Julie Anne-Genter’s ‘secret letter’ controversy is a Hooton/Bishop con job
You can always tell how much a political narrative is bullshit by how shrill Hooton gets and the nonsense over Julie Anne-Genter’s ‘secret letter’ has reached such a fever pitch, only dogs can hear Hooton screaming that she must resign.
The beauty with a Hoots conspiracy is that you get him espousing it behind the Herald Paywall while his feminine side, Ben Thomas, spins it on the Spinoff.
It really says how low the threshold for scandal is under this Government and how easily Chris Bishop can use his common bloke schtick to con journalists into believing his claims of a scandal.
I like the good old days when Governments used deceit to pass mass surveillance laws, smeared leaders of the Opposition in tandem with the SIS and engaged in a plethora of dirty politics, (many of which included Matthew Hooton at their centre). To listen to Hoots and Bishop cry out about transparency over a bloody letter is a joke looking for a punchline.
Here are the two reasons this is all bullshit.
1: We all know what Genter would have said! Public Transport! Public Transport! Public Transport! She wants more public transport, and of course she would have advocated for it, pretending this is some great mystery is eye rolling. We need more public transport and if taking a great bloody stick to that process is required, great! Seeing as the Bus Service in Wellington is a national disgrace, more public transport is desperately needed.
2: The idea that Genter would have any impact on a decision being decided by Phil Twyford is absurd. Phil Twyford believes that Phil Twyford is the smartest person in the room and while that is technically true, it is an incredibly underwhelming threshold.
Twyford listens only to Twyford and Genter is so obscenely transparent about her righteous love for public transport that pretending she is hiding something is as believable as Trump being a fan of gender binary activism.
This would be a storm in a teacup if the teacup was the size of an atom.
Yes Hootten/Bishop ‘dirty politics saga 2’ has now ‘entered the ring’ as the replacement for the now defunct”whaleoil’.
Do you see the connection?
If it is a con job as described by you, why can’t the minister release it and shut everybody up? Remember Jacinda promised that this will be open and transparent government
maybe she can’t recall we are use to can’t recall replies as we got it for 9 years while waiting for our brighter future
Maybe she can’t recall we are use to can’t recall replies as we got it for 9 years while waiting for our brighter future
I am one of many Wellingtonians who want to know the contents of Genter’s letter to Twyford.
The reason for that is the rumour doing the rounds, that she and another Green MP threatened to resign if the transport plan wasn’t watered down to her satisfaction. See this:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/114828737/city-councillors-claim-green-party-agreement-used-as-leverage-to-get-agreement-on-lets-get-wellington-moving
“It is understood Wellington Mayor Justin Lester told a number of city councillors Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter and another Green MP threatened to resign if councillors did not vote for the new mass transit plan and the Government would use the money elsewhere”
……….
“It revealed an extra Mt Victoria tunnel would not be built for at least 10 years, while a proposed second Terrace tunnel and reconfigured state highway under Te Aro were excluded altogether.”
Now here’s the thing. Even were it the case that we here were to reach public transport nirvana (assuming that our crappy bus service can be returned to its former robust self), we still need those tunnels and that undergrounding. The buses, light rail, evs, ubers, bikes all gotta go somewhere. Not to mention the cars that some of us need, on account of we’re older and less mobile, and thus find public transport variably inaccessible.
If Genter white-anted the plan that we need here, and most of us want, we are entitled to know about it. Might change the way some of us vote at the next election.
If – as she claims – the contents of the letter are unexceptionable, there should be no issue with its release.