This week has probably been a real tough week for John Banks after TVNZ and Mark Crysell spent three weeks of muck raking work at the behest of Len Brown’s Labour flunkies. Bernard Orsman’s article isn’t much better and does himself a dis-service shopping tawdry tales Labour has been trying to get in the media for 3 weeks. He should ask himself why he is studiously ignoring both Brown and Williams using council resources and the spamming of council staff on the beg for money. John Banks had to face something that no parent wants to face and he dealt with it admirably.
Non-political people have commented to me how well Banksie handled himself in the face of an obvious hit. They say that you just know that Alex Banks got a boot in the arse, one he deserved. Now political people are weighing in and that is why I say that Len Brown’s campaign is over.
John Banks is a polarising individual, admired by some, hated – not too strong a word – by others. For my part, I have not changed my view of the man I attacked on The Ralston Group, the talk-back host I deplored on Radio Pacific or the Mayor of Auckland in his previous incarnation. But either he has changed or I have. I suspect it’s the former. Certainly the person I have got to know in the past fortnight is a very fine man indeed. Or maybe there are two John Banks, two sides to the one man – the father and the politician perhaps. I’d be happy to have the father continue as Mayor.
That people is an endorsement. Not only is it an endorsement it is an endorsement from Brian Edwards. That was the end paragraph. Now read this from the middle of the post.
Ten days ago I was one of five speakers at an Auckland Mayoral Fathers’ Breakfast at Sky City organised by Parents Inc., the organisation founded by Ian Grant. Each of us had seven minutes to give an inspirational address on fatherhood to the 750 men present. The Mayor of Auckland, formally hosting the event, spoke first.
I’ve heard a lot of speeches in my time and few have been memorable. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the seven minutes in which John Banks held that audience in the palm of his hand, enthralled. He did not, as his advisors have suggested, talk about his own traumatic childhood. He talked about the troubled kids he has met in the course of his job; kids on drugs, kids in trouble with the law, kids in borstals and prisons, lost boys and girls. A common theme, especially among the boys, he observed, was the absence of a father in their lives. These were boys without role models, boys who didn’t know how to be men. Fathers mattered and fathers had a responsibility to teach their kids the difference between right and wrong.
Delivered entirely without notes, the short address was spellbinding, extremely moving, and entirely met the inspirational criteria laid down by the breakfast’s organisers. When he returned to the table, I said to him, ‘If you could talk like that during your campaign, you would certainly be the first Mayor of the Super City.’
When the illuminati of the left feel so compelled to write posts such as this then you realise very quickly that Len Brown’s campaign is over. When Brian Edwards puts a spike in that hard you KNOW Len Brown’s campaign is over.
