Golly gee, at this rate Martyn Bradbury will need to get a regular slot on Whaleoil. Martyn keeps calling out the left for their hypocrisy and he is absolutely correct in doing so.
Martyn rightly points out that if Treasury had just pulled a hacking manipulation this audacious while National was in power, the left would be screaming for heads to roll. Martyn suggests that the majority of the Left are ignoring what Treasury did out of a misplaced loyalty to Ardern and Robertson.
“It’s infantile.” His words, not mine. He quotes from Stuff:
Worse, it’s understood Treasury was advised by the National Cyber Security Centre – a branch of New Zealand’s cyber spooks – that what they were dealing with, was not a hack by any stretch of the imagination.
Treasury’s referral of the matter to police, after being advised of that, and its subsequent statement referring to the use of its website’s search bar as a “sustained and systematic hack” was a total waste of police resources and an example of extreme arse-covering.
It’s not even clear at this point, that Treasury’s claim it happened 2000 times is correct.
But its most egregious crime, for which Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf holds personal responsibility, is advising the offices of the Finance Minister and Prime Minister on Tuesday that it was a hack – knowing it wasn’t.
Makhlouf had already referred it to police at that point – removing the option of choice from Finance Minister Grant Robertson. But it also did him the favour of keeping him far enough away from the debacle that Opposition calls for his resignation are clearly a step too far.
Inexplicably, Makhlouf doubled down. He went on national airwaves the very next morning, with an overcooked metaphor likening the documents retrieval to entering a locked room and taking to a chest with a sledgehammer – completely false.
All signs suggest Makhlouf knew what had happened, and went ahead with his own version anyway.
Stuff
Martyn ties it up with the comment:
I’m not nearly as clever as my woke comrades on Twitter, but what is ‘beltway’ about Treasury knowing they weren’t hacked but then telling everyone they were? Shouldn’t we be incandescent with rage at such a manufactured deception by one of the most powerful Government Departments?
If Grant doesn’t sack him, Grant should be sacked. It’s as simple as that.
DailyBlog
However, it seems that everyone from Ardern down is doing the ostrich thing with their heads firmly in the sand hoping it will all go away. Just like the Labour Camp sex scandal or Karel Sroubek or a billion trees or 100,000 houses or Metiria Turei or ‘no strikes’ or ‘no lies’ or ….
