Graphic courtesy of the outstandingly good Kupu Hou twitter account.
So in the space of a week or so Paula Bennett has gone from potentially being the next leader of the National Party to the person who has leapfrogged Nick Smith on the list of Ministers most likely to be dumped.
I am sure that Judith Collins is smiling from ear to ear.
Because put to one side how evil it was for Bennett’s office to smear Hurimoana Dennis in an effort to denigrate Te Puea Marae’s efforts to house families in need it is also so stupid for Bennett’s office to smear Hurimoana Dennis in an effort to denigrate Te Puea Marae’s efforts to house families in need.
I mean what made her or her minions think that secretly attacking the chair of the Marae was a good idea because the Marae was embarrassing her government? The cause of the embarrassment was not the Marae, it was because tens of thousands of kiwis are homeless and this Government does not care and the Marae is actually doing something to help.
The most important aspect of the attack is that it was an attempted sneaky under the radar attack using a staff member rather than the Minister herself to release the information. Maybe it was all a crazy accident but in these post Dirty Politics days it does not feel so.
Paula initially said that she was not really aware of the background but then said that her press secretary did release the information but thought it was in the public arena. This seems implausible. It is much more likely that this was an attempted smear. An anonymous attempted smear.
It is sad that this appears to be the only response this Government is equipped with when facing a crisis. Instead of acknowledging that there is a homelessness crisis and trying to deal with the homelessness crisis it attacks someone associated with an organisation trying to actually house the homeless.
How feeble. How stupid. How inhumane. How hamfisted. You mean to say that the person in charge of the office responsible is a Minister?
If National does not want to be accused of dirty politics then its minions should not play those stupid games. They may have worked a couple of years ago but the tide is clearly turning. You can see this by the response of the media. They will no longer tolerate being treated as pawns. There is clearly a renewed interest on the part of the media to do their jobs. We have a new class of reporters of the calibre of the reinvigorated John Campbell and Maiki Sherman and Mihi Forbes. They will no longer tolerate these sorts of games.
National should hang its head in shame. No doubt it rues the days when it could feed Cameron Slater with all sorts of information and be confident that he would smear the innocent victims without the slightest sense of guilt. He has been shown to be a hypocrite, someone who railed against name suppression but sought it, someone who accepted a very generous offer of diversion but has refused to accept that he committed wrong but for a while he did National’s bidding.
At least he was more competent in smearing people. Even if the law suits are starting to mount up and more and more people are demanding justice against all of the lies that he and his associates have told.
But this latest event marks a new low when the head of a Marae looking after the homeless has had sensitive information released about him by a Minister’s office clearly with the intention of smearing him. Whoever is responsible needs their head read for a brain and their body checked for a heart.
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