Simon Bridges was on Breakfast yesterday morning and he looks strangely like the cat that’s licked the cream:
He is going on about chairing the new committee to provide oversight, a system that Trevor Mallard established. Mallard should rightly be given credit for establishing this committee.
But look at the attitude of Bridges. On the one hand, he is ebullient about his prospects despite the seriousness of events we are facing. On the other hand, he is also showing that he wouldn’t do anything different from what has already been done, while at the same time making it all about him.
What readers won’t know is that during the conference call to establish the committee, on Tuesday, he acted like a churlish and bombastic prat, demanding to know how many questions and supplementary questions he would get. His behaviour was self-centred and was all about what was in all this for him. There was no talk about assisting with anything, it was all about combative partisan politics. Sources say that other members of the House Business Committee were astonished and disgusted by his behaviour.
The new oversight committee members from National are likely to be Simon Bridges, Todd McClay, Paul Goldsmith, Mark Mitchell and Michael Woodhouse. A real boys club, and missing people who have ever been involved in an emergency like Gerry Brownlee with his Christchurch experience, or Judith Collins with her experience in solving the fuel pipeline emergency. “Toddy”, “Goldie”, and “Woody” have precisely zero experience with stressful emergencies. Only Mark Mitchell has any sort of experience and that is with having bullets zinging around his ears. The rest are journeymen and it shows.
Paula Bennett has dodged the committee because she is quietly positioning herself should Bridges make a pig’s ear of it, which is highly likely. Interesting too that Bridges has included the internal poll leaker in his top five.
Simon Bridges seems to live in a parallel universe where net favourables don’t exist or matter. He should be adopting Joe Biden‘s playbook. Do stuff all and let your opponent do their worst. There is a slight risk that they might get it right but in this kind of disaster economy-wide it is going to be near impossible to succeed on the first try. Instead, he is planning on causing chaos and mayhem for the Government. He signalled that with his trained seal speech in parliament yesterday:
What a travesty of a speech. Totally insincere, rehearsed and just a performance.
National’s putative leadership contenders Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye seem to be playing a blinder by not doing anything. Simon Bridges should do the same, it’s not all about him.
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