Monday, October 09, 2006



Pure hypocrisy

National is accusing Labour of leaking the Auditor-General's report into the misuse of Parliamentary Services spending [audio] in order to "soften up the public" to its conclusions. Even assuming its true (the Sunday Star-Times piece in question seemed to be mostly speculation - hell, they even asked DPF for his opinion), for the past few months, National has been accusing the government of corruption based on... a leaked draft of the same report. So it's apparantly OK for them to leak to influence public opinion, but not for other people to do it. This is pure hypocrisy, and yet another example of National's "one law for all, for everyone but National" position.

Posted by Idiot/Savant at 10/09/2006 08:55:00 AM

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4 comments:

The more resilient claims of corruption arise from allegations of knowing overspending at the election (a corrupt practice under the electoral act) rather than mis-spending identified by the Auditor-General.

The claims of corruption that have stemmed from the Auditor-General's report (there are some they're just less resilient) have tended to be surrounding a potential abuse of power to retrospectively amend the law so money doesn't have to be paid back.

Suggestion that National leaked the draft seem a little misplaced. Each party only received the introduction to the draft report and the section applicable to them. The draft report for public consumption had more information in it that any one party officially had.

 Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 10/09/2006 09:09:00 AM

I/S:

Excuse me? While we're talking about pure hypocrisy, do we have any idea who leaked the A-G's draft report? As I understand it, over a hundred copies of that paper were out there - and National was far from the only party on the distribution list. AFAIK, only the A-G and the Speaker have copies of the final report.

Having said that, you do have a point: The stories I've read so far seem to be little more than speculation and a dash of pre-emptive spin from Labour no different from the standard line. While I find it hard to believe Wilson or anyone in the Speaker's Office would be stupid enough to leak the final report to anyone, there's been much about Labour's response to this whole issue that defies rational explanation.

 Posted by Craig Ranapia : 10/09/2006 11:21:00 AM

This is a bit OT but I was thinking the other day it would be noce to know which EB businesses had exemptions from employment legislation. Are you able to post a list from the act so that we the public can make our decisions on supporting their efforts, or otherwise?

 Posted by Anonymous : 10/09/2006 12:41:00 PM

IS,
your talking about politicians here.
you really do have unreasonable expectations.

GNZ

 Posted by Anonymous : 10/09/2006 01:36:00 PM

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