Seems it is the season for lies. Hot on the heels of Winston Peters being the first politician in years to be censured by Parliament for telling lies, John Key has been caught out with his own lies about his Transrail shareholding.
And it seems in trying to cover his lies, he has told another one this morning. Being interviewed by Paul Henry on Breakfast, Key stated:
Any question I asked would have been in the public domain really, er, any information I had was in the public domain.
Now, that is true of Parliamentary Written Questions, but the documents released by Michael Cullen reveal that John Key also made and received responses to Official Information Act requests about Transrail.
Now responses to Official Information Act requests are not in the public domain. The only people who would have known the contents of those responses would be Key and anyone he chose to send them to.
Seems he’s been caught with his pants on fire again.
g.blog 
That’s an interesting point Toad, except anybody can make OIA requests. That’s right, even an ordinary member of the public. Key did not have any special access to information (parliamentary written questions are published at the same time he gets the answers), and anybody can make OIA requests.
Of course they can Tim. That’s not my point.
My point is that on Breakfast this morning, John Key said that all the information he had was in the public domain.
But it wasn’t, because he had the information from his OIA requests, and that was clearly not in the public domain.
So he told another lie to Paul Henry this morning, on top of his attempt to lie to Fran Mold about the extent of his Transrail shareholding (and that was a silly lie to tell anyway, because the number of shares was not really an issue).
And imo John Key’s lack of ethical behavior over this issue puts him well on his way down to the sewer to join Winston Peters.
I like politicians who tell the truth. John Key and Winston Peters tell lies. Russel Norman doesnt, and he is pretty hot as well.
Can somone tell me if he’s got a wife of girlfriend? It would be sad if he’s gay though.
That isn’t true, Toad. Key said he didn’t have any information that wasn’t in the public domain: this related to information he received in his capacity as an MP. The accusation is that John Key used his position as National’s associate transport spokesman to enrich himself.
You know this accusation to be patently wrong. None of the information he obtained as an MP (in asking written questions to Ministers) was not available in the public domain. Yes, he made OIA requests, but any person can do that. Once an OIA request is granted, it can be publicly available.
Do you really think that if I make an OIA request, and it is granted, and somebody else makes that same OIA request, it won’t be granted? Do you think government agencies discriminate on who has made the request?
That’s a silly argument.
Tim, this is the Clinton defence. When former President Bill Clinton was caught out telling a lie in saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” he attempted to defend himself by inventing a technically arguable but curious definition of what “sexual relations” actually means that didn’t fit with the generallly accepted understanding of the term.
You are doing the same. It is technically arguable that information is “in the public domain” when it is released to someone under the Official Information Act. But the reality is that when John Key received the response to his OIA requests about Transrail, he was the only person outside Government who had that information.
So it was not in the “public domain” in the sense that the media had access to it or it could be found on a Government website with a search engine.
The fact that Key also held a significant portfolio of Transrail shares, and could have used the information gained from his OIA request to assist him in managing that portfolio before any other shareholder had access to it is an extremely bad look.
Toad, I repeat, since this seems to be difficult for you to understand. Any shareholder in Tranzrail had the right to use OIA requests to get information. Key was not privileged in this regard. It was not special access to information he had in his capacity as an MP.
You are trying to invent motive where there is none. I don’t know why you just don’t have the courage to come out and say that John Key was involved in insider trading, rather than crudely just alluding to it.
Tim, if his official information act requests were intended for the public, like any good politician, he would have press-released them. While technically in the public domain, the public was never informed by Mr. Key about what information he had obtained from his OIA requests. He may have been “technically factual”, but saying he’s told the truth is a stretch.