Karl du Fresne: Pushing the views that suit them

It’s verging on dishonesty for RNZ to describe political commentator Janet Wilson as a former National Party press secretary, as it did yesterday in an item about the reported unrest in the National caucus, as if her former status endows her opinion with special force or credibility.
For the record, Wilson described National as a “slow-slip political earthquake” and “a miasma of nothingness”. These were damning words. The unmistakeable implication was that if Wilson is dissing Christopher Luxon then the party must be in a truly dire predicament – because after all, isn’t she supposed to be on National’s side?

Bob Edlin: Columnist is critical of Luxon’s leadership......

Columnist is critical of Luxon’s leadership – and that’s without examining policies which approve separate funds for Maori science

Janet Wilson, writing in The Post, muses on why New Zealand’s major parties seem hellbent on making themselves as irrelevant as possible to the voters they serve.

For different reasons, both National and Labour have unshackled themselves from their identities and what they stand for, she contends.

Janet Wilson: A new media regulator – a safe haven or Big Brother?

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the citizens of Oceania are watched everywhere they go through telescreens by the ruling Party’s omniscient leader Big Brother. To further tighten its grip on its denizens, and to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it, the Party forces its citizens to learn Newspeak, an invented language.

Which begs the question; is New Zealand about to get its own Newspeak moment with the release of the Safer Online Services and Media Platforms discussion document by the Department of Internal Affair’s Content Regulatory Review?

If those names sound Orwellian, then the content behind this proposal is even more so. And despite its aim of providing safer spaces online for everyone and the fact that it’s primarily targeting previously unregulated social media, it seeks Big Brother-like to encompass all forms of media including mainstream, social media, films and gaming.

Janet Wilson: Politicians and the dark art of misinformation

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues,” the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in a seminal 1967 essay in The New Yorker. “Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade. Why is that so?”

That startling truth seems prescient now in an age where social media and Artificial Intelligence can turbo-charge political lies, sending them around the world in nanoseconds.

Janet Wilson: Never mind the name, we'll all pay for water changes

In 2006 Sea World executives, fearful of a backlash from the gay community, decided to change the name of the Phillip Island fairy penguin to little penguin, an act which the community itself described as ridiculous and unnecessary.

That same characterisation could be applied to the lamentably renamed Affordable Water Reforms, aka Three Waters, whose very name has become a controversially partisan clarion call. Lamentable, laughable even, because the water reforms are now less affordable in their new 10-entity formation, a victim of decreased economies of scale.