I overlooked the hypocrisy!

On Thursday I blogged my amusement at Labour criticising National for the fact it uses a template for its candidate announcements. Trevor Mallard had said:

Labour’s campaign chair Trevor Mallard said any ”fill in the blanks” type press statements were ”subject to ridicule”.

”It’s a sign of both laziness and also disrespects the electorate on the part of the candidate,” Mallard said.

Now my memory failed me. The correct reaction shouldn’t have been amusement but outrage at Trevor’s hypocrisy. Why?

Well I forgot how Labour set up a Government Communications Unit, also known as the Burns Unit. It consisted of five taxpayer funded press secretaries, and do you know what its job was? To produce hundreds and thousands of press releases for local newspapers, candidates and MPs. They’d take one standard press release, and stick in local data and send it to the local media. It was exactly what Trevor Mallard is now labelling as disrespecting the electorate. The difference is National has one staff member at Party HQ doing candidate releases, and Labour had a taxpayer funded unit of five full-time press secretaries dedicated to these “fill in the blanks” type press statements.

Again the hypocrisy is amazing.

Maybe Trevor forgot that Labour had their own taxpayer funded fill in the blanks press release factory. I doubt it though as the former head of the unit is now a Labour MP.