RODNEY HIDE: The Private Text That Triggered the Outrage Machine

Is it too soon to declare the brouhaha over Mr Stuart Nash’s text

theatre? And a political hit job?

I don’t know. Let’s test the water.

The text was private to former National Attorney General Mr Chris

Finlayson. Mr Finlayson chose to make the text public. I would have

thought making a private text public to embarrass and knobble the

sender would deserve its own opprobrium. It hasn’t. That said, few

people will now risk casual, unguarded messages to Mr Finlayson. And

no doubt people will think less of him.

We make use of traitors in war but we despise them nonetheless. It’s

the same with political operatives who breach confidences.

The substance of the message was straightforward. Nash wrote that the

new National MP for Napier Katie Nimon was the “laziest MP” he had

ever come across — “nice woman, but ill suited to the rigours of being

an electorate MP.” He also noted that she had taken nine months off

on full pay upon having her baby, returned briefly, then taken another

month off.

I took the claim that she was lazy as a general thing with the

time-off with her new born an additional charge. It wasn’t the time

off that made her lazy. After all, according to Mr Nash she is “ill

suited to the rigours of being an electorate MP.”

The time-off appears not in dispute. And it was not Parental Leave

which is capped at less than a quarter of an MP’s salary. Ms Nimon

kept her full Parliamentary salary.

The suitability of someone for the role of Napier MP is something Mr

Nash is well qualified to comment upon: he was that MP for 9 years.

I can also imagine disgruntled Napier voters expressing their concern

to Mr Nash. They elected Ms Nimon expecting a full-time

representative, especially when the great bulk of them work far more

onerously and under far less generous conditions than their MP and

then turn to their MP when in desperate need. I for one would be

disgruntled. Observing that extended absence from the job has

consequences is not automatically sexism. It is a statement about the

nature of the role.

Yet the reaction was pure theatre. The louder one condemned Mr Nash,

the more one was deemed to care about women. The actual work of an

electorate MP -- casework, local advocacy, consistent presence -- was

sidelined.

That Ms Nimon is lazy appears also not in dispute. The best her

defenders could say was that in those months off she had turned up to

events with her baby. The defence served only to reinforce Mr Nash’s

point. It was not like Ms Nimon was taking the opportunity to rewrite

the tax code or write a treatise for Parliament on how only women can

birth a baby.

Mr Nash’s mistake was not to to point out that an MP is lazy and has

taken months off parliamentary work. The problem was, the MP was a new

mum. That’s the heresy. One can have a baby while the Prime Minister

and the sacred narrative insists the role is unaffected.

And so we can’t have an honest debate about hiring women and men and

the cost to business of paid parental leave. That would be

misogynistic. I note that National is now riding the political wave

to extend parental leave.

Oh, and none of this brouhaha was happenstance. Mr Nash was not about

to win the seat of Napier but he would have won sufficient votes from

Ms Nimmon to lose her her seat. She has a better chance with Mr Nash

off the ballot.

What we witnessed was a cool, hard political assasination co-ordinated

through the National Party aided and abetted by the New Zealand media

party. The good people of Napier voted for Mr Nash three elections in

a row. The political machinery denied them the opportunity to vote

for him a fourth time.

I close without comment observing that it was National’s 2023 campaign

chair Mr Chris Bishop who did an excruciatingly bad job on camera

feigning no knowledge of the text -- and who then proceeded

immediately to put the boot into Mr Nash the harshest.

Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader