Winston Cries Wolf

I have been thinking about cliches a bit recently, having read bygeorge’s excellent articles on the subject, but watching Winston use his parliamentary privilege to accuse a whole new raft of people of invading his privacy over his superannuation overpayments three years ago, the obvious cliche comes to mind. Winston is ‘crying wolf’. This matter has been through the courts, and it was found that Winston’s privacy was breached, but no conclusive evidence was found as to who the actual leaker was. As a result of being unable to tie the matter conclusively to anyone in particular, Winston has now named a number of other people, previously unmentioned in the case, that he claims he is now going to sue.

Interestingly, the person at whom his finger is most decisively pointed is Rachel Morton, former partner of ACT’s David Seymour. There is, of course, good reason for Winston to suddenly start going after ACT. After indicating that he would look after gun owners with the second tranche of gun laws, Winston let them down, which has probably resulted in many of those gun owners moving to the ACT party. This has no doubt been costly to Winston and is likely contributing to his party’s poor polling, but if you make promises and then don’t keep them, as Winston often does, you are going to pay the price eventually.

The crazy thing about his latest claims is that he targets people who simply do not play ‘dirty politics’. David Farrar, John Bishop (Chris Bishop’s father) and David Seymour are known for being straightforward, honest political players. Jordan Williams has nothing to gain from this; the Taxpayers Union is not focused on pulling down individuals, it is focused on stopping wasteful government spending. There is something of a scattergun approach to this; catch everyone in your sights and you might get the real culprit eventually. Maybe.

Chris Bishop, of course, immediately pointed out that Winston had done this to take away focus from the story about him arranging for two of his friends to go on a taxpayer-funded trip to Antarctica, which had broken earlier the same day. This is fair comment, and of course, is damaging to Winston. The timing of this outburst in parliament gives considerable credence to that claim, but the media gave coverage to Chris Bishop and David Seymour, who both pointed out that he is just playing the same old games as he always does.

There is also the fact that we are now in an election campaign and so much has been going on recently that Winston is not getting much coverage. If Winston thought that playing his old tricks of using parliamentary privilege to make unfounded accusations against people that will not be heard in court for a couple of years, then he has exaggerated the public’s regard for him. This sort of thing would have been in the news for weeks a couple of decades ago, but Winston has used these tactics too many times for anyone to take him particularly seriously now.

The sad part, as with the story of the boy who cried wolf, is that it could all be true this time. While unlikely, there is a level of detail in this story that could indicate that some serious investigation has gone on. Even if he eventually wins in court, though, Winston has lost the public with his tactics. He has simply played the game of abusing parliamentary privilege too often, and of course, he would not repeat his claims outside the house.

There are a couple of other cliches that come to mind. Winston’s claimed that those who objected to the Antarctic trip were being “racist”, which brings to mind cliches about pots and kettles. The other one is particularly pertinent to the Winston of today. His attacks and unsubstantiated claims, hitting out at everyone like a cornered rat, are nothing new. We have seen it all before. It may have worked in the past, but back then he still had a little bit of charm and a reputation for ‘keeping the government honest’. And although he may have stopped some of the government’s policies from becoming law, as he loudly claims, betraying his conservative voter base by forming a government that included the Greens was an enormous mistake. Now he is distancing himself from them, pretending he had nothing to do with it all when he was the one that put the government into power. But he has nothing else in his arsenal, so he keeps using the same old tactics while becoming more and more desperate that nothing seems to be working for him nowadays.

In other words, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Back to the future. Back to the future. Back to the future.

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