And another Labour candidate going off the rails

The Timaru Herald reports:

The Labour Party’s Rangitata candidate, Steve Gibson, said yesterday he was “a bit tired of toeing the party line” which he said was “too respectful,” making a series of strongly-worded criticisms of the National Party.

Gibson said he was concerned about the “degradation of the public’s confidence in the democratic process by Judith Collins, Cameron Slater, Jason Ede and other rotten Shylocks”.

Labour party leader David Cunliffe put Gibson “on a last chance” in August for insulting Prime Minister John Key on Facebook, where Gibson called Key “Shylock” and a “nasty little creep”.

So he is back to calling people in National Shylocks.

Gibson criticised the National Party’s planned education reforms, which include differentiating teachers’ pay levels based on their responsibilities, as “just idiocy”, and said the party looked like “a bunch of dicks” for proposing the policies despite unionised teachers’ official opposition.

Actually the unions all welcomed it, when announced. The primary principals called it a game changer. The PPTA still support it. The NZEI has backflipped, because they seem to be a branch of the Labour Party.

Gibson is to appear at a candidates’ meeting on Wednesday in Timaru. He would not be answering questions from “obsequious, sycophantic scumbags”, which he believed could be written by his opponent, National’s Jo Goodhew.

Between Steve Gibson in Rangitata and Gordon Dickson in Selwyn, there seems to be something in the water down there. Or more a reflection that Labour’s support and membership has collapsed outside the big cities.