Having been subjected to nasty and vicious attacks from the supporters of the Labour First Clark/Peters Axis (PM's Office, and Chris Trotter), Matthew Hooten has responded with an intensly personal response. This is a must read.
First, yes, I do believe that Winston Peters is an evil influence on New Zealand politics and the use of the phrase “axis” was entirely deliberate, chosen as being more appropriate than “allies” or even “bloc” for the regime he sustains.
Clark too is an extremely dangerous individual. Those of you who work at Parliament should go down to the Select Committee Room on the ground floor of old Parliament Buildings which has all the photos of all the female MPs who have ever been elected to our Parliament. You’ll see Marilyn Waring, Fran Wilde, Ruth Richardson, Jenny Shipley, Ruth Dyson, Katherine Rich and so on. All of them look like regular people, happy to be in Parliament. But take a look at the photo of Clark. As an MP I have worked with has told me: “I sit in that Select Committee Room and stare at those eyes. Because I have seen those eyes before. But only in the heads of fellow trade ministers in governments where the leader of those governments is a documented killer.”
Clark has dictatorial tendencies. She has marched through the institutions. She has improperly brought the civil service under her control, including, most outrageously, the police. She has stolen taxpayers’ money for her election campaigns, deliberately broken our election spending limits, run filthy fear campaigns such as the letters to state housing tenants saying they would be evicted under a National Government, told lies about all this, and rammed through retrospective legislation to legalise her own staff’s and party’s crimes.
Constitutionally, she is far worse than Muldoon, who people like Chris would eagerly have called a fascist in the early 1980s.
The Clark/Peters Axis? You bet.
