What do they say about the truth always coming out?
By Friday morning Kerrin Leoni was gone.
She lied and she got caught with the photo and the video. Not only didn’t it pass the pub test, it didn’t pass the truth test.
Campaigns almost always have things in them you never saw coming. For Labour it was a combination of dishonesty and their past.
Law and order was not part of the vote of 2026, until it was.
It was very much a part of 2023 because Labour was perceived to have failed abysmally on the subject.
Law and order was, if not the number one issue, certainly in the top three and a major part of the law-and-order story was the perceived weakness Labour had around gangs.
They ruled the streets, they paraded the patches, they sold the drugs and they abused the women.
Labour opposed the new Government's gang patch ban, until they didn’t.
Labour has been hoisted by their own petard.
This started as a Greens/Māori Party mess that infected a third party. The initial issue was reputational.
Could Labour be seen to be alongside a couple of radical operators in the gang space? An embattled Chris Hipkins did his best by saying none of their people would hold justice/police, or law-type portfolios.
Then he said funding gangs was wrong. Then when asked why his party had funded the Mongrel Mob, he said it was a mistake and, in doing so, threw his former leader under the bus.
It was a miserable ten days and a story that he couldn’t shake. But then it got worse, disastrously worse, after one of his own turned out not only to hang with gangs and campaign with gangs, but then when sprung, lied.
The only thing he can do now is hope this fades, which it will. But what won't fade is the simple truth that all three parties in the left bloc now, in some way, shape or form, associate with the gang culture, like and support the gang culture, or are not averse to funding the gang culture.
All three share the same broad ideology towards gangs.
Given that it makes them so far removed from middle New Zealand, it's fatal. Other issues could be forgiven or looked past, but gangs are in a league of their own.
Criminality and dishonesty might have been the singular event that caught all three.
And blew it for all three.
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