Judith Tizard

Dave Armstrong takes apart Labour and their pro tempore leader Phil Goff:

Last week I mistyped the Opposition leader’s name as Phil Goof. Given his recent form, my mistake may well go uncorrected by sub-editors. But can you really lump all Labour’s woes at the feet of Mr Goof? I don’t think so.

And that was just the second paragraph, there is more:

If Labour was a cricket team, it would be 60-7 chasing 260 to win with 30 overs to go. When Darren Hughes quit, I scanned the Labour list, desperately hoping someone like Richie McCaw may have put his name forward. No such luck. After Mr Hughes was Judith Tizard, Mark Burton and Mahara Okeroa. Jesus. There’s more talent in the Zimbabwe late order.

That’s the third paragraph, the hits just keep on coming:

The trouble with Mr Goff is the trouble with Labour – their legacy. Watch Alister Barry’s excellent documentary, Someone Else’s Country, and you’ll see Phil in the 1980s hysterically defending Rogernomics – a thirty-something, Treasury-crazed, moustachioed nut. By comparison, even Michael Laws comes off as compassionate in the documentary.

Today when Mr Goff talks about closing the gap between rich and poor, I simply don’t believe him. It’s like a newly reformed alcoholic trying to convince you that he now prefers the taste of tomato juice to tequila.

Labour spent nine long years largely trusting a free market “leave it to the unregulated banks” economic policy developed in Chicago and introduced to New Zealand by Roger Douglas.

The introduction of possums did more good for the country. Labour never restored Ruth Richardson’s benefit cuts and neo- Leftists like David Cunliffe (another name one must be very careful typing) happily existed for nine years in a government drier than a Hawke’s Bay chardonnay.

And speaking of Phil Goff’s legacy ,here is a bit of Youtube whimsy for you . I can’t confirm or deny whether this might be one of the campaigns Labour is considering for the election. It does however help to underline his extensive experience… as a lifelong politician.

NOTE: If you pause this clip at exactly the right moment (08 secs).  You will see an article headed: “Phil Goff – Big Hair, Bright Future.”
It starts - “Twenty years ago Phil Goff was hot.  So were VCRs, big hair, Hill Street Blues, and Duran Duran.”

Clearly us  bastards on the right of the blogosphere don’t give Phil credit for his extensive politcal legacy.

Looking at this video though, it”s his hair!

But back to Dave Armstrong for the last word:

If only there was the technology to morph different Labour politicians into one. Imagine a Labour leader with Jacinda Ardern’s looks, Trevor Mallard’s mongrel, Shane Jones’ blokie-ness, David Cunliffe’s intellect and Louisa Wall’s sporting ability. Trouble is, if you left it to Labour head office, you’d probably get an MP with Trevor Mallard’s looks, Jacinda Ardern’s mongrel, David Cunliffe’s blokie-ness, George Hawkins’ intellect and Judith Tizard’s sporting ability. But as any zoologist will tell you, there is no animal more ruthless than Labourite caucusi sniffing consecutive election defeats.

Despite no clear alternative, Labour’s caucus may soon say to its leader, as David Lange brilliantly called out to him in Samoan as he left for Apia, “fa Goff”.

The paid lap-bloggers at The Standard think that Labour’s crass manipulation of the MMP list system is “a quirk”.

Judith Tizard won’t take Labour’s vacant seat in Parliament. It’s the right thing to do. It’s only a quirk that we should be looking back to a list written in 2008 to fill a seat for 6 months now.

It might be a quirk but it is the law. The list that they now refuse to stand by is the same list they died in a ditch for and now it doesn’t suit they want very much to ignore it.

Russell Brown and Tim Watkin, both TVNZ bed-fellows rush to the defense of  Judith Tizard. Perhaps they consider it as thanks for all the patronage bestowed upon them when Judith was a Minister. Perhaps it is also payback for all that patronage that is seeing Tim Watkin manipulate the guest list for the panel on Q+A into a who’s who of the Labour party. So far we have seen Jon Johanssen as a regular, Andrew Little had numerous appearances and on her first day in teh job as Labour’s new president they draft in Moira Coatsworth. They even regularly have “Fat Tony” Mike Williams on. I don’t recall ever seeing Judy Kirk there or Peter Goodfellow. It seems that Q+A is fast becoming a leftist apologists wet dream.

TV3′s “Pedro” Gower however gets stuck in with some home truths about the Tizard Bomb.

Labour and Phil Goff got scared into defusing the Tizard bomb because of two right-wing bloggers.

That means Goff is scared of the blogs.

Yes, you heard me right: Goff’s office (aka the ‘Goffice’) and the Labour Party hierarchy decided their Judith Tizard strategy because of what they read on Kiwiblog and Whaleoil.

That means Labour is scared of the blogs.

Heh…our powers are immense. Bear in mind that during the height of the Richard Worth affair Phil Goff, who had been climbing into the affair boots and all refused to front on Closeup with me. The man who would be Prime Minsiter runs scared from bloggers..he ran in 2009 and he runs still. Pedro goes further:

Goff could have let Judith back in way back at the Mt Albert by-election or at least not been so dismissive of her. During our cup of tea last weekend, she told me she felt they were mean to her during the Mt Albert saga. If Labour had been nicer then, maybe she wouldn’t have pulled the latest tricks.

Instead, it’s become an issue. If she’d come back it would have been another test of Goff’s leadership, etc, etc.

So they had to manipulate the 2008 party list that was signed off by their party.

Goff even had to work together with Andrew Little (After the “President… Schmesident” debacle in the Hughes affair) to put the pressure on Tizard.

Forget all this talk about respecting decisions. Tizard’s got it right when she said Goff sounded like he was swallowing dead rats saying this. She’s on record with me saying he doesn’t like her and she doesn’t like him.

She would have been frozen out of the Caucus.

But anyway, Tizard got the upper-hand in the end and was able to put the boot in to Goff saying he’s not up to being Prime Minister a couple of times.

All because the Labour Party didn’t have the gumption to stare down two right-wing bloggers.

So that’s what’s led to this damaging tete-a-tete over the last week. Damaging for Goff, because even though the Tizard bomb has technically been defused its blown up in Labour’s face.

Chaos and Mayhem caused by two bloggers!

Cactus Kate meanwhile, approves whole-heartedly:

We all know the power of the Whaleoil in decimating political opponents online.

But it is hard not to be in absolute awe of Whaleoil’s latest achievement – rattling The T-Bomb Judith Tizard so much that she has quoted The Whaleoil effect as one of the main reasons she was thinking of returning to Parliament and with it troughing $160k. To apparently piss him off.

As Charlie Sheen would say WINNING! Except in our case we are.

via the tipline

Judith Tizard has announced on Q+A that she isn’t coming back. The threat of the Tizard Effect proves too much for Labour as they bully and cajole Tizard into standing aside. SHe has even accused Phil Goff of being a bully.

Instead of MMP delivering us the rightful person to parliament we now get the unedifying spectre of watching Labour manipulate the list so that 5 other people with more claim legally to a place in parliament get spiked so Louisa Wall can make her way back into parliament.

Tizard though has gone out with a bang accusing pretty much everyone, me included, of being bullies.

The lsit is perhaps the worst aspect of MMP and we can now all see why. Labour will now cynically manipulate the list and 5 people they told us were better than Louisa Wall will have to take one for team.

This is precisely why MMP needs to go and you should choose to Reject MMP in the referendum on November 26.

Judith Tizard is thinking of going back to parliament to “stick it up” David Farrar and me!

So she says she has reasons to return: unfinished business, the salary, supporting colleagues in their first opposition election, offering institutional knowledge and support. Acting as camp mother, essentially.

Those reasons … and to “stick it up them”.

Stick it up who? Phil Goff?

“I was actually thinking of David Farrar and Cameron Slater, et al. I wasn’t thinking about my former colleagues,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a particularly worthy thing to say, but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t.”

Bwahahahahah….my sides have been hurting from all the laughing I have been doing since reading this.

In the rest of the article Jono Milne looks at the reasons why the T-Bomb is despised in Labour.

It probably all goes back to union firebrand Matt McCarten. In the middle of a mayoral election campaign, he dubbed former Auckland Central MP Judith Tizard the Minister Responsible for Assisting the Prime Minister with her Handbag.

The label stuck. Lazy. Ineffectual. Would attend the opening of an envelope. Effete heir to a political dynasty, elevated into Parliament and a ministerial post purely because of her family’s friendship with Helen Clark.

McCarten is unrepentant. “She may have been maligned a little too harshly,” he says. “But her reputation for a lack of constituency work and follow-through was strong.”

In WikiLeaks diplomatic cables made public by the Herald on Sunday last year, United States Consul General John Desrocher wrote: “Tizard is increasingly dismissed as Clark’s (literal) bag carrier.”

Right-wing bloggers like David Farrar and Cameron “Whaleoil” Slater popularised the slander – but Labour leader Phil Goff seemingly swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Goff denies it but his electoral strategy of the past 2 years looks as if it has been dictated by one thing: the Tizard Factor. The party seems convinced that the public will not stomach Tizard’s return.

Her spectre loomed over potential byelections in Mt Albert, Mana, Manurewa, Te Atatu and Botany.

Two mentions in one article. Awesome. Now we await the Tizard Effect when she announces that she is returning to parliament.

The NZ Herald editorial is scathing of Judith Tizard, Labour and MMP.

The last thing the MMP electoral system needed this year was an episode to stir up discontent over list MPs. Yet that is exactly what is being provided by the posturing and prevaricating of Judith Tizard as she decides whether she will take the list seat vacated by Darren Hughes. The Labour Party hierarchy has made it clear it does not want the former minister back in Parliament.

But, as the unelected candidate highest on Labour’s 2008 party list, she is, by law, the first cab off the rank. With the retention of MMP the subject of a referendum at the time of the general election, this is far from a ringing endorsement of its merits.

Exactly, and bizarrely the vested interests of pro-MMP lobbyists seem tot hink that these same people rorting the list should also be the ones to reform MMP.

Labour has itself to blame for much of its embarrassment. Not only does it not want Judith Tizard back – and earlier went so far as to stop Phil Twyford standing in the Mt Albert byelection to prevent this – but it also does not want any of the next four candidates on its list, Mark Burton, Mahara Okeroa, Martin Gallagher and Dave Hereora. None are standing this year, so they would occupy the seat for just six months. Party president Andrew Little’s choice is Louisa Wall, who is next on the list after those fellow former MPs and has already been selected for the safe seat of Manurewa.

The editor is of course talking about the Tizard Effect or the Tizard Bomb. Labour are ardent supporters of MMP, yet they are quite willing to chuck the intent of the list system aside because it doesn’t suit them. That makes the MMP system highly suspect that it can be manipulated in such a manner.

It would be easy to say Labour should have seen this coming; that it erred badly in the drawing up of a list which saddled it with lacklustre choices in the event of incidents such as that allegedly involving Mr Hughes. But before the 2008 election, the party may have felt it would be wrong to demean and effectively disown sitting MPs by placing them far lower on its list. If the worst came to the worst, it could always appeal to them to stand aside for the good of the party.

Labour is not the first to seek to manipulate its party list this way. In mid-2008, the Greens tried to bring Russel Norman into Parliament by orchestrating the departure of MP Nandor Tanczos and asking Catherine Delahunty and Mike Ward, who were ahead of the co-leader on their party list, to stand aside. This came unstuck when Mr Ward stuck to his guns. Nonetheless, this blatant attempt at a rearrangement of convenience left a sickly taste, a state of affairs now rekindled by Labour.

Yes it does leave a sickly taste. We need to dump MMP, not reform it. If politicians can’t be trusted to stick to their lists then they can’t be trusted to reform MMP.

Issues surrounding list MPs, along with other aspects of MMP that have raised question-marks, will be examined by an Electoral Commission review if the public votes later this year to retain the electoral system. This would offer the chance to assess whether the situation in which Mr Little finds himself is reasonable.

On the one hand, the public votes for a party list, which, like policy, is announced before an election. It could be considered that a commitment has, therefore, been made to voters, and the list should be sacrosanct.

Yet is it fair that a party, and perhaps a new leader, should be shackled with unwanted people in what may be much-changed circumstances? Should, in fact, party lists be dispensed with after an election?

The common complaint about this would be that people could enter Parliament without any sort of public mandate. Party leaders would be free to exercise their whims. Equally, however, the present situation is unsatisfactory, and has blighted MMP at an inopportune time.

Louisa Wall is, clearly, the most suitable candidate to replace Mr Hughes. Something must change to ensure the country is spared a rerun of the current shenanigans.

That something is for us all to reject MMP.

via the Tipline

The Whale hears whispers that not all Labour MPs are against Judith “T-Bomb” Tizard returning. The T-Bomb has never gotten over her loss to Nikki Kaye whom she despises, and is already an active member of scum list MP Jacinda Ardern’s campaign committee.

The problem that is being whispered about is that Jacinda is not full-time in Auckland Central as she is also a scum list MP for Coromandel, Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty where she has an electorate office.

But if Judith returns to Parliament, with much fanfare, then she can donate all her parliamentary funding to Labour’s activities in Auckland Central, to try and beat Nikki Kaye. So if Judith returns, Jacinda will effectively gain double the taxpayer funding.

It seems My Little Pony is playing a nice double game, publicly supporting Phil Goff and privately supporting the return of the T-Bomb.

I give you the T-Bomb.

Phil Goff is in serious trouble. TV3 has quotes from senior Labour MPs about him, Farrar has helpfully transcribed them.

“I wouldn’t say I’m on Phil’s side but there’s no one else.”

“A few of the guys are rattled but not enough for a spill.”

“Come on Bro – who would want that job?”

Judith Tizard has heaped even more pressure on Goff by saying she will take a week to think about saying yes.

Meanwhile, former Labour MP Judith Tizard said last night she may take at least a week to decide if she wants to return to Parliament.

Party leader Phil Goff rang her yesterday to ask if she was planning to take the spot vacated by Hughes.

Tizard said she had “some unfinished business” and it would also be nice to say “stick it up you” to those who didn’t want her back.

Tizard plans to speak to friends, including former Prime Minister Helen Clark before she decides.

Asked if she supported Goff as leader, she said: “He has to decide if New Zealanders see him as a future Prime Minister. Phil could be a Prime Minister. I think a Prime Minister has to lead, has to be very fair, very generous. The question for Phil is if he can step up to that.”

Chris Carter has also piled into the scrap.

INDEPENDENT MP Chris Carter last night renewed his plea for Labour to replace leader Phil Goff, saying he “made a brilliant bureaucrat, but was never born to lead a country”.

“I’ve said all along, he is a hard worker but he ain’t got the X-factor,” Carter said.

A cabinet minister in Helen Clark’s government, Carter said Goff had demonstrated by his handling of the Darren Hughes affair that he was a “hopeless” and “indecisive” leader.

The Te Atatu MP was suspended last year for trying to undermine Goff, and his comments are sure to infuriate him when speculation over his leadership is mounting.

Even Matt McCarten says Goff has to go. Worse he says that Goff has blown any chance of saving Labour.

Why is the Labour opposition so hopeless? I had assumed that leader Phil Goff was competent enough, albeit lacking in charisma, to survive until the November election.

Now I don’t. His performance this week has been appalling.

I reluctantly swallowed the line that he was the best of the bunch after Helen Clark’s departure and was handed a poisoned chalice to do the best he could to rebuild his party.

In retrospect, maybe the Labour Party should have picked someone else as a break with the past.

I think that is what Labour are doing right now. There is blood in the water and Goff is a poor swimmer.

The handling of the Darren Hughes incident exposes Goff’s hypocrisy, his lack of judgment and, more importantly, his political smarts. You couldn’t get a more inept management of a crisis.

It was always a long shot for Labour to win November’s election, given the dismal polling of the party and their leader.

Goff’s mismanagement this week has taken any chance now. The Hughes affair will now dominate the media and cloud any positive profile Labour was sure to get in the period leading up to the Budget.

The failing economy and a record deficit budget is a gift for Labour. Goff had two weeks, for goodness sake, to work out a strategy over Hughes – and he blew it. He appeared confused and then changed his mind about Hughes staying on, probably under pressure from his caucus. Because of that, Hughes is certainly a goner whether he’s charged or not.

Labour has no chance in the next election if Goff remains. Labour needs more urgency, more mongrel and more seriousness about its obligations to its supporters who are really hurting under this Government.

They desperately need a circuit breaker.

I’m sad to have to say it but Labour needs to face the reality that its leader is now a liability and has to go.

Goff is a corpse, if Labour leave him stinking up the joint then they will start to smell like him. The birds are already picking out the eyes but once the maggots  start then the stench is really going to permeate everything about Labour.

Time for the undertaker and the body bags.