Mayor’s claims scrutinised

Politicians the world over have turned to social media to speak directly with voters and supporters. There are obvious pros and cons to this approach. On the one hand, they can communicate as often as they like and interact in an instant.

On the other, their words aren’t subject to scrutiny before publication and can charitably be described as a one-sided interpretation of events.

A video of almost seven minutes posted by Horowhenua mayor Michael Feyen to his Facebook page on Friday falls into this category.

Feyen uses Facebook to publish videos of council events and his travels throughout the district, but he’s also taken to criticising press coverage of him. Coverage he deems critical to him is biased. Anything he broadly agrees with is praised. Such black-and-white distinctions are unlikely to hold true all the time.

And so it was on Friday when Feyen discussed a

Manawatu¯ Standard story about his unsuccessful attempt to take the Horowhenua District Council to the Disputes Tribunal. Feyen was attempting to claw back money for reports he paid for into the structural integrity and weather tightness of the council building.

The tribunal ruled there was no reason for a full hearing into the matter because Feyen’s claim had no grounds to proceed and there was never an agreement that the council would meet the reports’ costs. ‘‘What really gets up my nose, though, this is just a trifling thing – the lowest court in the land,’’ Feyen said in his video.

It’s true the tribunal deals with small disputes, but a mayor taking a claim against his own council is undoubtedly newsworthy.

The public interest is such that we would have reported the outcome no matter what it was.

Feyen continued: ‘‘There’s been so much media around this yet there was so little media about years of email interceptions from not only myself, Cr [Ross] Campbell, numerous organisations, other people.’’

The Standard has published two stories about the tribunal matter, on pages 3 and 2 of the newspaper.

The email interceptions to which Feyen refers were an affront to democracy when, between 2011 and 2017, the council blacklisted certain email addresses, including one belonging to Feyen when he was a councillor. Until a policy change, emails from these addresses would only be sent on to their intended recipients after council chief executive David Clapperton or a staff member had read them under the guise of stopping abusive messages from reaching staff. This potentially meant council staff were viewing correspondence between elected officials and constituents.

On top of 18 news reports in 2017 and 2018, including seven appearing on the front page of the

Standard, we ran six editorials highly critical of the practice. I wrote one concluding Clapperton’s position was untenable and another I wrote last year called out the council for, in my opinion, issuing a press release under-selling the Ombudsman’s conclusions about what went on.

In Friday’s video, Feyen also said we’d barely reported the release of an Ombudsman’s report into Official Information Act practices at the council. Our report ran on page 1 of the Standard. Ironically, in a June Facebook video, Feyen praised our coverage.

He’s clearly happy to have his say over Facebook, but it’s incumbent on him to do so responsibly.

Twisties have this annoying thing where they leave brutal and damning evidence every time you indulge.

attend.

That’s not the bit to love, by the way.

It’s that when you have lots of birthday parties to attend, you have lots of birthday food to eat.

And when you have lots of birthday food to eat it generally – but not always – means there are certain non-negotiables offered among the annual spread.

All too often there are murmurs around the typical favourites found at most Kiwi kids’ parties – you’ve got your standard sausage roll, fairy bread with just the right white bread-thick butterhundreds and thousands covering, your little red cocktail sausages with lashings of tomato sauce at hand.

Sometimes there’s even an array of animal biscuits, some token cucumber strips and hummus and the ol’ Kiwi onion dip with chips, washed down with Just Juice.

But there is one party food I feel doesn’t get enough praise.

Almost any good party will feature them, except maybe the gluten free wary among us, but I’ll get to that later.

There are so many reasons to love this party food. It’s easy to prepare (open bag, pour into bowl or if you’re a real rebel, just leave in the bag and serve as is), adds colour to the table (hello chemical cocktail of random things) and almost no-one can say no to this cheesy snack (I dare you to).

I am, of course, talking about Twisties. Twisties are a superior birthday party chip. If you’re a grown-arse adult standing next to a massive bowl of Twisties, I dare you to not reach on in there and grab a handful. It can never be one