National’s dirty politics blogs continue in full effluent flow. In the last two days one of Farrar’s targets, Dr Gilbert (a lecturer at Canterbury) has updated his story. In a first post:
Proof of David Farrar’s deception: my own experience of Dirty Politics
In the lead up to the election the Minister of Corrections Anne Tolley launched a gang policy. In order to justify the government’s approach she used gang figures that overstated the gang problem. Not by a little bit, but a lot. And I mean a lot. I couldn’t prove it at the time (I can now) but because they were so obviously nonsense I called her out and said I would eat a suitcase full of carrots if she was correct.
Carrots proved to be the least of my problems. My problem proved to be the dishonest Right Wing blogger David Farrar. I initially took Farrar’s challenge in good humour thinking it would be a healthy tussle to seek the truth. It wasn’t. As we know now, he and Cameron Slater are birds of a feather, but where Slater is dim-witted Farrar is marginally smarter and this makes him more insidious.
Farrar quickly leapt to the Minister’s Defence. He was able to gain the figures – presumably from the Minister’s office – and with them he attempted to ‘prove’ that I was wrong and discredit me. Sound familiar? It was my own little experience of Dirty Politics. …
By this stage, of course, Farrar almost certainly knew he was wrong, but right and wrong is not his concern. His only concern is a political agenda – protect and promote the National party, no matter what the truth is. Deceive and mislead the public, shut up opponents, bury the truth, twist the facts. These are things my training deplores. In fact my last piece on the Minister was praising her work with the Department of Corrections, and I contract to do research for them – and I can’t imagine this helps me getting more – but my only concern is the truth. …
and then yesterday in a second:
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the government isn’t playing dirty.
Ten minutes or so before I posted my blog yesterday proving the Police and Corrections Minister had used dodgy gang numbers, David Farrar wrote something akin to an apology on Kiwiblog for attacking me for exposing the truth. He was getting the jump on criticism coming his way.
Was this a coincidence? Of course not. He was tipped off by the Minister’s office following an inquiry by the the Herald’s ever diligent David Fisher just an hour or so before Farrar posted. Tolley’s press secretary is a man named Gillon Carruthers. Leaked emails used in Dirty Politics show that Carruthers has been providing material to Farrar’s offside Cameron Slater since 2011. Old habits obviously die hard.
Not that Carruthers will admit it, of course, and if he does he will undoubtedly say that he was just apologising to Farrar for sending him false information in the first place. That’s obviously a sop, though, why only apologise to Farrar? Why not to the public for misleading them when launching important policy before the election? Furthermore, any apology to Farrar would only prove he previously leaked him the original information so that he could attack me. …
Farrar’s (latest) “promise” to clean up his sewer included a “promise” to declare parliamentary sources – Graeme Edgeler calls him out on this latest example:
Business as usual then (what a surprise). Expect dirty politics, and personal attacks on critics of the government, to escalate even further over the next three years.
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