We’ve had two polls out today, the latest Roy Morgan poll and the 3News Reid Research poll.

In the Roy Morgan poll, there’s a slump for National, down 3% to 45%. Despite National’s fall, there’s no good news for the Labour Party, who drop 1.5% to 26%. Instead, the news is overwhelmingly good for the Greens, who rise a huge 4.5% to 16%, their best Roy Morgan result in over two years.

For the remaining minor parties, NZ First may be down 0.5%, but they’re still on 6%, which would see them returned to Parliament. The Conservatives climb 2.5% to 3.5% (their highest ever Roy Morgan result), while ACT is up 0.5% to 1%. There’s bad news for the Maori Party (who drop from 1% to 0.5%), United Future (who don’t even register, having dropped 0.5%), Internet Mana (who drop 1% to 1.5%).

In the Reid Research poll, National…

 

Bloggers in the thick of election campaign? Image Credit: Against the Current

PLEASE NOTE: Sitemeter is playing up again making it impossible to automatically get the stats using the normal process. I have done a manual work around but it was still impossible to get the stats for a number of blogs that I list below. Maybe more bloggers will shift to StatCounter or other counter.

No stats could be found for these blogs:

There are now over 300 blogs on the list, although I am weeding out those which are no longer active or…

The latest One News Colmar Brunton poll has just been released, and there’s some interesting results there.

National drop 2%, down to 48%. That’s on top of the 2% they dropped in the mid-August Colmar Brunton poll.

On the left, Labour increased 2% to 28%, while the Greens went up 1% to 12%. That’s a 5% narrowing of the gap by a Labour/Greens alliance. Given the continued floundering by National in the wake of Dirty Politics, and the confident performance by David Cunliffe in the first televised leaders’ debate (which wasn’t covered by the polling window), Labour might be in line for a continued lift in subsequent polling.

For the minor parties, NZ First is up 1% to 6%, providing a clear buffer above the 5% threshold. And there’s a good results for the Conservatives, up 0.8% to 3.2%, although it’s still nowhere near the threshold.

Internet Mana slumps badly, down…

Yesterday, when the news of Judith Collins’ resignation broke, I asked where the Cameron Slater email had come from. It hadn’t been released by Whaledump, and it hadn’t featured in Dirty Politics. Instead, it had been sent to the Prime Minister’s office.

John Key clarified yesterday that the email was not sent anonymously. Instead, the email came from a person who was known to the PM’s office, but the identity of that person was not going to be released.

Well, we don’t know just whose hands the incriminating email passed through on its way through the Beehive to John Key and his staff, but according to the Sunday Star-Times this morning, the source of the email was Cathy Odgers aka Cactus Kate, Cameron Slater’s partner in crime:

Knowing Fairfax was investigating the hacked emails, it is believed Odgers (known by the blog name Cactus Kate) went through her own emails…

Cameron Slater’s email to Carrick Graham, Mark possibly-Hochin and one mystery identity may have sunk Judith Collins’ political career, but Slater is standing steadfastly by her. Reading a pre-prepared statement yesterday, and taking a few media questions, he denied that Collins had done what the email said she’d done.

So was he lying in the email? Apparently not. According to Slater, he was exaggerating the truth:

“Embellished is a good word. It’s better than a lie, isn’t it?”

It’s worth looking at precisely what Slater wrote about Judith Collins’ involvement in the conspiracy to undermine then-SFO director Adam Feeley:

“I also spoke at length with the Minister responsible today (Judith Collins). She is gunning for Feeley. Any information that we can provide her on his background is appreciated. I have outlined for her a coming blog post about the massive staff turnover and she has added that to the review of…

So, further to the Cameron Slater email that felled Judith Collins, there’s a particular line in the email that’s rather troubling:

I am maintaining daily communications with Jared Savage at the Herald and he is passing information directly to me that the Herald can’t run and so are feeding me to run on the blog.

Perhaps Jared Savage might like to explain what precisely he as a journalist was doing feeding information to Cameron Slater that Savage couldn’t publish himself. If the NZ Herald can’t use certain information in a story, it’s presumably because they’re worried about the legal consequences. So why would a reputable journalist then pass that information on to a blogger to use?

Let’s look at the Len Brown sex scandal story. It wasn’t something any mainstream media outlet was going to touch. Until it was all over the Whaleoil site, which meant that it was now…

Oravida and the mysterious Chinese border control official, the Simon Pleasants leak, Bronwyn Pullar’s Privacy Commission complaint, plotting to roll John Key after the election – the allegations just kept coming.

Now there’s the allegation that she conspired with Cameron Slater and others to discredit former Serious Fraud Office director Adam Feeley. This while she was Minister of Justice – the Minister in charge of the SFO.

She’s resigned as a Minister, and John Key has accepted that resignation. As with the Oravida saga, she believes that she’s the victim here (the vast left wing smear campaign continues…), and she’s resigning to focus on clearing her name. She’ll be staying on as MP for Papakura though, although John Key, in his press conference at the Beehive, made it clear that she could not expect a Ministerial role if National is re-elected (not at least until her name is cleared).

A 2011 email from Slater to Carrick…