Remember the fuss when Judith Collins called out Arena Williams over her tweet about her father now being able to heat his room and pay for his prescriptions? The media covered Judith’s ‘mean’ tweet, but didn’t actually look into the circumstances of Arena’s father. We did that.

Arena Williams also managed to get herself fact checked by Twitter, showing her claim was a lie in the first place.

Now, it has been revealed, by none other than Arena Williams herself, that her father actually lives with her and her husband. In a soft article in Woman’s Day, which really should carry an authoriser statement from the Labour Party, she reveals:

Having her father living with them for the past five years has made for some precious memories. No one knows exactly how old Haare is because he doesn’t have a birth certificate, but Arena guesses he’s in his late eighties or early nineties.

Woman’s Day

Arena Williams must have known this was going to come out. The lead time for articles and publishing schedules means that this interview was already in the can when she tweeted about her father’s allegedly precarious financial position.

That means that her tweet was particularly stupid, on her part, and demonstrably false in the extreme.

Not only was the lie about prescription charges deliberate, but also the circumstances of her father were false. Arena Williams claimed that he couldn’t afford to heat “his bedroom”. That would be the bedroom in the house in which she lives in with her husband. Members of Parliament earn, and I use that term rather loosely, between $160,000 and $180,000 per annum, and her husband, a former lawyer at Meredith Connell and now Wayne Brown’s Chief of Staff, would be pulling in around the same amount. Between the two of them they are pulling in close to $400,000 and they aren’t heating her father’s bedroom? How cruel is that?

Unless of course Occam’s razor applies and the simplest explanation is the most correct explanation. That is that Arena Williams lied about everything, from her father being in such a precarious position that he had to choose to either heat his room or pay for his prescriptions, to the household situation, to the actual cost to him of prescription charges.

This should be a big story: it certainly would be had a National MP shamelessly used their father of indeterminate age to pimp a political story that is now exposed as an orchestrated litany of lies. No, instead we get a soft story in Woman’s Day, republished in the NZ Herald, which ran the hit job on Judith Collins and ran a story where Arena Williams gaslit us all saying the point she was trying to make was that he would never have to make that choice, “even if he moved”. Was she saying she was booting him out of his cold bedroom?

The media are paid propagandists for this Labour Government so don’t expect to read this story elsewhere.

What we now know, however, is that Arena Williams is a shameless liar.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...