Deborah Coddington, former ACT MP and author of the filthy racist article “Asian Angst: Is it time to send some back?” that killed North & South’s reputation, waffles on about ‘snitches’ in her Herald on Sunday article.
Coddington says snitching – informing the public or the authorities when someone is doing something bad or illegal in secret – is wrong. Good people, it seems, turn a blind eye and let people keep their dirty secrets even if it is in the public interest to know. Her piece purports to be about Cameron Slater’s violation of suppression orders put in place to protect sex abuse victims to get his 15 minutes of fame. In fact, she spends half the article attacking Kees Keizer, whose secret recordings of senior Nats revealed their secret agenda before the 2008 election.
Coddington writes of Keizer: “the pre-2008 election snitch who bluffed his way into National’s cocktail party and secretly taped senior MPs’ conversations before giving them to TV3 news. He justified his snitching as his own form of journalism (laugh? I almost started); and said it was in the name of democracy”. Keizer actually said “This is certainly in the public interest, it certainly enhances our democracy by having what politicians say in private have to come out in public, especially if it concerns policies that are good for ordinary New Zealanders, like Working for Families and Kiwibank.”.
Coddington coninues: “Keizer sashayed around the cocktail party pretending to be a National supporter, without informing anyone the conversations were actually interviews that would be made public.” Yeah, I think the point was to find out what they were hiding from the public. Would have rather undermined the exercise to let the Nats know, eh, Deborah?
The truth is, of course, that Coddington, like many on the right, knew all about National’s secret agenda and had kept the secret from the voting public without a moral twinge. They’re still fuming over the way Keizer managed to expose and undermine the secret agenda. National’s polling fell 5% on the back of the initial wave of tapes (the ones where English talks of “sorting out” Working for Families and says Kiwibank will be sold “eventually, but not now”, Lockwood Smith talks of “bloody dead fish you have to swallow” in order to do “some useful things that way that may not be policy right now”). John Key was forced to guarantee no asset sales in the first term to arrest the slide.
The sad thing is that having been so damning of a man who brought to light the secret agenda of a major political party that was trying to slip into government while keeping the public ignorant of its true plans, Coddington can’t even bring herself to make a judgment on Slater’s behaviour. Here’s a man who is simply trying to get more media coverage to fill a void within his on persona and doesn’t mind hurting the victims of sexual crime to do it, yet all Coddington can do is shrug her shoulders.
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