Heather du Plessis Allan writes about the utter humiliation of the Greens at the hands of Darleen Tana.
After the first-term MP quit the party, they should have left Tana in Siberia, sitting in the Debating Chamber way up behind everyone else, with no one to talk to.
They should never have started down the path of compromising their principles to kick Tana out of Parliament.
Yes, that wouldn’t have been ideal. Or tidy.
It would’ve meant that Tana would be hanging around for two-plus years like a constant reminder of all their recent mistakes. Tana would be the most recent (but not only) below-average MP the Greens dragged in on their list.
Tana would’ve got a bit of media attention from time to time by saying something stupid or (at the extreme) joining some other party and hating on the Greens from there, and that wouldn’t have been ideal.
But it wouldn’t have been as bad as this. Although hindsight is a wonderful thing, and that is not what the Green Party did.
Instead, they picked a fight with someone who they clearly underestimated.
Darleen Tana is embarrassing the Green Party. The rookie is whupping them in front of us.
So far, it’s 2-0 to Tana.
NZ Herald
She is embarrassing them. Hubris, though, is always the undoing of politicians. Neither Marama Davidson nor Chlöe Swarbrick are even remotely equipped to deal with a strategy from one of the best practitioners of the dark arts of realpolitik on the left.
