Shots have been fired!
The PM wants voters to punish New Zealand First for Shane Jones’ comments about Indians.
My message to voters is this. In election year, the power now sits with you, you determine who is able to form government. And you have it within your power to decide what you make of those remarks as well.
That is strong from the PM.
This is, by the way, from an interview with the Indian Weekender, an Indian news website.
The PM’s argument is clearly that she can’t do anything about what Jones has said, so we as voters have to.
Logical conclusion from this is she wants New Zealand First, because that’s what will happen if Jones is gone.
Punishing Jones is punishing the whole party.
The party’s rating at 3%, there is a real chance that New Zealand first won’t make it back into parliament unless they win a seat.
And the only seat they have any chance of winning is Northland, the MP running there is Shane Jones.
I don’t blame the Prime Minister for wanting New Zealand First out.
They have pushed their behaviour to the absolute limit.
In the last month they have been unreasonable, they’ve threatened to kill off three government policies, light rail, electric vehicle subsidies and gun reform.
They’ve renewed their attacks on the Indian community.
Now I’m not passing judgement on whether any of that was wise.
But they have clearly pushed it too far with the PM and Labour.
Clearly she’s worried that she’s the one who’s going to be punished by voters who now think she’s weak because she doesn’t have the guts or ability to tell Jones off herself.
I would consider that to not be fair that I be punished for the opinions of others.
And quite frankly she and Labour should be punished.
You can’t go around saying you’re going to promote a kinder way of politics when you continue to retain in government a party that does the opposite.
The fascinating thing now is how is New Zealand first going to react to this.
The PM’s fired shots, are they going to fire back?
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