Helen’s blunders

Helen actually made two mistakes in Parliament yesterday. One was about John Key which I’ll come to shortly. The other was on the level of investment needed in rolling stock:

Mr Key caught out the Prime Minister in an error when she claimed that Dr Cullen had said that an investment of $80 million a year would be needed to keep the rolling stock in a steady state – and she said that would be $300 over five years.

In fact, Dr Cullen said it would be $80 million over five years; he has not mentioned $300 million.

A spokesman for Dr Cullen said last night that the Prime Minister had “misspoke” with her figure of $80 million a year, but he said that the $300 million figure was an option in for making a medium-term investment.

Now I don’t think this is a big issue. MPs make mistakes all the time. I highlight it purely because people think Clark doesn’t.

But now let us look at her big blunder. She stated as a fact something about John Key which she had not verified, and was wrong. By not checking her facts (and I think share registers in listed companies are publicly accessible) she had it backfire massively. Now what she should have done is post the issue as a question. If she had said “It is well known John Key is or was a shareholder in Toll, so maybe he can tell the House whether or not he still had $30,000 of shares when he was talking their bid up” then it would have been very different. Sure Key would have still confirmed he had sold them, but the headlines then might have been “Key narrowly escapes” instead of “PM’s smear backfires”.

Clark also has blundered with the timing. National was being pinged on Crosby/Textor plus you had the ACC issue also. So why on earth would you detract attention from those two issues, with the attempted smear about Toll shares. If Clark was thinking tactically she would have kept that for another day, which would also have given her time to have the dates checked out more fully.