctioned by all of their peers.
For the CM to work, integrity is required. Seems to be an obvious flaw now, but it did work for a long time.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Matthew Poole,
In theory the opposition and the media should play a key role in highlighting the inability of a government to abide by its own rules, but that is something of a quaint notion nowadays.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to ,
"Look! A tax cut!" seems to be the current technique. Sigh.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Rob Stowell,
This is what concerns me too. If these acts are allowed to slide, our parliamentary and public service frameworks are at risk of being hopelessly compromised, assuming they aren’t already.
After everything that has come out, we can’t just look at Parliament, we also have to look at our public service. That the heads of the central agencies didn’t have an inkling of what was going on is pretty unlikely, and if those leaders who are supposed to champion free, frank, fearless advice to government were too cowed to speak, that has some horrible implications.
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But something that should definitely be investigated, no?
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Daft question time. Do the documents in the Jordan Williams @whaledump today point to the possibility that policy changes in Cabinet were bought?
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One question that a lot of this raises for me, is how much did the central agencies of the public service (SSC, Treasury, DPMC) know about what was going on in terms of dirty politics?
If central agencies were aware of what was going on, and said nothing, that is a concern, and reinforces the need for a wide-ranging Royal Commission into dirty politics that looks at:
1. Parliament,
2. the public sector, and
3. the media.