Watkins on Labour’s smear campaign

Tracy Watkins writes:

Personal, nasty, grubby – Labour’s attack on National leader Christopher Luxon over women’s access to contraception tells you everything you need to know about the ground on which the election campaign will be fought.

Stupidly, I was hoping that with so many big issues for us to grapple with this election the campaign would be a fair fight on real issues – the economy, immigration policy (suddenly at never-before-seen record levels), infrastructure, education, hospital and cancer waiting lists to name a few.

But in just two social media posts, Labour blew me out of the water.

The first was by Labour’s campaign chair Megan Woods – so a pretty clear steer on the type of campaign she intends running – likening National’s stance on prescription charges to the dystopian Margaret Atwood novel​ The Handmaid’s Tale​, in which women are forced to bear children for the nation of Gilead​.

Woods was called out for dirty politics. But that didn’t deter Andrew Little, who took it to even more ridiculous heights, claming in an Instagram post: “Labour decriminalised abortion; National want to stop women’s access to contraception. Disgusting.”

In those two sentences, Little sought to plumb the depths of the culture wars consuming the US and elsewhere, and drag New Zealand politics down to its basest level.

These are not posts by junior staffers. This is senior Labour Cabinet Ministers bringing out the smear machine because they know that is all they have left.