More “Smear” Accusations
David Farrar has an interesting thread on Kiwiblog (PM Accuses Auditor-General of Smearing Labour). Based on something he picked up out of his comments section, the article discusses the Prime Minister’s latest attack on the Auditor-General. On Close Up last night she charged the Auditor-General with “smearing the reputation of [the Labour] party.”
This is classic Helen Clark. Whenever she’s confronted with her own wrongdoing, her tactic is to try and confuse the issue by conflating it with something else.
When accused of illegally taking public money to fund her election campaign, the only thing she’ll talk about is other people spending their own money voluntarily on someone else’s campaign.
When the Auditor-General rightly criticises Labour’s election misspending she calls it a “smear”, trying to make it sound like some tacky tabloid scandal rather than a serious charge about Labour’s cavalier attitude to public money with the consequent questions about her fitness to govern.
Over the last week we’ve seen what real smearing is about and people have rightly recognised it as dirty and irrelevant to the real questions. Clark’s accusation of “smearing Labour” is an attempt to make the Auditor-General’s findings sound as disreputable as the contents of Investigate. It’s another example in a long line of trying to confuse fact with rumour, good with bad, relevant with irrelevant, voluntary with compulsory, democracy with dictatorship.