food irradiation

Matt McCarten : Goff falls in chal­lenge to show courage under blog­gers’ fire — It’s ironic that in the same week we com­mem­o­rate the courage of young men who died in bat­tle, our new Labour Party lead­ers hoisted up the white flag in Helen Clark’s vacant seat. It’s been an open secret for some time that Phil… [NZ Her­ald Pol­i­tics]

With­out men­tion­ing us, Matt McCarten has acknowl­edged that DPF and I have har­pooned Phil Twyford and may yet har­poon Mt Albert as well for Labour.

Inde­pen­dent ver­i­fi­ca­tion of a slay­ing is always most sat­is­fy­ing, more so than claim­ing the kill yourself.

McCarten accuses Phil Goff of extreme cow­ardice under fire, fire that was deliv­ered via the blogs. On reflec­tion it is hard to argue with McCarten’s analysis.

But in a stun­ning dis­play of polit­i­cal cow­ardice, the Labour Party national hier­ar­chy this week knee-capped Twyford. The polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion of one of their best and bright­est is one of the most dis­loyal and treach­er­ous polit­i­cal acts I’ve seen.

What is dis­heart­en­ing is that Labour’s action wasn’t from a place of prin­ci­pled strat­egy but the result of hys­te­ria gen­er­ated by their polit­i­cal opponents.

I salute the right-wing blog­gers, who mis­chie­vously insti­gated a desta­bil­is­ing cam­paign against Labour by writ­ing that National could win Mt Albert if Twyford was the Labour Party nom­i­nee. Twyford is a cur­rent list MP. Their genius was in point­ing out that if Twyford won — as was widely assumed — then Judith Tizard, as the next-highest place list can­di­date, would be enti­tled to return to Par­lia­ment to replace Twyford’s vacant list spot.

The blog­gers claimed that Twyford’s cam­paign would be over­shad­owed by the furore of the sup­pos­edly unpop­u­lar Tizard slip­ping back into Parliament.

Pri­vately, none of the blog­gers believed that their strat­egy would amount to much, but were incred­u­lous when cer­tain media play­ers started tak­ing it seriously.

What gob­s­macked the blog­gers par­tic­u­larly — and fatally for Twyford — was that the Labour Party pan­icked. There were even some attempts to force Tizard to step down off the list, which of course she wouldn’t.

Heh.….Are we now run­ning Labour’s strategy?

Per­haps the best line of all in the whole arti­cle is the last;

Richard Preb­ble once said to me that no politi­cian can make it with­out courage. In this respect, Goff — in his first test as leader — has failed. If I was a Labour MP I wouldn’t vol­un­teer to share a fox­hole with Goff when the shoot­ing starts.

Hard hats anyone?