Mike Williams: A week is a long time in politics

Mike Williams

IT WAS a week in politics which showed that a week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson was once misquoted as saying.
Hawke's Bay people whose mortgage interest payments will be rising should pay attention to Labour's monetary policy announcement.
At present when inflation threatens, all the Reserve Bank can do is to put up interest rates. The idea is that if we have less to spend, then prices won't rise as fast.
Inflation isn't a problem at the moment but there's one exception and that's Auckland property prices.
The average price of a house in the not flash suburb of Auckland where I live has increased by more than $100,000 in the past year. In the same period, the free QV website will tell you that Hawke's Bay house prices have flatlined or even fallen slightly.
It doesn't seem fair that the rest of New Zealand should pay for one city's out-of-control property market, but that's what we've had to endure for years.
Labour's proposal would make KiwiSaver compulsory and increase contributions to suck out spending power when necessary to control inflation.
This would at least mean less padding of banks' profits (and the wallets of foreign exchange dealers) when prices need controlling; and we'd eventually get our money back.
In the same week National lost a Minister and we were reminded of the dark art of data mining.
Some years ago, an aspiring American politician saw his promising career abruptly ended when a picture of him driving his car was published in his local newspaper.
Almost immediately a political opponent tipped off the media that the candidates' driver's licence had expired.
Unlicensed driving is a serious offence and the candidate went quietly.
This kind of political activity is called data mining and New Zealand politicians are not immune from such attacks as we saw three times in just one week.
Labour leader David Cunliffe, former National Party minister Maurice Williamson and a NZ First MP, Denis O'Rourke, were all targets for the data-miners.
With the digitisation of more and more of New Zealand's records, many new sources of information are becoming available to those seeking to trip up public figures.
Cunliffe had been led to believe that his grandfather won a medal for bravery during World War I, but the data miners found the medal went to a great uncle with the same surname.
I have some sympathy for Cunliffe.
It's nearly a 100 years after the event and, when my sister looked up our grandfather's WW1 record, she discovered that he'd been in harm's way for less than a fortnight before copping the wound that sent him home.
No one in the family was aware of the brevity of his service.
Pakuranga National MP Maurice Williamson's woes were compounded by the data miners at TV3.
Having admitted a lapse of judgment when he sought police advice on the status of charges against a wealthy Chinese donor who he'd assisted with a citizenship application, Williamson denied that the man was a "friend".
He admitted only to dining with the man in large groups on a few occasions.
Campbell's researchers had excavated two publicly available nuggets.
First, that the donor, Donghua Liu, was not resident in Williamson's Pakuranga electorate.
This in itself was not too harmful to Williamson, although it's unusual for an electorate MP to go in to bat for someone else's constituent.
TV3 had also been rummaging through property ownership records and discovered that Mr Donghua owned a property at the Coromandel beach resort of Pauanui, right beside Williamson's own property.
The MP was forced to concede that he'd put Donghua on to the house's availability, and stayed there while doing some handyman work.
Still not a "friend"?
The most complex bit of data mining was around the relationship between O'Rourke and his parliament-funded employee.
Electoral Roll, Valuation Roll, and Christchurch City databases were accessed and compared to show that the employee shared a seemingly undivided house with the MP.
O'Rourke denied any kind of partner relationship with the employee, not allowed by Parliament's rules.
My pick is that with vast historic databases preserved for all time, someone will ultimately be brought down by the data miners.
In particular, public figures should make sure that their electoral roll address is what they use when buying a property, registering a company or a car, getting married or one of many now discoverable acts.
Watch this space.
Mike Williams is a former Labour Party president who grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is a director of Auckland Transport and CEO of the NZ Howard League.