Kennedy Graham punished for being right

Stuff reports:

The Green Party has rejected Kennedy Graham’s request to be put back on the party’s list following Metiria Turei’s resignation.

Graham and fellow MP David Clendon earlier this week resigned at short notice from the party’s 14-member caucus over the former Greens co-leader’s benefit fraud admission. The men had threatened to quit if the co-leader didn’t resign. 

But their colleagues rallied around Turei, voting on Tuesday to block the pair from future caucus and strategy meetings and to remove them from the party list ahead of the election. 

On Wednesday, Turei did step down, saying the “unbearable” scrutiny of her family was too much. 

The scrutiny she made a deliberate decision to expose them to. And the scrutiny being that she implied the father’s side of the family never supported her, and she resigned when they contacted media with the truth.

In a statement on Saturday morning, the party said it had declined Graham’s request to return as a list candidate for next month’s election. 

“After careful consideration of the facts and Kennedy’s submission, the Executive concluded that he had breached the Party’s Candidate Code of Conduct in a serious manner, and therefore decided to exclude Mr Graham from the Party’s pool,” the statement said. 

He’s being punished for being honest enough to say thet Metiria’s leadership was no longer tenable. The rest of the caucus (bar Clendon) had their ideological blinkers on and couldn’t accept the reality.