The Labour Party spin blog
One of the new blogs to the blogosphere, and one where posts appear very often, is the standard. The people behind the website, are just as anonymous as National’s donors, despite their frequent calls for more transparency. It has emerged that the Standard is being hosted by the Labour Party. Although Tane explains in the comments that this was a temporary measure as it needed to be shifted as it often crashed because of all the traffic. Even if this is true, it indicates that labour is supporting the Standard, and there probably are connections between the anonymous bloggers and the Labour Party. I would be very surprised if Labour offered to host my site if it had the same problems. Also, Labour Party president Mike Williams has said publicly that “Labour Party activists”(he must know who they are) are behind the blog. Bill English points out herethat there are legal issues involved with Labours new Electoral Finance Act. One can only imagine what The Standard would do if the Exclusive Brethren were caught secretly running a blog attacking Labour, that was hosted by the National Party.
UPDATE: In the comments section, Iparet from The Standard has offered his explanation. It is worth a read. I will investigate the issue more in the near future.
The Standard has not only used Labours web address. They have also had (it appears) some good lessons in dishonesty and spin from their Party bosses. Yesterday, they put up a new postabout plans from the Canadians to asset strip Auckland Airport, in order to derive hyper-dividends. The post was made on a gross misinterpretation of a linked NZ Herald article, which revealed that the hyper-dividends were to be obtained by exploiting a tax law loophole that has now been closed. I tried twice to comment on the articles error, but both times my comment did not appear in the comments section. When Snelly Boy finally made the point I tried to make, at 3:22 PM, Steve Pierson, the author of the post (and one of the few bloggers who writes The Standard who blogs under his real name) conceded he was wrong, but amazingly, despite admiting he was wrong said “the arguement that the CPF is here to asset-strip still stands”. He also did no editing to his original post. As a result many readers will read it, without all the comments, and go away with misinformed views of the CPF. Keeping the post up unchanged, knowing the information is wrong, is lying to his readers. While on the subject of Auckland Airport, today is D-Day for the bid, and the voting is close.
But in case you are a left winger and and optimistic about the Airport staying in NZ hands I’ve got some bad news for you. The airport has been out of our hands for the last 10 years (since the Government sold its shares in 1998). As I pointed out here 40% of the Airport is owned by overseas (mostly US) hedge funds, and another 14% is already owned by the Canadians. So more than half the Airport is already under foreign control. So much for it being a NZ national asset. But hey, you wouldn’t expect The Standard to spread the word on that, or anything alse that undermines its spin.
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In And Out Of Beltway 
March 13, 2008 at 7:59 pm
This popped up as a link at The Standard, so I popped over for a look.
What you are saying about the site is just pure rubbish. It appears you only bothered to read whale’s line of bullshit. Just so you have the real idea, let me reiterate. Maybe it will penetrate the crust of your ossified brain.
The group that set it up included Labour supporters like me, Green supporters, and probably supporters of every party of the Left. It was set up using borrowed resources including my servers and those eventually started falling over.
We then set up a stopgap solution using more donated resources – obviously these were donated by supporters of the left. Some of those turned out using some resources that were donated to the NZLP, which were in turn being used by various activists. Could have as easily been from the greens, maori party, or the socialist workers. I was more interested in getting the server stable.
After whale and some of the more rabid wingnuts of the right started to try to use it as a weapon against Labour, and managed to sucker Bill English in. So I moved it back to my home server, and then to a linux server. The latter costs $70/month for a hosted system.
So frankly Bill English’s comments make me quite worried about his ability to handle issues. It could be poor advice, or it could that he simply doesn’t know much about programmers. In any case his comments were just stupid. The Labour Party was indirectly helping us – not the other way around. They certainly don’t run the site.
Now in the light of these facts – please have a look at the first part of your post, and you may be able to understand why I consider it to be complete bullshit.
March 14, 2008 at 10:52 am
BTW: you have a time problem at your server. I posted my previous comment at 0859 NZDT. It shows as being at 0759 the previous day (ie GMT) – it isn’t a lot of use on a blog based on NZ issues.