This has to be the sledge of the day.
It is from Judith Collins, of course.
“Most people in New Zealand don’t know who Iain Lees-Galloway is, they don’t know who Andrew Falloon is and mostly they are saying: ‘why aren’t you getting back to your job of sorting out our roads’?”
It’s a great sledge because the Government cancelled heaps of National’s roading projects, told us they were going to fix everything, promised the earth regarding public transport in Auckland and delivered not one millimetre of anything useful.
To cap it all off she outmanoeuvred Jacinda Ardern in the game over sleazy MPs and forced her to sack a minister.
Heather du Plessis-Allan explains about that:
Does anyone actually believe the PM fired Iain Lees-Galloway over just an affair?
Come on.
This affair’s been known about for months down in Wellington. Even senior Labour MPs knew about it for months, and did nothing.
Unless there is more to this, it looks like he’s been fired because the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was politically snookered. She couldn’t do anything other than fire him because she had to match new National leader Judith Collins.
She gave Collins dirty information last week. Collins was decisive. Andrew Falloon lost his job.
So, tit for tat. Collins gave the PM dirty information yesterday. Ardern needed to look decisive too. She had to fire him.
She basically got snookered by a Collins power play.
Which is why Jacinda Ardern looks really shitty at the moment and refuses to even say Judith Collins’s name in some sort of petulant “Voldemort” play, which just shows the lack of grown-up thinking on the part of Ardern.
This is the sort of stuff kindy kids do when they think someone is being mean to them.
Jacinda Ardern thought she’d have plain sailing until the election, and last week she got a bloody nose, and this week, a broken nose.
There will be a few MPs pretty worried right now about the precedent this has set for their own careers.
Ardern has now set an unbelievably low bar for her own MPs. I would not want to take a bet on who’s next, but I might wager a good Mexican takeaway on who else might be somewhat nervous.
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