Why ACT is invisible?

There has been a lot of criticism that ACT has been invisible or at least had a very low profile in the last few months. In fact many fo the media have been calling for the old scam busting Rodney Hide to re-emerge.

But what do you do, when the media don’t report what you do do? The Dominion Post has an article on the $111,000 Housing NZ spent on Treaty education. The only MP quoted from in the article is United Future Leader Peter Dunne.

Now if you look at the question in Parliament, it was asked by ACT. In fact they used a huge seven of their dozen or so daily question slots to quiz the Government on this. Peter Dunne made one contribution. Yet ACT gets no mention whatsoever in conjunction with this issue. Plus Rodney has been on the same issue for the last two days.

Even worse the article quotes from questions asked by ACT MPs, it just doesn’t mention that they did the asking.

Now I should point out that it is highly possible that the original article submitted by the journalist did contain references and credit to the MPs who actually raised this issue, and sub-editors (or butchers as their colleagues think of them) chopped them out, not realising they were removing balance by doing so. This is not at all uncommon.

Nevertheless I do feel it is rather a bad look to complain about a party’s low profile, and then have stories on issues which they raised, fail to mention them.