Clare Curran has been called many things, but certainly never competent.
Today she has displayed exactly why this is the case. The Labour Party techtard has scored yet another own goal.
Once again, Curran has written a letter of complaint making all sorts of wild allegations, only to have it flat out rejected.
She has been in a flap that telecommunications companies are colluding with the Government over the price people pay for copper broadband.
My spies tell me that Curran shopped the story to a number of journalists in the press gallery but was shot down by everyone she approached.
And when none of the press gallery journalists would touch the story, it appears that Curran turned to her future press secretary, Tom Pullar-Strecker.
But even he couldn’t bring himself to push Curran’s lines and ended up writing a story that smacks the Dunedin South MP in the chops for trying to push an angle that would have made him look like a right plonker.
“The Commerce Commission has rejected Labour’s concerns that a failed industry effort to broker a deal over the price Chorus could charge for copper broadband amounted to collusion.”
The highly-respected Commerce Commission chair Mark Berry confirmed that Curran is nuts.
“Berry said the commission understood that telecommunications companies had had discussions about the wholesale price of copper broadband. But he said the commission did not believe the talks breached the Commerce Act, since pricing was regulated and the discussions were “limited to encouraging the minister for communications and information technology to legislate for a different regulated [wholesale broadband] price”.
“As such, telecommunications companies cannot themselves fix, control or maintain the regulated price,” he said.
So Curran, who sees herself as a future ICT Minister, thinks that telco companies can just have a chat amongst themselves and set the prices. This is the type of intellect that the industry has to look forward to if the Labour/Greens form the next government.
My spies also tell me, that by making these false allegations, Curran has managed to piss off the entire telco industry. And the press gallery has reinforced why they run the other way when they see Curran approaching them.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not the first time Curran has been forced to run away with her tail between her legs after making false allegations.
Last year she wrote to the Auditor General moaning about the appointment of the Telecommunications Commissioner. Not surprisingly, her claims came to nothing and she was left red-faced.
Perhaps next time, she will write to Mickey Mouse and ask him to investigate the Labour Party.
As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.
They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.
He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.
Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.
To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.
