Key: Look over here! Please, look over here

Written By: - Date published: 6:45 pm, February 8th, 2010 - 44 comments
Categories: humour, john key - Tags:

Well, wages are stagnating, unemployment is just shy of its all-time high, crime is up, and there is no chance of the Government fulfilling its flagship promise – closing the gap with Australia by 2025.

Tomorrow, a make or break speech will lay out Key’s programme of action for the year ahead, and expectations are high after a year of do nothing government.

Must be time for another media stunt!

Short of a broken arm this time, John Key drew a funny looking fern leaf on a piece of paper on Breakfast and now it’s being auctioned for charity.

Aww, isn’t he funny and cute, and smiley? I’m not worried about any of that other stuff any more.

44 comments on “Key: Look over here! Please, look over here ”

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  1. QoT 1
    8 February 2010 at 7:05 pm

    In before “REMEMBER PAINTINGGATE AT LEAST HE DID IT HIMSELF HELEN WAS A FRAUD”.

  2. kiwiteen123 2
    8 February 2010 at 7:14 pm

    @QoT I presume you mean paintergate.
    This is the sort of thing I like to see on The Standard. Well reasoned, peaceful debating.

    • snoozer 2.1
      8 February 2010 at 7:19 pm

      Nah, you like the robust debate, that’s why you come back. If you want peaceful you can get that on kiwipolitico. be patient though, from my count of the front page there’s been 59 comments in the last 13 days.

      • kiwiteen123 2.1.1
        8 February 2010 at 7:21 pm

        Well reasoned and peaceful debating can be robust.
        What’s your point about the comments?

      • Lew 2.1.2
        8 February 2010 at 7:22 pm

        Quality, not quantity, snooze. But you went to the effort of counting them. I’m touched.

        Anyway, it might come as a shock to you that I concur with and endorse this analysis. Not like the one last week where it was a real flag.

        L

    • QoT 2.2
      8 February 2010 at 7:24 pm

      Well Lord forbid I get the name of a painfully stupid -gate-suffixed pseudoscandal incorrect. PaintINGgate’s more accurate anyway.

  3. Bris Klarkov 3
    8 February 2010 at 7:17 pm

    [deleted]
    [lprent: You’re been permanently banned.
    Adding you to anti-spam list and feeding your previous comments to it as well.
    Your comments from now on even on new IP’s will be sent there as well.
    Hopefully this will help akismet decide that you pollute the net. ]

  4. sweetd 4
    8 February 2010 at 7:19 pm

    The real funny thing is Key’s simple misdirection is still thumping Goff’s best efforts.

  5. sweetd 5
    8 February 2010 at 7:26 pm

    Marty, you miss the point. Its that Goff is so bad that simple misdirection beats him every time.

    You also fall for the misdirection shit. No wonder you are in opposition.

  6. Lew 6
    8 February 2010 at 7:59 pm

    But I have to say, this is a smart bit of political theatre. Even though paintergate should have been a non-story, it wasn’t — for a lot of people, it spoke to character, and fair or not, the character of leaders is legitimate political material. This handily reminds people of that episode and all that it symbolised for people about Labour and Clark, and re-casts it as an “anything you can do, I can do better” story which boosts Key’s strongest political attribute — nice guy charm.

    Watch for the story in a week or so when it gets sold for more than Clark’s painting did, and the purchaser makes a point of not destroying it.

    For the benefit of snoozer and folk who’d like to think the worst, this is not an endorsement — but an observation that, ridicule and minimise this as you like, it’ll probably work just fine. A certain amount of this comes as a perk of office, but the left needs to develop counterstrategies to derail this sort of stunt. You can’t do that with policy. You can’t do it with earnest intensity and a relentless focus on the hard issues.

    L

  7. gobsmacked 7
    8 February 2010 at 8:27 pm

    He did this one himself? That’s nice.

    Makes a change from the usual forgery …

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10601923&pnum=1

    Funny how Key’s fake signature, fake personal message, in his fake handwriting didn’t get beaten up to a “- gate.”

    • felix 7.1
      8 February 2010 at 8:43 pm

      Did he “do it himself” or did he just appropriate the design that John Ansell has been (ahem) running up the flagpole lately? (so sorry).

      I wonder – if we were to adopt the silver fern flag at some future date – has history just been re-written in advance to make Key the designer of it?

  8. big bruv 8
    8 February 2010 at 8:39 pm

    And still it goes on!

    Nobody is listening guys, nobody is taking any notice.

    Trying to change public opinion of Neville Key from a nice guy (which he is) into some uncaring hard right Tory (which he sadly is not) is NEVER going to work for you.

    • felix 8.1
      8 February 2010 at 8:48 pm

      Why “Neville”?

      I noticed the U.S. righties were calling Obama “Neville” as an attempt to associate his foreign policy with that of Chamberlain – often identified as trying (and failing) to “appease” the German chancellor (see what I did there?).

      How does this relate to Key? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

      • Lew 8.1.1
        8 February 2010 at 8:55 pm

        S59?
        ETS?
        Foreshore and Seabed?
        Backing out on tax cuts?
        Not privatising ACC?
        Not disbanding the Ministries of Women’s Affairs, Mãori Affairs, Ethnic Affairs, and about twenty others?
        etc …

        The guy’s clearly a pinko feminist pantywaist.

        L

        • felix 8.1.1.1
          8 February 2010 at 9:01 pm

          So Key is appeasing all those middle NZers who voted him in?

          Does his treachery know no bounds?

          • Lew 8.1.1.1.1
            8 February 2010 at 9:38 pm

            He will appease them in the bedrooms. He will appease them in their hybrid vehicles. He will appease them on the beaches. He will appease their accountants. He will never stop appeasing!

            L

      • big bruv 8.1.2
        8 February 2010 at 9:05 pm

        Nope, you have the ‘right’ end of the stick Felix.

        I think it was Perigo who first called Key ‘Neville”, I have been continuing with it for the last two years.
        He gets called Neville because he is a gutless wimp when it comes to doing what is needed to get this emerging third world nation back on track.

        I sure as hell did not like Clark, indeed, I still hate her with a passion but at least with her I knew who the enemy was.

        Successive governments have driven this nation backwards at a rapid rate of knots, none of our politicians are brave enough to stand up and say that we are living beyond our means and that we simply cannot keep going on like this.

        The annoying thing is that Key will not change until Labour start gaining some ground in the polls, the trouble is that Labour and the left in general have no idea how to go about brining Key down or eating into his lead, making silly personal attacks is not going to work.

        They need a strategy and a plan, at the moment they are still in Helen Clark “attack mode”, the public rejected that type of politicking, and if we are being brutally honest, a huge percentage of the public think that Key is a bloody good bloke and one that you would not mind having around for a BBQ and a few beers, attacking him over silly and pathetic issues is not going to get them anywhere.

  9. Daveski 9
    8 February 2010 at 8:48 pm

    Marty Marty Marty. Try and make it a little harder for those of us from the dark side.

    “Must be time for another media stunt!”

    You mean like riding in to deliver his speech on a motorbike?

  10. illuminatedtiger 10
    8 February 2010 at 8:49 pm

    How about doing some work for once, John?

    • kiwiteen123 10.1
      8 February 2010 at 8:58 pm

      John Key is one of the most hard working New Zealanders, so was Helen Clark.

      • illuminatedtiger 10.1.1
        8 February 2010 at 9:31 pm

        So you would count his many weeks spent in Hawaii as being all part of his “hard work”? What about his ministers kicking back in Disney Land as part of “fact finding” missions? Hard work too heh?

        • BLiP 10.1.1.1
          8 February 2010 at 9:35 pm

          Then there’s week long family holiday in China, another week with the family in Florida, and lets not forget the long weekend at Huka Lodge when We’llmissya Lee was left swinging in the wind.

  11. sweetd 11
    8 February 2010 at 9:50 pm

    Kiwiteen, Key is also contactable when on holiday, Clark was often out of communication due to the nature of her breaks.

    • lprent 11.1
      8 February 2010 at 9:56 pm

      Yeah, Helen had trustworthy and competent deputies. She didn’t have to be available.

      On the other hand, John Key must remember the Bolger and Shipley experience. Go on holiday and get a hatchet in the back. Mind you at least National were civilized enough to dump the lousy leaders (English and Brash) without needing to sneak around quite so much.

      Of course Helen had so many of those back-stabbings going on that she faced 5 National party leaders during her stint as Labour leader. Must have been pretty boring betting on how long each could survive.

      The National party is a bit of a snakepit – just look not further than McCully (or Brownlee)

  12. Scott 12
    8 February 2010 at 10:00 pm

    I’m not surprised Key wants our flag to be a silver fern. It goes with his desperation to be photographed with the All Blacks.

    I liked the copyright symbol he drew. Maybe he’s going to do a Harawira and demand a royalty.

    • lprent 12.1
      8 February 2010 at 10:09 pm

      I thought that the All Blacks had already tried or talked about doing that? Copyrighting or trademarking the silver fern. It seemed pretty weird to me at the time.

  13. Brett Dale 13
    8 February 2010 at 10:02 pm

    Helen showed more taste, wanting to be photographed with Warriors!!

    Hopefully pricey will be fit for most of the season.

  14. Jenny 14
    8 February 2010 at 11:14 pm

    Marty asks: So what stunt could Key pull to divert attention away from the sagging economy, and growing unemployment?

    Knowing cutesy pictures and broken limbs, won’t cut it this time, Key may be tempted to indulge in an old fashioned red scare, but instead of the word communist, replace it with the word terrorist, or extremist.

    The honeymoon could be over, and this right wing party could be reverting to type, throwing away the Mr Nice Guy image, and returning to the Don Brash style Maori bashing rhetoric.

    Key’s comments at Waitangi about “extremists” and “grievance industry”, sounded like the first shot across the bows of left leaning MPs and activists inside the Maori Party.

    I expect that this is only the beginning, and we can expect a lot more of this classic right wing scapegoating, leading up to the election next year.

    The balancing trick for Key is if he can find bribes big enough to take some Maori with him, even hopefully converting the more conservative Maori Party MPs to become conscious kupapa, as he migrates to pandering to the extreme right of the electorate.

    If he is successful this will make him a force to be reckoned with.

    The trick of course is to do it slowly, and gradually, like the trick of boiling a live frog.