Soper says Clark was smart

The Herald reports:

You can now understand why Helen Clark never embraced the Greens, how she would never entertain including them in a Government led by her.

They’re not only Green in name, they’ve shown themselves as political greenhorns.

Clark was smart. She knew the risks. Unlike Labour today who have an MOU with the Greens and say they are their preferred coalition partner which means a vote for Labour is a vote for having Greens in Government.

When Metiria Turei decided to fess up to benefit fraud just short of a month ago, to draw attention to poverty and how difficult it is to make ends meet on a benefit, she drew more attention to herself.

 

Unapologetic for breaking the law and giving her blessing to others who she says have no choice isn’t the sort of behaviour we expect from our lawmakers.

If she’s to be believed, it was on a taxi ride in Wellington that she reflected and decided to call it quits, saying the scrutiny of her family became all too much. What did she expect, of course her family, and her living circumstances when she was ripping off the benefit system, were going to come under scrutiny? For her to expect anything else is naive.

Soper was pretty much the first journalist to ask Turei questions about her circumstances and he basically got hissed at by the Green staffers. They were outraged that he would dare to ask questions of Turei around the father and the father’s family. Their view is that welfare is an entitlement and that’s it.

It was the nastiness of the Green staffers to Soper that got the backs of most of the gallery up, because they rightfully saw that if an MP does make assertions that they were forced to steal because of their circumstances, those assertions can’t be made unchallengable.

Now this fractured party is limping into the election with one leader, James Shaw, and with a party that makes the six leadership changes in the Labour Party since National came to power, look unified by comparison. It’s now on life support and Labour will surely now have to consider whether that memorandum of understanding it has with them could in fact end up being their death warrant.

Vote Labour and get Greens is not an attractive proposition.