In a sure sign the silly season is upon us, the Trans-Tasman has released its annual MP ratings. Considering the writers of the Trans-Tasman are rabid rightwingers who view John Key as the second-coming, it’s hardly a surprise that Nats get high scores and the Left get low ones.
Anne Tolley, a woman so stupid she literally went on a taxpayer funded chopper flight because she was told she needed a helicopter view of her portfolio and who has enacted national standards that she herself admits might be a disaster in the face of universal criticism from the experts, out scores every Labour and Green MP save Annette King. Even allowing for the Trans-Tasman’s pathetically shill-like stature, some of the rankings still elicit a laugh of surprise:
Bill English gets an 8 out of ten. For what? For cancelling contributions to the Cullen Fund, which is going to cost us $8 billion over the next decade? Maybe for ripping off the taxpayer to line his own pockets and trying to use his family as human shields when he got caught? For sitting on his hands while unemployment doubled? For setting up bodies to suggest economic and fiscal reform only to reject their findings?
Nick Smith goes up from 6.5 to 7.5. This is the minister who has turned everything he touches to crap. Hardly a week goes by without a protest thousands-strong opposing his policies. Nowadays he can’t even turn up to a meeting in a Tory suburb without the crowd turning on him.
Sharples and Turia each get 7 despite having precisely zero achievements this year, unless you count not selling out quite as much as you could have as a win.
Gerry Brownlee gets an 8 despite the fact that Parliament runs like a Polish shipyard under his direction as Leader of the House. When Parliament isn’t in urgency, it’s out of legislation – so the taxpayer ends up paying both for the added cost of urgency and for Parliament’s staff to sit idle when normal sitting time is wasted. Half the time he mucks up the procedure, wasting more time and money. The hatred between him and Lockwood Smith is becoming more and more unsettling to watch.
These silly ratings only serve to tell us about the personal biases of the people assigning the points. Still, I confidently predict our opposite number in the blogosphere will soon have a post up giving us a detailed statistical breakdown of these nonsense numbers.
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