The National Party is now in full Sergeant Schultz mode saying that they know nothing after Jami-Lee Ross revealed in parliament that the National Party has taken foreign cash from Chinese Communist Party linked people, and worse for them, the SFO has traced the money flow back to China.
As Anne-Marie Brady points out, the donations outlined by Jami-Lee Ross in parliament have not been listed anywhere on the National Party’s donations returns. The National Party’s response is to sound remarkably like Sergeant Schultz:
Jami-Lee Ross can say these things because he is protected by parliamentary privilege, but what he had to say is nothing short of a bombshell for the National Party who have been studiously ignoring him and trying to sweep all their muck under the rug. What they have forgotten about Jami-Lee Ross is that he was integral in raising money for the party, has done that ever since he became an MP and is responsible for facilitating more than a third of the National Party’s donations in any given year. National threw him in front of a train and now he’s throwing them under the train.
National’s caucus can thank Simon Bridges and especially Paula Bennett for the predicament they now find themselves in. This is hardly a brilliant start to the election campaign, being accused, with plenty of evidence to support those accusations, that National has sold out to the Chinese Communist Party. Worse still, was that it was begun and expanded under John Key.
As we have outlined over the past week Chinese interests have infiltrated New Zealand politics. In a way, and should he be proven correct, Jami-Lee Ross drained a swamp yesterday. My opinion of him has changed for the better as a result.
The National Party have been caught out. They’ve made out that they are as pure as the driven snow. The reality is that from John Key to Bill English, to Simon Bridges with able assistance from Todd McClay, Peter Goodfellow and Paula Bennett, they have become nothing less than shabby shills for the Chinese Communist Party. They are a bunch of grubby little chancers who have pretended that they have had New Zealand’s best interests in mind when in fact they were prepared to sell out the principles of the National party and the members in the pursuit of power.
Jami-Lee Ross also outlined that Labour may well be complicit in laundering dirty Chinese cash from the patient zero of the Donorvirus, Zhang Yikun. They aren’t off the hook either.
There is a fetid, corrupt swamp that needs draining, and it needs draining fast. National’s caucus can pull the plug on the swamp by saying enough is enough and removing both Paula Bennett and Simon Bridges. It is their ill-considered actions that have landed the party in this quagmire. Peter Goodfellow has presided over all of this, helped cover up some of it, and therefore the party needs to remove him too.
Jami-Lee Ross really is a whistleblower and he’s blown time on National’s leadership.
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