McCarten triple flips

The SST reports:

Left wing union leader Matt McCarten has performed a triple flip flop over endorsing a candidate for Auckland Council’s Albany ward.

McCarten formed the website supercitypicks.co.nz to help voters select a left-leaning Auckland Council in the upcoming local body elections. …

But yesterday McCarten withdrew his support for Williams entirely.

“Originally I thought progressives should support Andrew Williams. But my leftist and even centrist mates gave me a biff on two fronts,” McCarten wrote.

“That he’s made his city a laughing stock and  he’s totally self absorbed and even his own allies have deserted him. The other reason is that he knows he had no chance to win as mayor and is deliberately drawing votes away from the only other candidate Len Brown who can beat John Banks.

“Privately he claims to support Brown, yet is helping Banks by not telling voters his real position. On that basis he’s a fraud and shouldn’t be supported by progressives.”

McCarten said Slater was “the only other candidate I know in that ward with any chance of winning”. He said the blogger was right of politics but “has a social conscience, does volunteer work and has a good brain”.

Yep that’s right, Matt McCarten did endorse Whale Oil for Council. And he called Andrew Williams a fraud.

One can only imagine the howls of outrage and anguish on the left. Matt’s own UNITE staff probably threatened to picket him. And so he flipped again:

However less than 24 hours later McCarten had withdrawn his support for Slater and replaced it with a new endorsement. “My progressive advisors tell me I should be supporting John Kirikiri as the best of the rest”.

Position No 3.

But, when Stuff called McCarten today to ask why he was making constant changes to his Albany ward endorsements he said he would be removing his tick for Kirikiri and reinstating Williams as the preferred contender.

“I hadn’t done my homework but I have now read all of the candidates’ policies and have decided Williams is the man for the job.”

He said Williams had been “an embarrassment with his behaviour” but had the best policies “and policies are how we should judge the candidates”.

I disagree with Matt. Policies are important. But so is judgement, temperment, and rationality.

Following his removal from McCarten’s endorsement list Williams let rip on Facebook about the well-known union leader.

“He should know better than to make such irresponsible statements about me a sitting mayor. I don’t even know the man, have never had a conversation with him, so it’s extraordinary that he would comment like that. But very telling that he initially endorsed that disturbed psycho nutter Cameron Slater then withdrew it.”

When Williams does rants like that, the term “disturbed psycho nutter” seems like a form of projection.