Tova O’Brien is supposedly employed as Stuff’s Chief Political Correspondent. If her tea-making abilities are on a par with her writing abilities I would have grave reservations about hiring her to dispense the said liquid. If she were so employed it’s probably not too much of a stretch to imagine the cups, saucers, mugs, tea and coffee etc., all placed on the left-hand side of the trolley. Tova’s thinking would be: anything on the right would be frightfully unsteady while in motion and risk a spillage.
This is akin to how Tova views the coalition talks. She’s full of praise for her leftist love-buddy Jacinda Ardern, who evidently is far better at this sort of thing than the incoming Prime Minister and former CEO of Air New Zealand, Christopher Luxon. Tova’s take on Luxon is that his inexperience is letting him down and, even worse, he’s now humiliating himself. This is the same man who ran the North American arm of Unilever. Allowing for the fact that politics is not exactly a clone of how business operates, Tova must be in a state of total bewilderment as to how this dunderhead ever got to win the election.
What Tova is really doing is highlighting the narrow world she and the left live in: The world of tax and control. Control the poor pricks and tax the hell out of the rich pricks. It’s a simple world really and pretty much a reflection of those who inhabit it, both voters and politicians. The only problem is it’s a world which, as we have found out over the last six years to the country’s detriment, can’t deliver the goods. The policies and the politicians who make them are not up to the task.
Tova would have you believe that the man in charge of the coalition negotiations is not Christopher Luxon but Winston Peters. If Tova had any appreciation of the world outside the Wellington bubble she cohabits with other equally simple-minded journalists, she might understand why the negotiations are taking the time they are. Winston will have a far greater amount of respect for Luxon than he did for the slow-learning fish-and-chip wrapper who simply threw her arms out in a welcome of blind stupidity. She is the reason he now won’t go with Labour as he doesn’t tolerate liars.
This time around Winston will have to work a lot harder for what he wants, hence the time it is taking. It has nothing to do with Tova’s nonsensical idea of Luxon being inexperienced and humiliating himself. Both men are intelligent and will be fighting for their corner as you would expect. Winston has to accept Luxon holds most of the cards. Negotiations of this importance take time. Luxon will want to have a stable government in place. He will be wanting to avoid problems further down the track.
What is happening now is a reflection of how this government will operate. It won’t be the half-baked performance Tova’s friends in Labour produced. Tova would disagree. In a recent article, she wrote that while in coalition with Labour Winston made it clear he wasn’t to be trifled with but in hindsight it turned out to be nuthin (Tova’s spelling). Tova writes that ‘Ardern ran that coalition with an iron fist compared to this week’s frankly jaw-dropping display of simpering servitude from National’.
This is hilarious balderdash. The first question I have in regard to running the coalition with an iron fist is: when did Jacinda Ardern change her name to Nanaia Mahuta or Willie Jackson? It really grates that so-called journalists who write this sort of garbage expect intelligent readers to take them seriously. By writing such nonsense she is humiliating herself. Tova is proving once again she’s simply prostituting herself as a voice of the left: a ‘call girl’ for leftist doctrine.
It was obvious from reading her article what her end game was – try to show Winston was in charge and the other two, particularly Luxon, for whom she used insulting language, were his lapdogs by comparison. Her article reeked of tittle-tattle and assumptions and would fail NCEA level one. If this is the standard of journalism she aspires to, then Stuff is in danger of going the the same way as Today FM. The little lady in question will then, to use her own terminology, be f….d again. Stuffed as well.
