Two Kates

An anonymous staffer at The Standard has blogged on how some National MPs websites have been registered by parliamentary staffers.

Doh, of course they have been. An MPs website  is a legitimate parliamentary expense, so long as it does not solicit money, members or votes.

The issue with Labour is that they had a parliamentary staffer processing credit card transactions.

But even putting that aside, the anonymous staffer has also mixed up two seperate Kates. He has mixed up the former IT staffer and manager Kate Pullar with the former Secretary to Chester Borrows Kate Pullar. It is no surprise than an IT staffer would be the registrant for domain names. Having two Kate Pullars was a bit of a challenge, but to solve it I referred to the first Kate P as “Bob” of course 🙂

I was a registrant for dozens of MPs and parliamentary sites when I worked in Parliament. I registered them using my parliamentary e-mail address. Nothing wrong with that.

I sometimes helped the party people out (this was in the 1990s when this Internet thing was quite new to people) by registering some party sites for them – but I did so using my national.org.nz address from home, so it was clearly not in my capacity as a parliamentary staffer.

Ironically after the 1999 election, the PMs Office did not update the registration details for over a year. It was a source of amusement to be that I was the admin contact for both the PM’s Office and the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. I could have gone in any redirected all the Clark Government websites, but didn’t do so of course!