Hypocrisy in Mt Roskill

The Herald reports:

Labour has claimed the first dividend from its agreement with the Green Party after the Green Party decided not to contest any Mt Roskill byelection.

Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei said today the Greens would not stand in a byelection in Mt Roskill should current MP Phil Goff win the Auckland mayoralty.

“The Mt Roskill by-election will be closely contested, and we don’t want to play any role in National winning the seat.”

However, she said it did not have a position on whether it would endorse Labour’s candidate Michael Wood or actively encourage Green supporters to vote for him.

It is the first ‘deal’ in an electorate under the agreement between Labour and the Greens to campaign together more closely and work to increase the centre-left vote.

Such huge hypocrisy.

Labour has spent years decrying so called dirty deals in Epsom and Ohariu where National made it known it was happy to get the party vote only. The loudest critic of these was Labour’s Epsom candidate Michael Wood.

But now he is standing for Labour in Mt Roskill and they have done a mega dirty deal (their term) and have arranged for the Greens to not even stand a candidate.

I don’t have a problem with such a decision per se. The problem I have is their blatant hypocrisy in loudly condemning such deals for years and then doing it themselves.