Photo Ross Giblin via Dominion Post
Like every other hack in the country Soper has taken the cudgels to Metiria Turei. In an online Herald editorial entitled ‘Now you can understand why Helen Clark never embraced the Greens’, he clinically dissects the former Green Co-Leader’s revelation of her criminal past and her subsequent behaviour.
Like most of the recent comment from the Fourth Estate on this topic it’s self-righteous and unkind.
Two photographs of Turei accompany the text. In one she looks relatively cheerful; in the other utterly despairing. I can’t say who chose the two pics, but they seem designed to illustrate the story of Turei’s downfall.
In a broadcasting career spanning more than half a century I have never called myself a journalist. In the first place I have no journalistic qualifications. In the second I’m a bit too sentimental, too easily moved.
So my reaction to Soper’s piece, no tougher than many of the editorials and comments about Turei written by his colleagues, is to ask: isn’t enough enough? We’ve got the message: Metiria Turei did a bad thing. Move on for god’s sake!
Had she quit politics, that would be a reasonable request. But we all know she’s stepped down as co-leader. She will still run for the Greens in the election, and you can bet dollars to a knob of goat poo that she expects to be back in parliament after the election as a co-leader with a “new mandate”.
MMP being what it is, there is nothing we can do about it.
Unless the Greens fail to get to the 5% mark.
And that would be mercy heaven-sent for all involved. Even for Brian, as he will no longer need to contemplate grumpy old white men beating up on little brown girls whose only crime was to have the brilliant forward planning to rip off the taxpayer and her family twenty years in advance so she could use it as an object lesson for the betterment of all starving babies in New Zealand. Perhaps we just need twenty years to realise it.