I have waited a while to comment on the Dirty Politics, or ‘Hager saga’, event as I wanted to see how things would shake down. And boy have they shaken down.
National keeps pointing the finger at Kim Dotcom as if he’s the only person in New Zealand ‘intelligent’ enough to release the hacked emails as cleverly as they’re being released. That just shows you how out-of-touch and stupid National is about IT. I could give you at least 10,000 New Zealanders with the skills to do that – out of the rest of the population, if you want to do something like that, for Christ’s sake just Google it like anyone else. It’s hardly rocket surgery.
Basically, as we all now know, some people in National have been super-complicit in aiding ace arsehole Cameron Slater into attacking opposition figures to the current regime in the most uncompromising terms, to the point of deep and nasty slurs (Christchurch earthquake victims ‘scum’, West Coasters as ‘ferals’ – and we haven’t seen the half of it). Some are opposition figures, some are completely innocent people who somehow got fingered by people who can’t be bothered checking facts to safeguard the innocent.
As even dyed-in-the-wool, suckled on right-wing cow milk National supporters begin to shudder in shame, Brand Key bravely denies, doesn’t recall and smiles weakly through the constant flow of revelations. I’ve said it before – the people standing behind Key have very little to recommend them. He’s it – Key is the Great Hope of National, because for some unfathomable reason (to me) people like him. Do they like the other National MPs? OK, let’s hear it for Nick Smith, Jerry Brownlee and Judith Collins, to name just a few. Didn’t think so …
And now, ‘at the end of the day’, Mr Key, that’s it. All you’ve got is you. The economy is rocketing along like a speedy racing boat? Don’t think so. Dairy prices are falling, farmers up north are already going bust, companies and mines are laying off more staff.
Then there’s the things you don’t care about – child poverty is now on a par with Mexico, equality is more dramatically polarised than ever before, and National invented an entirely new category of New Zealand suffering: the working poor.
Let’s check back on your record: some great work has been done in Christchurch under National’s watch. Except what you’ve done in three years would have been achieved in six months by a competent government. Likewise the disaster would have been used as a boost to the economy much more comprehensively and much sooner by a competent government. One that didn’t think of Christchurch as Labour-voting ‘scum’, anyway.
For shame.
So here’s my prediction of how this will play: National will keep painting Key as the poor victim of a smear, of looney lefties out for blood, of ‘hacking’ (since no one, especially them, seem to understand what this means). He will play the sympathy card: ‘I have some good policies but all this Dirty Politics noise is deflecting attention from them’.
Except National doesn’t. Except that it’s not a ‘smear’ if someone on the left is merely pointing out what National has been up to, which looks to be utterly true and utterly unconscionable in a country we used to consider a leader of civilisation.
And this is what the Left has to do: paint him as what he is – incompetent.
Key has not been in control of his own cabinet; he has failed to get and read briefs, by his own admission, even when they are from the Security Intelligence Service and even when they concern the leader of the opposition; incompetent in preventing the kind of bitchiness that Collins can’t seem to control, not to mention her scandalous misuse of government credibility and her own privilege (Oravida) and incompetent at managing his connections even when they’re with someone as patently out-of-control as that simpering fascist fuckwit Cameron Slater.
Incompetent!