One-all on the political scorecard
Someone should have warned Bill English on Tuesday morning not to rely on his poker face. English doesn’t have one and never has. Over the years it’s been both a blessing and a curse. As his head swivelled from side to side to answer questions about what he knew and when over the whole, sorry, Todd Barclay mess, English looked like a hunted man.
It was that performance which later forced English to come clean – producing the police statement placing him square in the middle of allegations of secret tape recordings at the office of CluthaSouthland MP Todd Barclay.
English, of course, had to put a gloss on it,and did, insisting he released the statement to be transparent. But nobody was fooled.
Texts leaked to Newsroom showed English knew all along that Barclay had recorded his Southland office staff, even though Barclay publicly denied it. That leak prompted a rush of media and Opposition Official Information Act requests to police for an unredacted copy of English’s evidence to the investigation into Barclay.
After metaphorically finding his police statement down the back of a drawer, the gravity of his predicament appears to have hit if not English, then his advisers. The evidence would back up what the texts showed, that English had both known about the tape recordings, and – more damningly – that it was Barclay who told him.
Exactly what English had failed to come clean about after months of questions.
The outcome of any OIA requests was beyond the prime minister’s ability to control. Better to get the truth out now than wait for a grenade to be lobbed on the campaign trail.
Anywhere else but the world of politics that must seem like looking for positives in getting to choose your last meal. But releasing the evidence himself, rather than waiting to be done over with it on the campaign trail, means English has limited the fallout.
Cutting Barclay loose has also stemmed the bleeding. Voters will have moved on long before the Opposition stop asking questions about English’s apparent complicity in keeping Barclay’s recordings secret and the young MP’s refusal to co-operate with police with the full knowledge of his superiors. (So much for the law and order party.)
But English will be kicking himself all the same. Any damage – there is some, and it is probably permanent – is self-inflicted. He effectively put a match to his own brand, bringing himself down to the level of just another politician, someone who is prepared to dissemble and duck for cover, rather than tell the truth.
The English brand was supposed to be above all that – credible, trustworthy, a safe pair of hands. But to be fair, expectations are not that high. Most voters expect politicians to be economical with the truth
So English is damaged, but not fatally, and maybe not even as badly as he could have been, after Andrew Little’s own banana skin moment, when an internship scheme blew up in Labour’s face over allegations of exploitation of foreign students.
The internship scandal casts shade on Labour on so many levels that it almost seems like an act of internal sabotage – the scheme lured 85 interns to New Zealand from around the world expecting lectures from Helen Clark and real world campaign experience.
They arrived to a cramped dormitory, no pay, no lectures, and a broken shower. Worse, there are now questions over whether it breaches immigration rules and Labour’s opponents are accusing it of exploiting vulnerable students for slave labour.
This from a party which is running on a central policy plank of improving sub-standard housing, cutting immigration, raising the minimum wage, and getting rid of dodgy education courses exploiting overseas students.
It’s almost too easy to tick off the ways in which this will hurt Labour and Little. It’s a credibility problem, given Labour’s rhetoric on all of the above. It’s a hypocrisy problem – a classic ‘‘do as I say, not as I do’’ moment, which voters can spot a mile off and always judge politicians on harshly.
It also proves the rule of karma – proving that no party’s hands are clean on taxpayer funding, questions about Labour’s funding of former chief of staff Matt McCarten, originator of the internship scheme, surfaced even before questions about National paying off Barclay’s former staff had subsided.
But the biggest blow to Labour’s credibility is it looks incompetent. Its handling of the scheme was so bad it would put it in laughing stock territory, if it wasn’t for the fact that young people were involved.
Bill English had his worst week as prime minister. Andrew Little has probably had worse, but not much. If they’re both lucky, the week ended with them at one-all on the political scorecard.
Both might be relieved about that but they shouldn’t breathe easy too soon. It’s when voters decide it’s a plague on both their houses that elections can careen out of control.
And we’ve seen how that ends elsewhere.