Polity: Key – “Meh. Maybe I lied to Parliament.”

notices and features
10 years ago
Categories: election 2014, grant robertson, john key, Judith Collins, national, Parliament, public services, same old national
Tags: mfat, polity

Rob Salmond at Polity points out the extraordinary way that the speaker let John Key get away with lying to parliament

Last week, struggling to defend Judith Collins’ meddling in an official trip to get private gain for Oravida,John Key told Parliament:

The [MFAT] paperwork shows right through this that not only did the Minister have a very busy programme, which the member wants to gloss over, all on judicial and justice issues, but, secondly, all the way through it talks about a private dinner.

I added the underlining. As I showed at the time, this statement is a lie. The MFAT documents he was referring to contradict this account on three separate occasions.

So yesterday Labour’s Grant Robertson called him on it:

Grant Robertson: In light of his statement to the House last Wednesday in reference to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade papers released about Judith Collins’ trip to China that “all the way through it talks about a private dinner.”, how does he explain the email exchanges as late as 16 October where the Minister’s office is asking why the dinner is not included in the official visit programme?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: It was a generalisation. Maybe I should have said “most of the way through”.

Grant Robertson: Are all of his answers about Judith Collins generalisations or does he actually have to answer the facts—that this was until 16 October an official dinner, not a private dinner, and that, actually, he misled Parliament last week?

Mr SPEAKER: The Prime Minister can answer any of those questions.

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: It is quite wrong. In my opinion it has been a private dinner the whole way through.

This exchange is extraordinary for two reasons:

Misleading parliament is serious. If it happens, MPs are supposed to make a stand-alone statement to the House about what they said, why it was wrong, and what they should have said instead. Key didn’t do that at all. He just inserted a pathetic “meh” concession into an answer to a question;
Even more inexplicable is Key’s answer to the second question. Apparently all those official documents – containing Collins’ demands to put the dinner on her official programme – don’t shake Key’s opinion that the dinner was private all the way along. This is the “see no evil, hear no evil” school of Ministerial management in full effect. I guess Key would rather be a guy who can’t read than be a liar.