The NZ Association of Convenience Stores (another pro-tobacco lobby group helmed by Glenn Inwood) put out a press release this morning claiming that 60% of retailers opposed a display ban on cigarettes.
Leaving aside the little tidbit that nearly a third of the association’s constituents actually want the ban, Lyndon here at the Scoop offices Stephen Judd noticed something odd about the PDF of polling data supporting this. Read the rest of this entry »
[By David Farrar
, Keith Ng, Rob Salmond, Tim Watkin (and now me)]
Many people are concerned about the quality of public affairs journalism in New Zealand. Being concerned is a good start, but how can you take the next step? How can you help make it better? Yes, you.
Here is one way. Follow this link and vote for Nicola Kean in the AMP “Do Your Thing” Scholarship competition.
It is an online popularity contest, and the winner gets $10,000 to help them pursue their dreams. Voting is quick, easy, free, and for a good cause. Of course, there are many, many fantastic applicants for this award, and we are not opposed to any one of them winning the money. We’re just especially in favour of Nicola winning, because of the value that her dream holds for all of us. Read the rest of this entry »
Never a dull day at the Scoop offices…
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing on behalf of [REDACTED], its subsidiaries and affiliates ([REDACTED]).[REDACTED] has become aware that there exists an unauthorized use of [REDACTED]‘s copyrightable material on multiple pages of the scoop.co.nz website (the “Scoop Website”), which we understand to be owned and operated by Scoop Media Ltd.
The content in question is a series of financial text reports entitled [REDACTED], developed by or on behalf of [REDACTED] that it utilizes in connection with its financial businesses. Read the rest of this entry »
If a week is a long time in politics, two years is practically geological. Following on from last week’s turnaround on foreshore and seabed legislation, it seems we have a new foreign affairs policy on Tibet – and freedom of speech for that matter.
The last time Tibet came up in New Zealand politics was when Key declined to meet the Dalai Lama when he visited New Zealand last year. At the time reporters called Key out on a promise he’d made on the 2008 campaign trail that he’d do so, but Key replied that he simply “wouldn’t get a lot out of that particular meeting”.
That may be so – and it’s not like his predecessor was any less evasive – but Key’s apology is not just a backpedal on the issue of Tibetan annexation. It is also the latest in a string of diplomatic handwaving over clashes between Chinese officialdom and freedom of speech in New Zealand. Read the rest of this entry »
Now to a current problem that gets to the heart of today’s mismanagement of Treaty relations. Just after the closing of Parliament last year, when MPs couldn’t debate the issue, the Government released its proposals for dealing with the foreshore and seabed following a legal decision that overturned 125 years of settled law.
The simple option was to legislate to establish the Crown ownership that almost everyone believed already existed. Instead, the Government has come up with a convoluted notion called “public domain”. On the face of it, it sounds good. But it leaves room for much more than just limited recognition of “customary rights”, and in fact embodies vast powers, including the right to a Maori veto. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m unforgivably late to the party, but turns out some nice things were said about Media Darlings at last week’s AirNZ Best Blog Awards. While the tobacco fiasco was too recent to be eligible, judge and Tumeke! blogger Bomber Bradbury had this to say about our stuff from last year:
OOOOOOOOh they are sharp aren’t they? Very good demolition of ACT on campus, good chase on National’s support of VSM, and excellent post on academic freedom. If this is the future of our news rooms, things are not as bad as they seem.
Unfortunately his collaborator Tim Selwyn wasn’t quite so impressed:
Earnest, researched, sober – and being about tertiary education, very dull. Striking an almost neutral pose it reads more like a policy journal than a blog.
Oh well, you can’t win them all. Unless you’re Amanda Fisher, who was at the Actual Media Awards on Saturday and took home the prize for Best Student Journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
I usually try to keep things local here at Media Darlings, but I want to make a special exception for the war of words triggered by the Israeli Defence Force’s raid on a humanitarian convoy this week.
This is not a political blog, so let me just say this in advance as a reporter: There was a well-publicised humanitarian aid convoy whose members included European legislators, former US diplomats, an international group of journalists and at one point a Holocaust survivor. The Shayetet went in with guns, nine people died, thirty were injured and now the IDF won’t return the journalists’ footage of what happened. Any authority which withholds evidence of a fatal incident is going to look incredibly suspect, IDF or otherwise.
Anyway.
Much of the Israeli hasbara, or PR offensive, has been absurd (the group I described above were supposedly arms smugglers and/or mercenaries) and often contradictory (said arms smugglers/mercenaries were attacking with kitchen knives rather than guns). But only one reporter I’ve seen so far has managed to report an absurdity as fact and then contradict it in the same article. Read the rest of this entry »
[UPDATE: The online disclaimer has now been amended. If anyone from the Herald's reading this, thankyou and please don't file my CV in the shredder]
There’s a famous saying attributed to Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to look like bloody big chumps and confirm every negative perception of their industry”. Or something like that.
Anyway, shame on the New Zealand Herald. On Monday – the very same day they ran NZPA’s recap of the incredibly sketchy relationship between Imperial Tobacco and the Association of Community Retailers – they also ran an opinion piece by Roger Bull of the Association of Convenience Stores. You know, Glenn Inwood’s other pro-tobacco client. Read the rest of this entry »
[UPDATE: In case you really don't feel like reading today, I'll be discussing the ACR and newsblogging in general with Colin Peacock on Radio NZ's Mediawatch this weekend. Tune in 9am or 10pm Sunday or look for the podcast here]
“The association does not have a relationship with tobacco companies, and nor did Stay Displays as far as I’m aware.” – Denielle Boulieris, Association of Community Retailers
“As far as I am aware, the Association does not get any funding from Imperial Tobacco. Glenn might with his hats; he might get paid by Imperial Tobacco, but that’s his business” – Richard Green, Association of Community Retailers
“Imperial Tobacco has not funded, or directly funded, the ACR” – Glenn Innwood, Omeka Communications
But it turns out Imperial Tobacco finally broke its silence at last fortnight’s Maori Affairs Select Committee hearing. Read the rest of this entry »
The last thing the internet needs is another Budget blog, but it’s always amusing when a current event is awkwardly shoehorned into a mostly pointless press release. Sometimes it’s an earnest attempt to catch a reporter’s eye with an otherwise weak news angle, other times it comes across as nothing more than a jaded intern mashing out another spiel so their boss hits the daily exposure quota.
In any case today’s post ranges from the tenuously topical to the breathtakingly cynical with my personal highlights from Thursday’s Budget blather:
DoC to develop cycleways and camp grounds
Cool, I guess. So, is that from DoC itself? Maybe an outdoor recreation group? Nope; apparently that’s the best thing Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson had to say about her portfolio. Read the rest of this entry »
So there was a fair bit of reportage last week around the fact that Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett had appointed a sociologist named Peter Saunders to her Welfare Working Group, while citing the work of a completely different Peter Saunders in the House. Not different in the ‘Clark Gable moustache and eyepatch’ sense; more ‘diametrically opposed philosophies which should be readily apparent to anyone reading their work’. Lyndon Hood has a much, much funnier summary of the whole ordeal here, but what most media outlets seem to have overlooked is the sheer craziness that the Actual Peter Saunders is touting.
Again, Gordon Campbell has a much better summary than I can really offer, but the gist of it is that the Peter Saunders that Bennett intentionally appointed to the Welfare Working Group explicitly believes that poor people (like beneficiaries) are generally less intelligent than wealthier people and are therefore less deserving of training and education. No, really. Read the rest of this entry »
[UPDATE: more skullduggery on Public Address, Soundbites from Richard Green and Glen Inwood on RNZ Morning Report]
Some interesting developments since yesterday: a brief response from the Association’s coordinator, a somewhat conflicting interview with Glenn Inwood and a very interesting poll of the ACR’s members. So let’s get cracking.
Dear Rory
Thank you for your email yesterday. I apologise for the late response, however, I was not in the office yesterday.
To answer your questions, the ACR is a trust, with retailers as trustees.
Your calculations regarding the operational budget are incorrect. Some retailers have offered to pay above the $50 annual membership fee. There are more than 7000 independent retailers in New Zealand and we are currently in the process of a membership drive.
The association does not have a relationship with tobacco companies, and nor did Stay Displays as far as I’m aware. Read the rest of this entry »
[UPDATE: Keith comes through with the goods again!]
It turns out I’m not the only one interested in this grassroots collective of mum-and-dad-tobacconists, with several people messaging and calling me with little tidbits of information. I also emailed the ACR twice to ask them directly, with no reply (despite their employees putting out a third press release today). But I just found out some very very interesting things, courtesy of Keith “Student Media Mafia” Ng.
Keith googled the PO Box listed on the Association of Community Retailers’ website and got back a bunch of articles about one Omeka Communications Ltd, who are still a registered company (although their website shut up shop in 2008).
According to the Companies Register, it just so happens that between 01 May – 16 July 2006 Omeka Communications was working out of the exact same offices ACR is using today. Read the rest of this entry »
Who is behind the Association of Community Retailers?
Last week’s sudden tax hike on tobacco saw a flurry of impromptu press releases, but far and away the most interesting ones were from these folks. “Tax Hike Will Hurt Dairies”, they said, and reporters scrabbling for an original news angle flocked to them for comment. But who exactly are they? Read the rest of this entry »
As I’ve said before, part of my job at Scoop involves copy-pasting the two-or-three hundred press releases that come through every day. A lot of it is drudgery, but occasionally you get public relations gems like this one from the Gaming Technologies Association (not the fun whoosh-bang kind of gaming technologies; the kind where you lose all your money to a pokie machine).
Gaming industry calls for greater recognition
Auckland, New Zealand: It’s time the true contribution of gaming machines to the New Zealand economy was recognised and acknowledged was the message from conference participants at the 2010 New Zealand Gaming Expo. Read the rest of this entry »
[Ed. - for the uninitiated, click here, here and here]
The cracked asphalt bubbled and congealed in the heat as I trudged down State Highway 1. Six long years had passed since the seas began to boil; five since the night of the Parliamentary Fatwah. Three since my wife and family were taken by the Mongol horde. Limping into the shade of a crumbling public toilet, I dropped my pack and wept.
So National’s Simon Power has ordered a review of the law surrounding violent crime and knives and there’s a good chance possession will be criminalised – in the same discretionary sense that, say, smacking is. Meanwhile ACT’s David Garrett is cheering them on from the sidelines:
“It’s too easy for would-be offenders to pick up a knife without thinking of the consequences. We need to send a message that knife possession is not acceptable in our society and harsher penalties will do this.”
I don’t have much more to add – a review is a review is a review, and it’s obvious that National and ACT lean towards a fairly authoritarian, retributive model of the justice system – but it is interesting that this wasn’t brought up much, much earlier.
Say, oh, January 2008?
[First things first, some great news: I've now joined Scoop as their new duty editor, which means that in between copy-pasting press releases I'll be writing the odd story and doing weekly segments on Radio Active and bFM. Should you be interested I've already got a couple of things here, here and here.]
So the government’s surprise press conference yesterday wasn’t such a surprise after all. The PM and Education Minister Anne Tolley are sticking to their guns on their national standards policy; the one that guarantees young New Zealanders get a fair go, etc. etc. through regular testing on the three ‘r’s. They’re so confident, in fact, that they’re refusing to trial it in a few schools first.
Except that they are. As we heard yesterday, they will be trialling the national standards for te reo Maori in some kura kaupapa to make sure they’re appropriate – an eminently sensible decision, but one which makes this battle with the teachers’ unions over the rest of the curriculum all the more absurd. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be more humble and accepting of the wisdom of elders. It’s still December though, so today I’m arguing cosmology with a physicist.
Victoria University’s Dr Jeff Tallon writes in today’s Herald that the upcoming NZ Atheist Bus Campaign is ultimately a bit misguided.
I could be wrong, but the bus slogan “There’s probably no God” is probably, nay, almost certainly, incorrect. It is a purely dogmatic statement that is not informed by science.
Well, why should we believe there’s an intelligent creator? Dr Tallon argues the odds – the universe we live in, he writes, exists on a knife edge.
Its density, back at the first moments of the “big bang”, was critically balanced to better than one part in one billion billion billion billion.
A fraction more dense and it all would have collapsed again. A fraction less dense and it all would have evaporated – no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no mother Earth. Read the rest of this entry »
ACT on Campus vice-president Peter McCaffrey recently put out a top 10 list of student unions misrepresenting their members. It’s been briefly mentioned in the Dominion Post, but on closer inspection the list manages to misrepresent more than a few things itself. I thought a good brisk fisking might be in order to set the record straight (as always, any dissent is welcome in the comments). So let’s get started.
10. NZUSA endorsement of Labour in 2008, despite more students voting National than Labour.
Not true – the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations put out a voters’ guide which can be clearly viewed here. Nowhere in the guide does it endorse Labour – even the colour scheme is non-partisan. What it does do is endorse universal student allowances, a policy adopted by Labour and the Greens in the last election, and it would seem this is the source of McCaffrey’s discontent. But there’s nothing illegal, questionable or even unusual about a lobby group endorsing a policy. It’s a very different thing from third-party electioneering - more Federated Farmers than Exclusive Brethren – and McCaffrey should be smart enough to know this. Read the rest of this entry »
Ten years ago a National government prodded tertiary students to adopt voluntary union membership. Now National is backing a bill to make membership voluntary by law. Libertarians are for it; lefties are against it – but what does it mean for the institutions that have to live with it? Read the rest of this entry »
As reported by Michael Oliver of Salient and today’s Dominion Post, Wellington’s Victoria University has announced plans to raise undergraduate fees by five percent and almost double its student services levies from $275.60 for domestic students to $510.
Now, don’t get me wrong: VUWSA’s storm-the-halls-and-egg-the-bourgeoisie tactics are a particularly obnoxious way of tilting at windmills, and Salient editor Jackson Wood claims that at least half of the 25 students involved were from the Communist Workers’ Party. But at the same time I wouldn’t be surprised if their constituents really were to rankle at the latest increase.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, the increase in student service levies is a national trend at the moment, with Canterbury, Massey and Waikato all announcing significant rises of their own. To give the university credit, Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh did meet with students in advance and explain the rationale, and it’s to be hoped that the money will be ring-fenced as with Massey and Canterbury.
But students would be right to object to Victoria’s exploitation of the fee maxima scheme, which requires institutions to seek government approval before raising fees anything beyond 5 percent a year. Read the rest of this entry »
Student representatives say the government is abdicating its responsibility for tertiary education funding, with universities increasingly turning to levies to top up operational budgets.
The New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations said Friday they were not surprised by a recent spate of levy increases, which university councils say will free up core government funding for staff and research.
While the vast majority of revenue still comes from government funding, many institutions also charge a levy in order to subsidise their facilities and pastoral care programmes, such as crèches, academic support or health centres.
The latest round of fee setting has seen significant rises in student services levies across the country: Waikato University’s $140 levy for intramural students in 2010 represents a 40 percent increase, while Massey’s has almost doubled at $200. Read the rest of this entry »
Industry awards are awful things, full of awkward speeches and obnoxious boors in equal measure. That said, they do offer a genuine opportunity for camaraderie and recognition of our best and brightest – and last Saturday’s Aotearoa Student Press Awards were no different.
But the problem I find with these ceremonies is that all too often you’re applauding someone’s work while hissing “what’s his name?” at your fellow diners. So today we offer a sampler of sorts: below we’ve listed the winners of individual categories and, where possible, a link to some of the work that has so impressed their peers and pundits.
A prominent member of the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations says student unions need to come clean with their constituencies – or risk losing them altogether.
Massey Wellington Students’ Association president Alex Sorenson said Tuesday that Roger Douglas’ Education (Freedom Of Association) Amendment Bill, currently before Parliament, raises important issues of accountability and good faith. Read the rest of this entry »
After our post on Roger Douglas’ VSM bill I took the liberty of emailing a few key players to find out where they stood on the issue. Associate education minister Heather Roy was obviously all for it, since she was the bill’s original sponsor. Education minister Anne Tolley did not respond (again, no surprises there), and nor did her other associate minister Pita Sharples.
But the other other associate minister, Wayne Mapp, was refreshingly frank. His unedited reply is below.
Honorary Israeli consul and former president of the NZ Jewish Council David Zwartz is demanding that Waikato University apologise for its handling of Roel van Leeuwen’s thesis, which was pulled from the university’s library when its subject, former National Front secretary Kerry Bolton, wrote to the university to complain.
Zwartz may well argue that the university’s behaviour constituted cultural insensitivity – but if any apology is forthcoming, it should really be to the country’s academic community.
When National swept into power last year, pundits described it as a backlash against Labour’s ‘nanny state’. But a little-known project to combat child pornography with a government-run internet filtering scheme may yet pose a genuine threat to civil liberties.
A funny thing happened on the way to the fees forum…
If you’re a student at Victoria University, you’re cordially invited to “constructively engage with the university on the issue of student fees” at a public meeting on Wednesday.
If you’re a student at Massey however, that train’s already left town. Vice Chancellor Steve Maharey will also be hosting a video conference with students tomorrow, but with the express intent of defending a decision the university has already made.
Trust us to begin with the big issues: you may or may not be aware that Roger Douglas’ Voluntary Student Membership Bill was pulled from the hat late last month. Salient‘s Michael Oliver has a pretty decent summary of the state of play in this week’s issue, but a little historical context wouldn’t hurt either. Here’s one I prepared earlier…
Oh, Rewa…