Spotlight back on Todd Barclay affair
So the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) has decided not to pursue a complaint about the police handling last year of an investigation into soon-to-be-former Cluthasouthland MP Todd Barclay.
It was reported in the first week of July that a complaint had been made to the police watchdog about the investigation, which ended with no charges laid against Barclay over the alleged recording of a member of his staff in the Gore electorate office. IPCA spokeswoman Sarah Collett said at the time the complaint would take several weeks to process.
It turned out to be just two weeks, with the announcement by the IPCA that it was satisfied there had been no misconduct by police in the investigation. The original probe has been reopened following new revelations about the alleged Barclay recording, over the past few weeks.
The authority’s decision is not necessarily surprising. Police deciding not to lay charges at the end of an investigation is common, where insufficient evidence to secure a conviction is found to exist. But the decision does come at a time when the Barclay situation, and the apparent obfuscation around it, have been thrown into sharp relief, culminating in a visit to the Gore electorate office by a reporter and subsequent accusations about that reporter’s conduct, which have been shown by video evidence to be untrue.
The latest developments beg a couple of important questions. Firstly, have we entered our own ‘‘post-truth’’ era in New Zealand politics, taking a leaf out of the Donald Trump playbook, where bluster and counter-accusation are somehow seen as a legitimate way not only to avoid answering uncomfortable questions, but to throw the spotlight back onto those asking?
Without the video footage of reporter Rachael Kelly’s encounter with a staffer in National’s Gore office, the accusations directed at her and the colleague documenting her visit, which came from the Prime Minister’s office and Parliamentary Services, might well have acquired an unjustified degree of credence. So does that mean every such exchange will have to be recorded from now on in order to head off potential fake accusations down the line? Painfully ironic, if true, given the nature of the Barclay affair.
The other question, the answer to which will undoubtedly play out before dozens of media cameras, is whether Barclay, still drawing his $3000-a-week salary, will front at Parliament when it resumes next week. It was a quest to find out what he’s been doing since deciding not to seek re-election that took Kelly to the electorate office. Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett’s subsequent assurances that he is fronting for work will fall rather flat if he doesn’t appear in Wellington.