By now everyone will have heard that the police have executed search warrants on Taito Phillip Field's home, electorate office, and Parliamentary offices. The latter is particularly interesting due to the interaction with Parliamentary Privilege. The freedom necessary for Parliament to do its job (and the bad history of the monarch trying to arrest "treasonous" MPs) has led to Parliament asserting its power over police operations within the Parliamentary precinct. There's a report on the draft agreement between the Speaker and Police Commissioner from the Privileges Committee here [PDF], but it doesn't seem to cover actual searches. The Speaker has therefore been forced to draw up an additional agreement, which seems to require that they be accompanied by Parliamentary Services staff. I'll try and get a copy and see whether it has anything interesting in it.
In the meantime, Field must be coming under intense pressure to resign, if only to avoid dragging his Labour colleagues even further into the muck. But given his past behaviour, I'm not holding my breath.
The stuff that has come out in recent days has been fairly damning of Field.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, I have to wonder if Lockwood really knows what he is doing? Anything that encourages or hastens a police prosecution will force Field to the conclusion that he has to resign from Parliament sooner or later. The Labour Party have a pretty easy get out of jail card here (the Police investigation. Like you say though, he's pretty thick skinned.
If Labour had an ounce of integrity they would expel Philip Field and stop relying on his proxy vote.
ReplyDeletePhilip Field was shown on TV footage contradicting his later testimony to the Ingram enquiry. How bad is that? Being caught, red-handed, lying to the enquiry into your own corruption !
Will Labour tolerate any rort, lie or corruption if it means they stay in office? Looks that way at the moment.
Like all good scandals, this has got muliple players all playing the game for their own reasons. For the National party its obvious. And its pretty clear what Olinda Woodroffe brief for her client has been - get him back into N.Z. by any means. She'll get him to make any statement she likes in the hope of provoking the government into allowing him into the country, so he can then play the immmigration service for years trying to stay. As far as I can see, whether or not Philip Field goes down is incidental to Olinda Woodroffe achieving her clients goal.
ReplyDeleteThe Labour Party in general and the 2 Hs in particular must be pretty gutted that they didn't manage to shut down all interest in Field with their toothless little inquiry. He's looking more and more corrupt and I would be very surprised if no one in the Labour Party knew about this before it went public.
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