Simon Bridges and Winston Peters had a little sledge-fest at the end of Question 1 yesterday:
Parliament was fairly subdued during its first day with MPs in the physically distanced debating chamber making their points without many interjections.
This comity appeared to have faded on Tuesday.
As Question One finished deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters yelled to Bridges across the chamber, asking him what National’s pollster David Farrar was telling him.
A recent leaked poll from Labour’s pollster UMR, conducted for its corporate clients, had National on just 29 per cent – a figure Bridges rejected as wrong.
Bridges replied to Peters to tell him that Farrar’s polling indicated Peters’ party NZ First would not survive September’s election.
That might appear, on the surface, to be a technical win to Simon Bridges, and to be fair to him the reporting looks that way, but Winston fired back “Dead in the Water”.
Personally I think Winston missed a trick.
He could have destroyed Bridges with a simple but devastating comment like “Prove it, Sunshine” or even better, but somewhat longer “Release the polls so your caucus knows what the real numbers are.”
Looks like it’s going to be a fun election.
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