Confused or Lying?

Helen Clark has been defending Mike Williams on the basis he was confused. The Press reports:

Following an all-day Cabinet meeting yesterday, Clark refused to say if Williams had her full confidence.

Asked by a journalist if she still trusted him to tell the truth, she would not answer directly.

“Well, I’ve known him for a long time, but he can be a little loose and confused,” she said.

But does this sound like a confused man. From Agenda:

MIKE  There was a seminar between 8.30 and 9.30 in the morning which I conducted.  The hall was set up so I was right at the back of the stage on a lecturn almost behind the proscenial arch in the Wellington Town Hall, I’ve got 400 witnesses who’d tell you the first thing I said when I took the lecturn was that I could neither see nor hear them, the acoustics were terrible and the lighting was such I couldn’t even see the audience, okay.  I gave my address, it lasted about 50 minutes.  There was then discussion.  Now what I heard the delegate say and I wasn’t hearing him clearly was that if somebody asks you for a Kiwisaver brochure the IRD’s got good ones.  Now according to people there I did not respond that is a good idea, I simply moved on to the next question which was the last one.  So the whole thing is an incredible media beat up, it arguably never happened.

Funny that for someone who could not see or hear the audience, he referred to the delegate (and fellow NZ Council member) by name. Anyway he labels the whole thing an incredible media beat up and denies outright that he praised the suggestion as a damn good idea.

GUYON  So why did Helen Clark accuse you of poor judgement then?

MIKE  Well she hadn’t spoken to me.

Now this part is crucial. This is where Williams is not just “confused” about what happened, but starts to directly lie about his conversations with Clark. He has just asserted he did not respond “That’s a damn good idea”, and the only reason Clark said he exercised poor judgement was that she had not yet spoken to him.

GUYON  So does the Prime Minister accept your…?

MIKE  Absolutely, I’ve spoken to her after the event, she did the right thing.  Now look make it clear it was my session and I take absolute responsibility to anything that was said there, but I do not believe anything like that was said and I certainly did not hear anything like that said and neither did I endorse it.

While Guyon did not finish his sentence, it is clear he is referring to Williams version of events, and Williams very clearly implies on nationwide TV that the PM has accepted he did not endorse the idea of handing out Government pamphlets while campaigning.

But what does Helen say. The Dom Post reports:

But Miss Clark said yesterday that Mr Williams had informed her last week that was what he said.

“The first thing he told me was the right one. That was, he’d reacted along the lines of `what a good idea’ and he should have continued to repeat that. For whatever reason, he didn’t.

Now if one was very gullible or generous one could almost believe Williams was confused about what was said and what he said at the conference. But are we really meant to believe that he was also confused about his conversation with the Prime Minister?

I mean Clark is quite clear about what he said to her.  The Herald reports:

She said she was baffled at Mr Williams’ denial on Agenda, because he had confirmed it to her when she first spoke to him after the Herald revealed it last week.

This is not confusion. How can you be confused about what you told the PM? Having worked with a PM or two, you tend to remember in great detail your conversations with them – especially those only a few days old.

And do you know what is the weird thing. There was no need for Williams to lie. He wasn’t some cornered rat like Benson-Pope desperately lying because the truth would force him out of office. The truth had already come out, and Williams had been gently reprimanded by the PM. There was no suggestion his job was at risk up until the Agenda interview. By trying to rewrite history, he resurrected what had been an almost dead issue. One can only assume he made a calculated decision that no-one could contradict him if he started to spin what happened. But he went well well beyond spinning. He lied nine times in one interview.  He was in no way confused when he says the whole thing is a media beatup and never happened.