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MediaAugust 1, 2019

‘This lifejacket clashes with my tie’: Louis Litt’s Air NZ safety video, reviewed

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Air New Zealand released their new safety video this morning, featuring the legendary Louis Litt from legal drama Suits. Tara Ward buckles up to watch. 

Prepare yourself for the brace position, because Air New Zealand just dropped its latest safety video. In typical Air New Zealand safety fashion, it’s filled with famous faces like Cliff Curtis, George Gregan and Stan Walker, all reminding us how not to die on a plane in a variety of wacky, hold-onto-your-side ways.

But I object, your Honour, because there’s only one face I want to see telling me to buckle up and settle down, and that’s the glorious Louis Litt from legal drama Suits.

For some reason, they call him Rick Hoffman in this video, like that’s his name or something. You can’t fool me, because I’ve watched nine million episodes of Suits and I would swear on the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that this is Louis Litt in the flesh. He’s out the gate, he’s on the plane, he’s taking us to a whole new world where safety comes first. Our lives are in his hands, and I’ve never felt more secure.

Air New Zealand’s new video begins in a ‘top secret’ location called the Area 39 Research Facility, which is exactly what I imagine the Koru Club looks like. It’s 19 long seconds before we get Litt up, which is 19 seconds of people who are not Louis Litt sitting around a table yelling random words like “RUGBY!” and “AWESOME!” and “I BRUSH MY TEETH WITH COLGATE BECAUSE KIERAN REID TOLD ME TO!”

Fine, that last one was me. I love sharing with the group as much as I love those lollies they give out at the end of the flight.

The big news is that Air New Zealand’s so bloody crazy about rugby that they’re changing their name to ‘Air All Blacks’. I’m sorry, what? Is this the law now, do we all have to change our name? Until I see a plane with ‘Air Louis Litt’ on the side, I will not be part of this charade.

But Louis Litt is on board with it and wins me over by waving his Air New Zealand jazz hands at me through a fancy screen. He’s pretending to be the airline’s lawyer, just like I pretend to be Harvey Specter’s girlfriend and/or a royal duchess. As a bunch of sportspeople and airline staff discuss what the Air All Blacks safety video should look like, Louis is the only one talking sense. “I have to ask you crazy Kiwis not to have any rapping, and no complicated safety demonstrations.”

Oh captain, my captain. Send Steve Hansen back to Arnotts and dispatch Kieran Reid to install a Plumbing World dunny, because I want Louis Litt in control of this flight. Destination? Anywhere. His version of the safety video is deliciously brief. Listen to crew instructions, “or you’ll be fired”.

You know what Louis Litt would do on a plane? He’d recline his seat before take-off. His hand luggage would be too big to fit in the overhead locker, he’d give the death stare to any small child who dared to blink, and he’d take a giant fistful of lollies at the end of the flight. I’d like to see that in a safety video, thanks very much.

“If it’s the All Blacks Air safety video, why don’t we just use the All Blacks?” Hell’s teeth, it’s Lord Steve Hansen piping up again. “How about we let the fans do the safety video?” chimes in Kieran Reid, and honestly, that’s the last thing we need. When have the masses ever done anything sensible? The last thing you trusted us with was Suzy Cato’s future on Dancing With the Stars, and look how that turned out.

Louis disappears while Japanese rugby fans put an oxygen mask on a robot (handy info for those of us with tiny robot children), before returning as a vision in yellow and red, inflating before our very eyes. He’s saving lives with every blow of the pipe. “Just so you know, this lifejacket clashes with my tie,” he says, before tuning out the All Black jibber-jabber to watch funny videos of cats. Louis Litt is all of us, really.

He’s Moby Dick, and he just swam in your goddamn waters, Air New Zealand. Sure, it was no Richard Simmons masterclass, but in the words of Kieran Read with the clean teeth, “that’s awesome”.

Keep going!
WhaleOil

MediaAugust 1, 2019

RIP Whaleoil.net.nz (2005-2019): the blog that turned NZ politics feral

WhaleOil

The most notorious publication of the digital media era in New Zealand has closed down for good. Alex Braae writes the obituary to Whaleoil.

It is customary to say kind words about a person or entity when they leave this world forever. So what then can one say about Whaleoil, the blog which in 2014 described a victim of a car crash as a “feral”?

The project first started by Cameron Slater, which came to take on an outsize influence over New Zealand’s media and politics, has finally closed down. Slater himself is unwell after suffering a stroke, reportedly brought on by the stress of being sued by people he defamed in exchange for money.

Those who took over Whaleoil in his absence have wrapped it up. In the final post on the site, author SB (Slater’s wife, Juana Atkins) said that the community that was built around Whaleoil had now outgrown the original concept, and so it was now time to move on to a new venture. That has come in the form of TheBFD, a new platform which bills itself as “brash, focused and dedicated”. Whether or not it will live up to the more commonly understood meaning of the acronym remains to be seen.

Whaleoil was the focal point for a wider network of rightwing blogs, particularly during the heyday of political blogging over the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was the wilder, more aggressive outlet for talking points and political attacks from the right, in contrast to the more sober older brother-type role played by the still operational Kiwiblog, created by National aligned pollster David Farrar.

Slater’s writing style, like the political attacks it underpinned, was brutal and deliberately nasty. In 2014, Massey University awarded a line from Slater as their Quote of the Year, for saying “I play politics like Fijians play rugby. My role is smashing your face into the ground.”

His method, detailed in Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics, was in effect to use Whaleoil as a conduit for scandals to be seeded, so that they could subsequently be reported on in more mainstream publications. This made him an influential and useful contact for journalists to have, for two-way sharing of information. Slater’s work was also helped by his connections to a faction of the National party centred around Judith Collins.

Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater, 2014 (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)

At the time of its death, Whaleoil’s “about” page described itself as “the fastest-growing media organisation in New Zealand,” which was a bold claim given the decline of the platform’s influence following the release of Hager’s book. In Juana Atkins’s last post, she referred to “two works of fiction” published about the site, one of which was presumably Dirty Politics. The other would presumably be the recently released book Whale Oil by Margie Thomson, which covered the long-running legal battle between Slater and businessman Matthew Blomfield.

But in the past there was significant truth to that boast about Whaleoil’s rapid growth: it was true both of Slater’s readership and his own increasing political power. At times the site had hundreds of thousands of hits each month. On the back of the success of the blog, Slater himself used to make regular appearances in the mainstream media as a political commentator. He also won a Canon Media Award in 2014 for blogger of the year, and was listed on the Sporting Contacts site as a celebrity speaker for hire.

And his work really did signal a change in how political communication took place in New Zealand. It fitted into a brief window in which political blogs were important platforms, in between the decline of traditional media sources and the growth of social media as a way for politicians to reach their supporters directly.

After Dirty Politics, the role of Slater himself within the wider Whaleoil platform slowly diminished. Legal battles also took up much of his time, and a new cast of bloggers and commentators started to take over day to day writing for the site. Whaleoil began to have the unmistakable vibe of a platform where the tips had started to dry up; increasingly, it commented on already existing information, rather than bringing new information into the public domain. Even among other blogs, it appeared to be largely irrelevant, and was almost never cited or linked to. Other Slater ventures, including the $35 a month Incite newsletter, didn’t capture the imagination of the politics-watching public.

TheBFD looks set to continue the editorial direction of Whaleoil, leading this morning with regular features like “Face of the Day”, a post highlighting a negative Newshub story about the PM’s alleged refusal to answer questions about Ihumātao, and an opinion piece accusing the Green Party of “promoting racial division”. It seems to be going hard on the identity politics that have always been a major element of Whaleoil’s output, both as a framework for its writing, and as a concept to attack. In its latter years Whaleoil also leaned heavily into the more conspiratorial, nativist and hard-right sort of politics promoted by the likes of Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones.

It would be a surprise to see TheBFD ascend to the heights achieved by Whaleoil. Partly that is because the format of political blogging has fallen away in importance, and partly that is because the people around the platform now appear to have little influence among more mainstream organisations.

So farewell Whaleoil.net.nz. If it is to be remembered for anything, let it be for making politics a crueler, and more viscerally hateful arena. May we never see its like again.

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