The Panama Papers continue to simmer and National’s greatest fear is that the public will link tax-dodging to the current government. (Up-coming political polls will be interesting to see.) But that is not all that National’s hierarchy has to worry about.
It appears that there are now two supporters for Mark Weldon;
Listen to Hooton’s participation on the panel, and compare his measured commentary on Radio NZ versus his irrational sniping on Twitter. It’s almost as if we’re seeing and hearing two completely different Matthew Hootons from Parallel Universes; our Earth and Earth 2.
Most folk won’t remember who Ken Shirley was, prior to his current ‘gig’ as CEO of the Road Transport Forum (RTF), representing road transport interests since July 2010.
Against a swirling back-drop of revelations surrounding the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca, John Key’s lawyer, Ken Whitney, then-Revenue Minister Todd McLay, the IRD dumping a review into foreign trusts, and New Zealand’s reputation for offering secret trusts as part of the tax-haven industry, TVNZ’s Greg Boyd interviewed former Revenue Minister, Peter Dunne for Q+A on 2 May;
So by the numbers, for this year;
TVNZ’s Q+A on Sunday 24 April featured an interview with Climate Change Minister Paula Bennett. Her responses were further evidence that National was increasingly unable (or unwilling) to cope with the growing threat of climate change.
Whilst details are hard to confirm by the very nature of these highly secretive deals – many made informally – the questions arising from these (and other) murky ‘arrangements’ is sufficient to underscore a recent downgrading of our Transparency International Corruption Perception Index;
As I have pointed out in previous blogposts, when threatened with bad headlines or a scandal of some description, National’s automatic defense is generally to default to one of three* deflections;
Blame previous the Labour government
Release story on ‘welfare abuse’
Blame Global Financial Crisis or similar overseas event
There are plenty of past instances of this kind of strategy.
that was then, this is now