Muller fails first big test
Todd Muller has faced his first real test of moral leadership and has been found wanting so far. In response to the admission from Clutha-Southland MP Hamish Walker that he passed on leaked personal details of Covid-19 patients to the media, Muller put out a statement blandly saying that he ‘‘expressed to Hamish my view that forwarding on this information was an error of judgment’’.
The nature of being a political leader is that you have MPs in your party who will turn out to be crooks, liars or just plain old stupid.
The trick is just how leaders respond to those problems when they arise. Any further response from Muller today will be telling.
It gets even worse for Muller. The person who leaked those details to Walker was none other than National Party grandee and former party president Michelle Boag. She received the information in her capacity as acting chief executive of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust.
Boag was involved in Muller’s bid to wrest the National Party leadership from Simon Bridges in June. Quite what the helicopter trust was doing with the information in the first place is clearly a legitimate question for the Government.
Nevertheless, this leak was of a scale of political bastardry that you don’t often see on these shores.
The involvement of Boag shows that National figures were deeply involved in this poorly executed operation from start to finish. For Walker, this is probably career-ending. He first made the dog-whistling claim that some 11,000-odd Indians, Pakistanis and Koreans would be quarantined or self-isolated in Queenstown. That was clearly errant information that didn’t pass the smell test. In the washup from that claim, he then sent the patient information to a number of media outlets.
Now, under the pressure of a government inquiry, he has come clean – and Boag along with him.
Leaks happen. But this is medical information, and all Kiwi citizens have a reasonable right to privacy. The privacy commissioner told Stuff that the leaks were ‘‘indefensible’’. He is right.
This is not a fatal blow for Muller but surely a very damaging one. In his first speech as leader, he said: ‘‘I’m not interested in opposition for opposition’s sake.’’
This may not have strictly been ‘‘opposition for opposition’s sake’ but it certainly was dirty. And it totally undermines any head of steam the party has built up over the Government’s border failings.
If National can’t be trusted with sensitive information in Opposition, voters might ask: Why should they be entrusted with government?
This leak was of a scale of political bastardry that you don’t often see on these shores.