'Our girl' scalped

The demise of Kiri Allan draws sad and sadly predictable reactions from her political peers.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

Paddy Gower, TV3’s former political editor and now roving chief oversharer, was recently interviewed by former leader of the opposition Simon Bridges for his Generally Famous podcast. In this interview Gower spoke about his former career as ahead hunter. I kind of thought that I really needed to take out an opposition leader, you know, and David] Shearer was the one that was there.”

He was after scalps. He didn’t view politicians as people but as amorphous”. So he was chasing people who to him, as ajournalist, had no human form? This sounds as though he was playing a video game where you shoot people dead, but it doesn’t matter because they’re not real people. He admitted sometimes forgetting which stories were about working fora greater good and which were designed to take those scalps.

This is a dispiriting story. As is this: a scalp he would have taken was that of former justice minister Kiritapu Allan. As we all know, she crashed her car, her political career and quite possibly her party’s chances at the ballot box on a bleak rainslicked night in Wellington. It is asad scenario.

The right reaction came from the left: the Minister for Broadcasting and Media Willie Jackson, who looked close to tears, said the sorry saga was heartbreaking and spoke of Allan as our girl”. Greens co-leader James Shaw also said it was heartbreaking. These were the right responses. Finance Minister Grant Robertson said politics was a game of preying on the imperfections. It's part of what we do here”.