I feel like people hold different political parties to different standards depending on whether they like the party. What Turei did was wrong, and she is the only one tainted by that. If the Greens had handled her situation the same way they would demand of a party they didn’t like, I wouldn’t be criticizing the whole party. The Greens thought she could still be a minister in a Labour/Greens government as well as remain as co-leader. They wouldn’t have accepted that from a National MP in the same situation. Then she said she wouldn’t be a minister but would remain co-leader but she didn’t think it was fair she couldn’t be a minister. When she eventually withdrew from the co-leadership she said it was because her family was getting a hard time. She still thought she should be able to carry on as uf nothing happened. There was still no personal insight she was wrong. The party supported whatever stance she took.

Personally, I was very disappointed in the party. I don’t vote for them, but I thought they were better than that.

So you’re saying the whole party is corrupt because you think Turei was a bit disingenuous? You’ve got to distinguish between Turei and her party here. I agree that they handled the fallout badly but you’d be more correct if you called that incompetent rather than corrupt. Everything happened out in the open.

I found a video of a chimp charmed by i-pad tricks — don’t know if Apple has used this as an ad, but it’s perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8NRh9UI1aQ.

The colors produced by the F22 in yesterday’s post were a treat for my eyes. So beautiful. And if I could embroider, I’d make an embroidered pillow with that “wish upon a star” quote. Dead stars. Dead dreams. That says it all.

I was also trying to make the point that they mostly change colour, but they’re still ON the trees.

Having said that, I grew up in a city that was really windy in the autumn, and until I moved away I’d never experienced the beauty of an autumn with all the beautiful colours. The leaves were gone from the trees as soon as they changed colour. I suppose it would have been fair to call it “fall” there.

😀

The problem I have with Meteria Turei is not so much what she did, but that she thought it should have no effect. If any National MP had done what she did there would have been a widespread scream for his/her resignation. In the past even the suggestion of wrongdoing has seen MPs from all parties stand down, and they’ve resigned if it’s proven true. Turei thought it should make no difference whatsoever – that her confession was enough. It seems clear to me that’s why the Greens lost so much support.

As for the Bill English thing, I’ve never been able to work out exactly what happened there. Barclay is gone, and so he should be. He clearly isn’t fit to be an MP. There was a gag order controlling what English said which confuses the matter and I think that’s a big part of the problem. He had been friends with the woman concerned for years and we don’t know what they talked about or whether it’s relevant but the Police know and are okay with it. He did lose public support over it, but what got him through was his strong reputation for integrity which both colleagues and opponents in the House agree he has. In all the coverage I saw, no one was able to definitively say what he did wrong – it was all allusion. That seems to be the difference. “A bad look” as Corin Dan always called it, and it definitely was, but there doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong on English’s part.

Personally, I’d always seen the Greens as a party of integrity and I found the way they handled Turei’s revelations extremely disappointing. She herself was quite clear that she didn’t think it should make a difference. It felt like she thought the rules shouldn’t apply to her. It also seemed like new things kept coming out – that her confession wasn’t full and frank. She left out the stuff she couldn’t justify, such as that concerning her mother and her child’s father.

Even Winston Peters handled the screw up with his super better.

Peters lost his electorate seat, which he only won in a bi-election, but instead of recognizing he’s not that popular he blames dirty campaigning.

“…was that it is a shield bug, not a beetle?”

That bugged me, too. 😉