Doomed to repetition

There's been much debate in comments on various posts as to the Diva's past... shall we say... indiscretions.

One anonymii suggested: Winnie's probably astute enough to know that if the Diva is on the list, the less time the media (and LawsWatch) have to pull out the dirty linen the better.

To which another riposted: Is this the dirty linen that allowed Laws to win the mayoralty handsomely and lead a team to dominate council. We should all that kind of dirty linen ... there is a saying that misusing extreme language will eventually debase it.

Earlier, someone else said: Yes, Laws really should have taken his lumps at the time instead of weaselly pretending he'd done nothing wrong. I mean, let's face it, he'd only illegally mis-appropriated public funds and lied about it, which is pretty standard behaviour for a politician.

To which someone else rather rudely responded: No he didn't you dork. read the background & you'll find he was cleared by all agencies & no public monies were involved. Inventing history does you no credit.

And in a more reasoned tone, yet another commenter suggested: Yeah its wrong to talk illegality. If it was, it would have been prosecuted as such and no-one was. It was certainly an error of judgement on Laws' part but he took his lumps and has moved on. Some people here should too. It distracts totally from what's important.

"Moving on" is all very well, provided you find no truth in the aphorism that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". One of the raison d'etres of LawsWatch is to ensure the Diva's history is not forgotten, because past behaviour is, we find, usually an excellent pointer to future behaviour.

We were going to type up a lengthy reminder of the Antoinette Beck Affair but we'd never manage to write as well as Russell Brown (whose Hard News is now on the excellent Public Address site) who, back in April 1996 when it was actually happening, summarised the Diva's fall from grace this way:

It would be wise to put nothing past a man [Winston Peters] who can make a political virtue out of the resignation of one of his MPs on the basis that he lied, covered up a forgery and spent public money with his wife's company. All were small transgressions, but I've long felt uneasy about Michael Laws' polls, which were so frequent as to seem like a fetish. For a while there, you expected him to consult his electorate on whether he should have a crap before or after breakfast.

Anyway, for those who couldn't work out the details, what happened is this. Last December, Laws, who was a Napier City councillor as well as an MP, told the mayor his electoral office could do some research. BZZT! That's not what your electoral office funding is for, Michael. He then got Harlequin, a research company part-owned by his wife, to do the poll. BZZT! Politicians should not channel public money into family interests.

The poll is done and the report is signed off by someone called Antoinette Beck. BZZT! Publicly-funded reports should not be signed off by non-existent people. By March, the tie-up between Laws wife and Harlequin was public knowledge - and a trifle embarassing to Laws. But it got worse. Early this month, it became clear that the signature on the report was false. A director of Harlequin, Paul Sheriff, claimed the "prank" signature was his and resigned. Laws let him do this. BZZZT! Don't tell lies, Michael. Eventually, once both Parliament and the council had gotten interested, it emerged that Laws secretary did the dodgy signature. Actually, I suspect it won't end there. There are none who cop vengeance so badly as the holier-than-thou - and all the unholy will be lining up to have a crack at Laws.

But he resigned. And Winston Peters was quite right to point out that that simple fact set him apart from anyone else in the current government. Lockwood Smith did not resign over student fees, despite his signed promise to do so; Simon Upton did not resign over the bad blood scandal which saw haemophiliacs infected with HepC; Denis Marshall did not resign over Cave Creek. Peters needed Laws to fall on his his sword to maintain New Zealand First's credibility and Laws, the good soldier, did so with a flourish - quitting the council, parliament and his newfound party in one fell swoop.

(Our emphasis) Those statements were made 9 years, 8 months and 4 days ago. If they were untrue they'd be defamatory, and we all know just how litigious the Diva is.

And as for a lack of a prosecution - name the last time any politician was held accountable in the courts for any act committed as a politician. NZ is a land where you can order your motorcade to get you to a rugby match (in which you have utterly no interest other than it's vote-getting capacity) and then feign surprise as they're prosecuted for speeding, remember. But only if you're a politician.

As to what "cleared by all agencies" means, we have no idea. A Papal conclave? No "agency" investigated, other than the Council (from which he ended up having to resign), Parliament (ditto) and the media, which hardly "cleared" him.

In fact, a senior TV journalist confided to LawsWatch that on the morning of Resignation Day he spent several hours in the Diva's Parliamentary office having various excuses bounced off him: "what if I said...", "no, we'd still savage you...", "well what about...", "no, that won't wash either..." Having exhausted every possible variation of spin, the Diva finally, and very reluctantly, went to meet his fate.

Brown and one of the anonymii are right, of course. The Diva did, after much pressure, eventually resign, whereas any number of other politicians responsible for arguably worse infractions of law and duty and haven't offered a decent "mea culpa" let alone a resignation, so some credit where it's due.
But then set against that is an even older aphorism, one we're sure your mother (not to mention Your Mother) has used on occasion: two wrongs don't make a right.

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