Slogans rule OK?

As a rule, Watchers take the pronouncements of Wanganui’s propaganda chief Michael Laws with a large pinch of salt. But when he walks out of yet another secret meeting about his grand plan for the heart of Wanganui and tells the Chron that hearing the projected cost would "scare people" we’re inclined to believe him.

The upgrade is likely to cost many millions. Mr Laws said hearing the full amount would scare people and Wanganui District Council’s finance team was looking at ways the work could be done in stages and paid for over 50 to 60 years. We think it can be afforded without a significant rise in rates.

The upgrade could include big changes, such as the demolition of the museum, the library moving to a central place, drastic alterations to Majestic Square and reconnecting the park with the Whanganui.

And when he reveals that his "communications strategy" to soothe the scared populace into meek submission will be "slogan driven", we just know the referendumb rollercoaster has already left the platform, with Mickey Mayor at the controls.

Laws is also making sure the EXCLAMATION MARK!!!! features prominently in his Heart hard-sell! Taking his cue from the TV advertorials in which peddlers of everything from eternal youth potions to home gym equipment try to part worried Watchers from their hard-earned cash in the wee small hours, he tells us:

...the slogan for the public information campaign on the Heart project – leading to the proposed referendum in mid-2007. It is – 'It's your money, your city, your future ... your choice.'

Be prepared, Watchers, to be assailed by this exquisite piece of spin at every turn because it will help take your fellow citizens’ minds off what lies below as the Vision roller coaster plunges Wanganui into their bottomless debt lake.

Crs Higgie and McKinnon are already squealing with delight and hanging on to MayorMichael for dear life.

HIGGIE: Please be part of this, as it's very important for our generation, as well as for our grandchildren and generations to follow. Mark October 26 on your calendar and be there if you can! Best wishes for the school holidays and the joys of spring! (Exclamation marks are called 'screamers' in the journalism trade for good reason - Ed)

DOTTY: There are various options for the library, one option for the Gallery, two for the museum and one for the War Memorial Hall. The concepts are very exciting and it would be a wonderful achievement to commence a revival project for our cultural centre.

Watchers have been observing new and very pleasing developments as Mr Maslin’s formerly withered organ stiffens its resolve to ask questions and knock the stuffing out of mayoral spin. The palpable disgust at Mickey’s bout of ratings-inspired verbal diarrhoea about Tonga has rippled through Wanganui and well beyond. Even Mickey’s formerly loyal lieutenant Rangi Wills was moved to expose a little mayoral lie in an item in the Chron last week and is making no secret of his wavering affections for his commander in chief.

So Watchers were left shaking their heads in sadness and wonder at today’s front page riverfront propaganda exercise by the lovely Mary Bryan who allowed Mickey to get away with claiming a referendumb mandate for a $1.5 million project that started out as just $260,000 in ratepayer spend.

But not to worry, Watchers, because the Chron is also suffering from an acute bout of Silly Slogan Syndrome with the revelation that Fat Newspapers are Bad!!!! Lean Newspapers are GOOD!!! But wait, there's more!!!!

"SINCE WHEN WAS FAT A GOOD THING? We’re lean, trim, healthy and full of ESSENTIAL daily NEWSTRITIONAL value.

Desperately attempting to match Media Mickey at his own game, the Chron’s very own sloganeers then urge Wanganui-ites to GET THEIR DAILY WORKOUT with the Chron because they LOVE THIS PLACE, LOVE THIS PAPER.

As the Daily Workout lands with a wee thud at letterboxes throughout the River City we’d suggest it will be judged on whether people like Mary Bryan (and soon-to-be senior reporter John Maslin) ask the hard questions and let readers in on the secret that mayoral propaganda has only a fleeting relationship with the truth. Beside that test, the fact that its paltry pages don’t even have the thermal rating required of fish and chip wrapping is neither here nor there.

Comments on this post are now closed.

Where there's smoke ...

Speculation has been mounting about where Michael Laws may seek further fame and fortune after he gets the big thumbs down by Wanganui’s increasingly disgusted voters next year, and gets the flick from his various media slush funds.

As one Watcher has pointed out, Touchdown bossette Julie Christie, who controls the purse strings for great big dollops of Creative New Zealand money - and hasn’t been slow to funnel lots of it Mickey’s way - isn’t going to be at all happy with his poisoning of the Pacific well that she draws on for her trashy Treasure Island ventures.

No one gave a toss while Michael Laws was boring the people of Wanganui with complaints of how he’d picked up hives during his short-lived visit to Tonga in February 2005 with Christie’s ill-fated Celebrity Treasure Island expedition (though his fellow celebs had decided with alacrity that Laws himself was a source of intense irritation and put him on the boat at the first opportunity).

But now that he’s well and truly bitten the hands that feed him, Christie and her crew, with or without Mickey, will be about as welcome on any Pacific island as David Irving would be at a Passover in Jerusalem.

Over at Radio Slide, desperate Mickey still has three weeks of the current radio ratings survey period to go and that means more of the same offensive racist ageist diatribes in hopes of rescuing himself from death by ratings. No sooner had the media started to lose interest in his war on Tonga than he opened up a new front by proposing extermination of dementia sufferers in hopes of provoking sufficient outrage to get him back in the New Zealand Herald.

Just another step, apparently, in the eugenics and cleansing policies he’s cribbed from his study of Germany circa 1944.

Interestingly, the current six-week survey period ends on Friday October 13 and we’re predicting that will indeed be a Black Friday for Mickey. By the unhappiest of coincidences that’s also exactly one year ... 12 months ... 365 days till the voters of Wanganui get to tick the only box that matters.

Which brings us, back, dear Watchers to idle speculation about life after Wanganui for Michael Brian Laws. We wouldn’t be the first to wonder if he’s spent the last year cultivating the National Front and other bottom-feeders as a prelude to launching a new political party in the mad hope of making his way back to Wellington and completing his unfinished business at the heart of the body politic. But that wouldn’t come cheap and at the very least he’d need a filthy rich backer with a penchant for Mickey’s style and his politics.

Coincidentally, the fax machine at The Cave chugged to life and out popped a copy of the love letter from the master of the offensive bon mot, Sir Bob Jones, that was excerpted in the Chron at Mickey’s urging. While the Chron was happy to quote Jones’s views on where Wanganui’s flag should fly, it apparently was rightly squeamish about what followed. In deference to the sensibilities of Watchers everywhere we’ll just say that Jones’s speculation on the predilections of Tonga’s new king would not have been appropriate for the front page of a family newspaper.

Reminded about the way Jones bankrolled the short-lived New Zealand Party in an attempt to oust Muldoon in 1984, The Cave's resident francophiles wondered if Jones’s billet doux to his man in Wanganui could be the start of a new roman politique.

Given Jones is now enjoying a minor bout of television celebrity of his own, on Touchdown’s home-grown version of Dragon’s Den, we even wondered if Mickey might be preparing to line up before the dragons to make a pitch for some of Jones’s millions:

MICHAEL LAWS: I’m not going to waste my time introducing myself, Dragons, because you all know what an absolute fascist bastard I am. I just want money, loads of it ... millions in fact, for another assault on Wellington. In return you’ll receive absolutely nothing but I’ll get my rocks off sticking it to Clark and her PC nancy boys and girls in the dirtiest erection election campaign the world has seen.

BOB JONES: This one is mine, Dragons, all mine. Michael, you are absolutely right in showing clear-thinking on this matter (reaches for huge wad of cash). Dragons, this boy and I are going to make sweet music together. (unaware of the irony, they embrace in a clinch that would make Ian Wishart’s day - and Investigate’s front page - and stroll off the set hand in hand).

Update (6 pm): Over at Mirage Media, a certain irony has been noted:

Laws - who I heard say earlier this year on his Radio Live talkback show that Tonga is a nation of inbreds - believes King Tupou is a despot and for that reason has ordered his city council staff not to lower the New Zealand flag to half-mast to mark his death. A despot - isn't that a man in power whose rulings, no matter how arcane, are permitted on the strength of his celebrity and the fear he invokes in his subordinates?

Mirage also notes several examples of incompetence and foolishness at Radio Slide. Can they be long for this world?

Mickey makes an ass of himself

LawsWatch got it wrong.

We'd always held that the Mayor's lycra-clad pavement-pounding was due to to nothing more than simple vanity - the typical response of an aging roue to the vicissitudes of age. We were wrong.

Clearly, the hours spent negotiating the often cracked footpaths of Wanganui (who needs to walk safely when we'll all soon be able to swim further?!) have but one purpose - the reduction in size of the Mayoral derriere, thus facilitating more effective ass-covering.

After all, when one is as prone to bouts of discursive dysentry as is Michael Laws, then protecting the source of the outbreak becomes critical. Hence the "small target" strategy.

If we may be forgiven for extending the analogy for one more paragraph as Watchers gag over their evening gruel, Mickey has spent the past week digging himself an ever-deeper latrine while at the same time filling it.

First, he attempted to cite everyone from the CIA to... well, himself... to justify his "fat brown slug" comments. Apparently half a day pretending to be a "celebrity" on a TV show makes one an authority on the region in which the show took place. On that basis, winner of the first "Survivor" Richard Hatch ought to be being cited as an expert on Malaysia rather than cited in multiple counts of charity fraud.

When that didn't work, there was the usual spray in the Sunday Star Times in which he accuses Tonga of practising:

"...institutionalised sexism..."
What, like the regular abuse of female staff, to the extent of allegedly calling one a "useless c___"?

"...the cowering of the independent media..."
As opposed, say, to the fiercely independent River City Press and the Chron?

"...and the domination of the cabinet by royal appointees."
Step forward, Sir Nigelwho, Spin Fairly Mk II et al.

No, that wasn't going to wash either. So the latest Mayoral e-coli is classic Lawsian spin, claiming to have "learned a few lessons" while making it plain he's done no such thing. "Some places are so insular, that if you criticise their leader then you insult the whole country", Mickey marvels. Well, duhhh. Remember the time your mentor and role model Rob Muldoon called US President Jimmy Carter a "peanut farmer", Mickey? And all those "insular" Americans - including those opposed to Carter - took umbrage?

It's basic human nature - we rally round our leaders in times of crisis, and while we may delight in insulting them ourselves, woe betide the "outsider" who does so. Which explains why Bush's approval ratings stayed as high as they did for as long as they did and why Joe Lieberman no longer has political career. But so much of people's basic humanity seems to escape Mickey's understanding, for reasons we will leave it to the experts to speculate upon.

The fact that Michael Laws, Mayor-of-someplace-most-people-have-never-heard-of, draws parallels between himself and Pope Benedict might be something else they could take into account.

Mickey's second, implied, defence - that he's merely standing up for his oppressed Tongan brothers and sisters - doesn't stand up to much scrutiny either. Yes, Tongans are generally poor, and the distribution of income shows much greater disparity than amongst New Zealanders. But it's not that different to all Pacific Islanders. We await his attacks on the leaders of the Samoan, Cook Islands, Tokelaun, Fijian and Niuean peoples. Or his efforts to redress these inequities. Guess which road he's most likely to take.

Important as it is, don't let the Tongan tizz distract you (as it's possibly meant to) from the rest of the e-coli. Wanganui Gas - and today's top secret meeting thereon - gets a passing mention. It is, Mickey regally informs us, a "very important meeting and will have a great deal of influence upon the financial future of our district".

Although these machinations are of "of some commercial delicacy", we can presumably rest assured that Dotty and the Dwarves are more than capable of grasping the full long-term fiscal ramifications of whatever secret proposal they're being asked to consider. And that the King of Tonga will make a posthumous visit to Wanganui to promote the benefits of Xenical.

As the gas leaks, we'll be sure and keep you posted.

Comments on this post are now closed.

King of the (Ozark) Mountain

Noam Chomsky has defined a rogue state as "a state that defies international laws and conventions, does not consider itself bound by the major treaties and conventions… in fact anything except the interests of its own leadership, the forces around the leadership that dominate policy".

Remind you of anyone? Yesterday Michael Laws used the death of Tonga’s King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV to further push Wanganui into rogue statedom. Sadly, the King had the bad timing to expire at the start of a six-monthly radio ratings survey period and that was the signal for Wanganui’s mayor to spew forth a masterful piece of hate-filled media grandstanding rivalled only by his hysteria about patched gang members that won him prime time attention during the last ratings period in February.

In New Zealand flags on government buildings were lowered to half mast, except in Wanganui where mayor Michael Laws refused and called the king a "brown slug" who had ruled a corrupt country. - Dominion Post

Mr Laws used his Radio Live show to say the Wanganui flag would not be lowered for "a big brown slug". “We honour people who have contributed to the community or the nation," he told the Herald. "Not someone who has been a despotic beneficiary of the New Zealand tax-payer." - New Zealand Herald

Meanwhile, back at LawsWatch, an anonymous commenter with an uncanny knack of sounding exactly Michael Laws has advised Watchers thusly:

The Tongan royal family have been ripping off the Tongan people for generations and its your MAYOR that's the problem? Time to get some perspective, people - which your mayor seems to have.

Which prompts the question … Just what perspective does "our mayor" seem to have? The perspective of a minor media "celebrity" with a cowed and stupid council majority, more than a few screws loose, and a big ratings problem, perchance?

Six months down the track from Radio Live’s last survey bomb, Auckland’s media moguls are all aquiver at the start of a new ratings period, running till October 13th. Heaven knows what it has cost Wanganui’s ratepayers, but Mickey’s famous gang patch bylaw stunt did nothing to stop the bad news for his little earner Radio Dive, with the February survey showing it haemorrhaged 12,000 listeners and won the New Zealand Herald title of "big loser". We’re predicting there’ll be more bad news when the latest results are released on October 27th.

So, Watchers, welcome back to Wanganui showtime where a mayor who is campaigning to attract intelligent, qualified medical people to the city goes out of his way to portray Wanganui as a red-neck paradise awash with ignorance and racism and rivalled only by a few charming little hamlets deep in the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains.

It’s all been a bit much for former military man and flag-lowering devotee Cr Don McGregor who once did a tour of duty in Tonga, but we shouldn’t expect Mickey’s loyal sychophants to be much bothered by what might look to sane reasonable people to be an outburst sure to bring the city and its council into disrepute. As perspicacious Watcher and regular commenter Bearhunter has quite rightly pointed out, such mayoral obscenities are protected by precedent, aka the Code of Conduct ruling last year by said mayoral sycophants:

"Mickey said these things while NOT being mayor of Wangers, which should be clear to all those mental giants who listen to talkback," says Bearhunter. "I know he did this because Dotty (speaking of mental giants) told me so, as she told everyone after the Code of Conduct fiasco. SO that's all right then, there is no way ANYONE could think that the Mayor of Wanganui was actually speaking as the Mayor of Wanganui..."

Of course, the irony of this can’t be lost on Cr Don McGregor whose hand shot up with military precision, along with those of Rangi Wills and the diVisioners in support of this bizarre theory advanced by Michael Laws in his defence.

So not only does Wanganui’s Mickey Mouse Mayor have the endorsement of a majority of councillors to launch attacks like these, he’s also able to (and does) cite their approval for the flag-lowering policy he introduced in the wake of the song and dance last year following the demise of King Faud of Saudi Arabia, who apparently topped the list of Middle Eastern despots identified by the Michael Laws Institute for Democracy, Transparency and Openness.

He wasted no time using the WDC website to bash the council with its own flag-raising policy, probably in anticipation of being strung up by McGregor et al at tomorrow’s Strategy meeting (where chairpillock Dot McKinnon will doubtless again fall off her chair in a fit of giggling as she did during the last mayoral rant about flags and despots - when "Mayor Michael" talked about the person Dotty described as "Professor Phard" in her breathless report in the River City Press). We hope she’s got her laughing gear in order for tomorrow because it’ll be her job at tomorrow’s meeting to shut down any debate about the latest outbreak of mayoral dysentery.

Here he is on the WDC website today trying to explain that his "personal views" really have nothing to do with where the flag flies on the council’s mast because it all comes down to "policy":

"I have strong personal views, having recently visited Tonga, as to the non-democratic and corrupt political structure of that country. However, whatever those views, the King's death did not meet council policy.

"Personally, I think we demean the whole process if we simply lower the flag every time a leader of a non-democratic nation dies. Tonga is the Zimbabwe of the South Pacific and we can only hope that the new monarch will allow his people the economic and democratic ability to escape their relative poverty."

Mr Laws said that he had been inundated with calls from throughout the country supporting his stance but reiterated that he was simply employing existing council policy."

A neat little rationale that overlooks just one awkward fact - a Mayor acting on policy would not then jump on talkback radio and claim he acted on prejudice. Unless, of course, he took his citizens, and his listeners, for utter fools.

And even the "policy" argument overlooks one thing. The King is dead, as was "Professor Phard". While supposedly in honour of the deceased, the flag-lowering is also a mark of respect for the nation that has lost a leader. One that might not be to Mickey's liking, but their leader nonetheless. But we're sure the thousands of Tongans in New Zealand understand it's just politics. Oh, and ratings.

Meanwhile, a Watcher has reported that a Wellington-based acquaintance responsible for a significant government programme available to local authorities let slip recently that the organisation’s limited resources and limited time wasn’t likely to be wasted on any council run by "an idiot like Michael Laws". Rogue state, indeed!

Comments on this post are now closed.

Fool me twice, shame on me

Just whose hand is up whose bum?

It's alright Watchers, you haven't stumbled upon the online edition of some odd fetish magazine, we're talking in terms of muppets.

We've already told the tale of Neil Kirton, former Associate Health Minister in the NZ First / National coalition government, whose career was eventually derailed by Machiavellian Mickey's meanderings.

Now it seems he, like his mentor, has slunk off into the far reaches of local government. Perhaps Mickey and Neil are the type of people who are convinced that someone, somewhere, desperately needs pint sized despots to tell them what to do.

Anyway, Kirton has all but disappeared from view, being either unable or unwilling to sink to Mickey's depths and cling to the sort of sad "celebrity" which comes from having people chuckle over their newspapers at your misogynist xenophobic clubland rantings.

Supposedly, when Kirton crashed and burned from the heights of Cabinet to the depths of Hawkes Bay, the association between he and his former mentor cooled somewhat. But can it be coincidence that he and Mickey are having the same fevered dreams?

While Napier City Council has unanimously decided to drop plans to cut councillor numbers from 12 to 10 following their hearing of submissions which were universally opposed to the move and coming to the realisation that cutting numbers would not reduce costs, the Hawkes Bay Regional Council is squabbling amongst themselves. Well, squabbling with one fractious member who wants to chop numbers - none other than Neil Kirton.

Council chairwoman Eileen von Dadelszen is trying to point out that whether there is nine or six councillors will not make any difference because "cutting their number will only mean fewer councillors are paid more".

"The only savings which can be guaranteed by having fewer councillors are for such things as travel reimbursement, agenda production and mail outs, meeting costs and training, and conference expenses", she says, which amount to an estimated $20,000 a year. So Hawkes Bay doesn't even save the cost of a dunny.

But Kirton, who wants to cut Hawkes Bay's democracy by a third, swears that reduction will save ratepayers $120,000.

Mrs von Dadelszen said Mr Kirton's comments on salary payments to councillors "had clouded the debate over the representation review" which we think is a polite way of saying he's fibbing worse than... well, worse than Mickey.

"The opportunities exist to reform local government in Hawke's Bay and cutting politicians is just the start," he says, no doubt clicking his heels together as he surveys a map of Poland... sorry, Napier and Hastings. If he continues following Mickey's plan, next to go will be superfluous employees such as those who actually carry out manual labour, to be replaced by the really useful lieutenants like spin fairies and lawyers.

Where could he have got these ideas from, let alone the means of selling them to a population which simply hates politicians and thinks any scheme to cut them back must, by definition, be a good thing? We just hope he remembers what happened last time he adopted a strategy authored by Mickey. After all, he hasn't got much further to fall.

Comments on this post are now closed.