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It’s hard to believe, I know. But the editorial in [yesterday’s] issue of the Sunday Star-Times is a worthy read. It’s the Kiri-thing again, but from a different angle. It points out the hypocrisy of complaining about ‘special treatment’ of ‘wahine Maori’ transgressions, pointing to the media furore when Gerry Brownlee inventively bypassed airport security (a Google news search shows articles spanning four months of coverage of that particular gaffe) and the slightly ridiculous Paddy Gower gangling sprint along a parliament hallway to quiz MP Chris Carter about allegedly buying flowers on a ministerial credit card.
Here’s the really interesting part: “We were played. Just as we knew we would be.” Played? By a government claiming to be “the most open and transparent” New Zealand has ever seen? Played by a prime minister trying to come across as honest and humble ‘Chris from the Hutt’. Editor Watkins writes of texting and asking for a simple yes or no answer: Was the Minister of Justice in police custody? She takes up the story:
Six hours before a reply? Six hours for a simple yes or no? Six hours to run the spin cycle. When faced with such cynical, self-interested manipulation, we are all entitled to make whatever we will of this sorry mob’s sob story. It could be as fake as their remorse, and as for the ‘reasoning’: a relationship break-up? Really, it’s the lady’s third in just 10 years: how bad could it be? Labour’s typical idiot-think trips them up yet again – shown up as shabby forked-tongue charlatans when the truth needs speaking.
They need to get gone: shot through to oblivion on the fly-blown horse they rode in on.
