National’s Bad News
The travails of National MP Sam Uffindell are bad news for the National party in more ways than one. The obvious question is as to how an applicant with such a disreputable history could have secured the nomination as the National candidate in the Tauranga by-election. National’s vetting procedures seem to have been so seriously deficient, if not non-existent, as to suggest something approaching contempt for the voters of Tauranga.
Even worse, the candidate’s personal history reeks of privilege and entitlement. Bullying is almost always the prerogative of those who think they are better than others and who also believe that their special status means that they are untouchable. It doesn’t require a great mental leap to conclude that those are precisely the qualities that one might expect to find in the National party.
The reaction of most voters to the Uffindel saga shows that, in a democracy, the liberties and indulgences taken and shown by the rich and powerful are not acceptable in those we engage to govern us. If they can’t govern themselves, how can they expect to be trusted to govern us?
1 Comment
I like your claim (‘mental leap’) that what the MP for Tauranga exhibits manifests what’s in the National Party writ large. Yet listen to Newstalk ZB and you hear the presenters’ rationalising away a young man’s peccadilloes, a minor blip in party selection procedure, and the talkback callers echoing this minimisation of a psychologically moribund party. We now have our own version of Fox News. Terrifying for democracy, this deliberate creation of an air waves echo chamber.