There is an unwritten rule that you don’t bring family members into the political debate. If you do you run the risk of blowback on you, and worse, on them. They didn’t choose to be involved and every time I see it happen I cringe. After the budget, that is exactly what Arena Williams did: she brought her father into the political debate.
This caused a massive blowback on her because she was dead wrong and also she essentially lied about the situation of her father. It was disinformation, deliberately false, but stated as fact.
It resulted in Arena Williams getting slapped with a Twitter Community Notice correcting her. Judith Collins gave her a slap too:
Naturally the propagandists at the NZ Herald attacked Judith Collins rather than disinformation super-spreader Arena Williams, and they didn’t correct Arena Williams’s false claims.
But that is by the by. The sad fact is, by involving her father, Sir Haare Williams, a former vice-president of the Labour Party, a broadcaster and a Te Reo advocate who was knighted by this current Labour Government, it brought focus on to his situation to see if Arena Williams’s claims held water.
In her original tweet, she claimed that her father would now be able to heat his room. A strange claim, but a claim made nonetheless. The problem for Arena Williams is that Sir Haare Williams lives in Hillpark, the best suburb in Manurewa, on a popular street. Plus the house he lives in has a CV of $1,295,000. That CV is a couple of years old and may well be a couple of hundred grand short of reality but the point is that Arena Williams made out her father is so impoverished he had to choose between paying for medication or heating his room.
She also mentioned the local pharmacist. Now I happen, by pure coincidence, to have been raised in my preschool and primary school years in the very street that Sir Haare Williams lives on. In fact, just six houses away. So I know the area and I know how far it is to the chemist. It is just 290m: literally around the corner.
The sob story is falling apart faster than a Kmart dresser.
A quick look in the property records and on Google Maps shows that the allegedly impoverished father of Arena Williams also has a swimming pool. How someone who is struggling to heat a room or pay for prescriptions is able to afford to keep the pool in tip-top condition is beyond my grasp. So, too, his having to pay rates on a $1.3m house.
It is now probably safe to say that Arena Williams has her pants on fire.
Then there is his Jaguar motor vehicle parked in the carport. Jaguars are not known for their fuel economy. So there is that, too.
Arena’s little tear jerker has now turned her into the political equivalent of a political Meghan Markle or a Jussie Smollett. In other words, her tweet was a shabby, dishonest, virtue signal that has seen her busted for lying and shamelessly and falsely using the personal circumstances of her father.
Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1808, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”
The question now is what on earth are the media doing instead of outing a proven liar?
They seem to be looking everywhere except at Arena Williams.
You don’t bring family members into political debates, especially when you misrepresent the truth and reality of their situation.
But the great thing is, Arena Williams has proven that Labour’s policy is designed to ensure family members of MPs, who have a $1.3 million house with a pool and drive Jaguar cars, can save $100 a year.
Labour, helping the poor…oh wait!
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