115. Three years in a leaky political boat

A large part of surviving in politics is about always having somebody to blame. If you fuck up, the only way you might survive is if you have somebody to take the fall for you.

So it's no wonder that politicians hate leakers, because the anonymity of the action means they have no target. Even if the information was still going to come out anyway, and it's all just a matter of inconvenient timing, political leaders love to launch inquiries that attempt to root out any traitorous insiders.

Both the Labour and National parties are on a rat hunt right now. Last week, the PM took time off from showing the world how a working mum does it to launch an investigation into how details of the confrontation that brought Meka Whaitiri down got out, while National leader Simon Bridges is still fuming about the slightly early release of his travel expenses.

It's all a sideshow, because these inquires never, ever actually find the culprit, (if they're lucky, they might come up with some suspects, but never any proof). But they do deflect the glare away from the substance of the leak. In the initial phase of the shitshow stirred up by a big leak, it doesn't matter who did it, only what the new information reveals. Everything else is posturing.

Down the line, when things have died down and everybody has examined the issues uncovered, the leaking can lead to big questions of political loyalty and party stability. But if somebody thinks it's worth leaking, usually at the risk of their own political career, finding out who it is should not be the greatest priority.

After all, moaning about it can make a situation so much worse, which Mr Bridges learned when the National Party started shaking itself to bits over his travel details. His choice of travel might not have been the greatest look, but he managed to make the stench of disloyalty smell even more pungent.

In the end, all they can really do is make snide remarks about the media itself, about how it is a moral failing to release information without going through the proper channels, which is the last refuge of people in power who find themselves in the spotlight.

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It should be noted that this kind of discontent with the news media doing what it does isn't confined to politicians, because the country's tertiary institutions have been making a complete PR hash of things themselves in the past week.

This was less to do with somebody leaking some report or document, and more with people going to the media with something a university would have preferred to keep quiet. Fuelled by some fine work at the country's student newspapers - which shows how vital they still are in the digital age - both Otago and Victoria Universities have been struggling to contain some troubling stories.

Victoria already feels like everybody is out to get it after the weird debacle of its name change, and the vice-chancellor lashed out at RNZ last week when the public broadcaster told the story of a student who was evicted from her accommodation the day after she tried to commit suicide.

Instead of just dealing with the issue, Vic Uni went after the semantics. In an extraordinary statement from the university, which also saw it moan that RNZ 'only gave them a few hours' to reply, it spent most of its time criticising the use of the word 'evict' in headlines and intros.

It was plainly obvious that was just the uni trying to cover its legal butt, and leaning heavily on the idea that 'eviction' was a strict legal definition, but Dani the student definitely felt like she'd been evicted, and it was her story the journos were trying to tell, not the brave tertiary institution's noble fight to make sure its legal ass was watertight.

Besides, RNZ is an equal-opportunities organisation, especially when it comes to pissing off the comms departments at the country's biggest tertiary institutions – Otago University also blasted the public broadcaster after the comms team sent the wrong draft email out when it was dealing with the fallout from the proctor's fundamentally illegal confiscation of bongs from student flats, and put out a press release designed to shame the press about it, even though the final email wasn't that much fucking different.

Getting these types of accusations are nothing new for journos. It's like picking up he phone to get blasted with a legal threat from Ian Wishart, or having Winston Peters openly sneer at you in public, it's just part of the life, and a good sign you're doing a good job.

You must be doing something right.

- Margaret Tempest/ Steve Lombard