Carter’s website

From Chris Carter’s website:

Well they say a week is a long time in politics. The last 3 months have been an even longer time for me. I know that you are probably wondering what on earth went wrong and why.

The simple truth of the matter is that I have had a really difficult 12 months in Parliament. Not from the people I would expect in the National or ACT parties but from some members of our own team. I felt really angry and let down by Phil Goff and his advisors over their lack of support for Peter and I over the vicious media campaign against my travel expenses. After all none of my travel was private and all of it was approved by Cabinet when I was a Minister and by the party leadership up until a couple of months ago. Remember Phil Goff and Annette King were members of the Cabinet that signed off all my ministerial travel.

Three months ago a journalist called me and revealed that Phil Goff’s office had leaked details of my travel expenses again to the Press Gallery. I had not even received these figures myself. I flipped out and in anger and poor judgement lashed back.

It would be interesting to know if this can be verified. While I have little sympathy for Carter over his travels, if Goff’s office did leak his travel expenses then that is an act of very bad faith.

It would seem that the current leadership of the party think that me saying in public that Phil Goff is a nice guy who works hard but doesn’t have the charisma or the clear policy directions to win the next election is more of a crime than some of the criticisms levelled by other Labour MPs in the past at Labour leaders. Richard Prebble called David Lange mentally unbalanced in 1987. Annette King and Phil Goff tried to roll Helen Clark in 1996. John Tamihere said he had 15 MPs to roll Helen Clark in 2005 when he did that infamous interview in Investigate magazine.

I think the difference is Tamihere didn’t carry on repeating it.