I received an email today alerting me to this Facebook group. [Edit: It appears the offensive Facebook page has now been removed. Mission accomplished!]
Now, I’m not on Facebook, and don’t know much about how it works, but Steve Pierson at The Standard reports that several significant National Party members are part of that Facebook page:
People like Emmy Gargiulo, National Secretary of Young Nats, Michael Mabbet, ex-Young Nat President, and youth activist/41 year old National Party pollster David Farrar.
Now, I’m not quite sure that Steve has got Natty people’s current roles exactly right, but there are clearly Natty people involved.
The group’s Facebook page begins:
This group is to encourage New Zealander’s to join the fight against hippies and social engineering by killing a kitten for every vote they receive this election, if we run out of kittens we will start using ducklings and hedgehogs.
For every vote the greens get, increase your carbon emissions, drive to the shops round the corner, turn on that extra light, club a seal, smack a child, make sure you ask for extra plastic bags at the supermarket.
Together we can punish the greens by using democracy against them, for every vote, do something to damage the environment in your own unique way! Let your imagination run wild!
Then some sicko called Jeremy posts this on the Facebook page:
You sick pricks – the lot of you, whoever you are.
31 October, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I’ve contacted facebook about this recommending that they ban the user and forward their details to the authorities if necessary.
The only comfort I can extract from this is the hope that this is a picture this person has found elsewhere on the internet, and that they didn’t do this themselves.
I just don’t have the words for this.
31 October, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I feel sorry for the people within the National Party who work hard to get across messages and make progress in areas which, regardless of politics, they feel are important- only to have their efforts undermined by foolish people like this.
There is a responsibility to report this to the NZ police- not in any attempt to censor the image, but to investigate whether it is evidence of a crime which has been committed. Unfortunately complaints cannot be submitted electronically (despite investigating an electronic medium)- http://police.govt.nz/contact/report-crime.html.
I’d encourage others to also forward their complaints to police.
31 October, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Well, that’s about standard for anything DPF gets his grubby mitts on – use underhand, disgusting, revolting methods to attempt to intimidate and undermine your opponents. In short, bullying.
As Ari and Dylan have posted, I believe this is an unacceptable use of the internet, which despite Russ Brown’s description as the ‘wild west’, does still have some minimum standards of decency.
I doubt that the Police would accept a charge against those responsible for this piece of offensive material, despite it possibly contravening the ‘offensive publications’ category of the Office of the Censor, simply because of the status of the journalists involved, whose employer (Fairfax) has already thumbed their collective noses at the law regarding publishing proscribed information, and showing contempt of Court, and not been prosecuted by the Police.
(The Court case was taken by the Crown Law Office & the Solicitor-General, instead.)
Once again, I am reminded of the key reasons why I associate with Green politics and Green Party members – that we do not acquiesce to the outrageous and unprincipled behaviour of unscrupulous others.
Vote for us, ‘cos those people are going to have some mighty pissed off grandchildren!
1 November, 2008 at 11:37 am
Sounds a lot like vote coercion, which is kinda against the point of a free election.
2 November, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Being invited to that group personally, the facts of it sickens me. The person who started this group is a National Wigram campaigner who thinks this sort of action is somehow right.
If that’s who National gets under their wing then I don’t want National anywhere near the government.
3 November, 2008 at 11:11 am
As a member of this group, I can say that I joined the group knowing that it was a joke. That picture sickens me, though, and it definately wasn’t on the page when I accepted the invitation. Obviously the problem with joining any group is that you are tarred by association. Worse with facebook, where you receive an invitation to a group with a mildly amusing name and click “ok”. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of everything the group stands for.
However that said, this is making mountains out of molehills, given that the “National connection” is to an office holder and former office holder of a policy advisory group to the party, and a pollster for the party. That’s pretty tenuous.
3 November, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Killing kittens? Didn’t some scumbags already start drowming deer in Lake Okaitana in Rotorua?
3 November, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Thankyou for your reassurance, although I have serious questions about why you’d want to even talk to someone who thinks this type of “joke” is appropriate. And that comes from someone who’s visited /b/
I’m glad that to some extent you didn’t know what you were getting into.
And james? I’d seriously be shouting from the hills right now if anyone like that supported the Greens that they don’t speak for the rest of us. That’s more what disturbs me- that nobody from National would pay enough attention to decry this type of behaviour and say it’s not what they’re about. Apparently they’re too busy making up fake headlines