The stupidest tea-party

`At any rate I'll never go there again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'

It must be hell being a Vision CEO right now. On the one hand you’ve got the Auditor-General waving his pre-election guidelines and ruling out the use of council resources for electioneering purposes … on the other hand you’ve got your mad mayor demanding you flout those guidelines with one last mad tea-party … and on yet another hand you’ve got the same mad mayor publicly grandstanding over the cost of you providing him with the very same guideline-busting electioneering photo-ops that he’s demanding from you.

Watchers’ hearts go out to poor Dr Warburton after his very public smacking last week by Wanganui mayor Michael Laws. There he was, busy cleaning the red carpet and dusting off the best wedgewood china for the series of Mad Mayor’s Tea Parties he was told to arrange for voters in the run up to the October 13 elections, when ‘them upstairs’ told him to mind his budget.

All very amusing, no doubt, for the Auditor-General’s lot who seem to labour under the delusion that CEOs are generally a decent, independent bunch of chappies who will happily blow the whistle on blatant electioneering with ratepayers’ money – not merely quibble over the amount to be spent buying votes for the incumbent political party.

Meanwhile, not even the Auditor-General would be naïve enough to expect the Vision dwarves to resile from the chance to push their vote-collecting barrow at the ratepayers’ expense in the Council’s weekly newspaper spin sheet. Since the onset of the three-month pre-election period on July 13 the ‘Councillor comment’ Roll of Shame has featured Vision look-alike Rangi Wills, the incredibly thick Marty Lindsay, bob-each-way Don McGregor, and mayoral wannabe Philippa Baker-Hogan.

However, credit where it’s due and LawsWatch is pleased to toss a bouquet in the direction of perpetual bridesmaid Dot McKinnon who, despite being jilted at the altar by Michael Laws, is gamely sticking around for a slice of the wedding cake. Her last appearance in the tacky little River City Press was on July 11th and she has since spared RCP’s masochistic readers her froth and drivel. Well done, Dotty!

Watchers wondered whether Rana Reckoned he’d also been torpedoed by the RCP after last week’s McKinnon & Waitai-free issue, but it turns out he was just off having an epiphany. No doubt inspired by his fellow ex-cop Chester Borrows’ recent stomach stapling, our Rana has had a bile duct reassignment and he won't be coming to Mad Mickey's tea party after all! After a suitable period of bed rest he was back in print warning the voters against having any truck with his ex-pal Mickey, while beating the drum for challenger John Martin.

Those commenters who have concluded, on the basis of Rana Waitai’s weekly ‘columns’, that he was a prime contender for microchipping or worse, especially those when he’s been barking in support of Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws, may like to take a peep at page 7 of the current River City Press. There he is, pointing the bone fairly and squarely at Mickey for playing the vote-splitting game and treating Whanganui with contempt.

My, how things have changed since the Xmas fairy tarted up her eye-liner and prepared to drop down the Buy-election chimney on December 23, 2005, when our Rana was only too happy to leap in and split the vote for Mickey’s crew. Back then, our favourite anonymickey (the one with 20:20 Vision into the mayoral brain, not to mention his running shorts – but let’s not go there!) made a heartwarming declaration of academic and filial love for “independent” Candidate Waitai:

You've got Rana Waitai wrong - he and the Diva are good mates and saw them together last month. They were in the same Vic law classes and it was actually Laws who encouraged Waitai to stand. They have a mutual relative too I've heard – anonymickey, 5:36 PM, December 23, 2005

Now, Watchers, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the kind of vote-splitting bile that same anonymickey is now spreading all over the blog, and every other available outlet, as he strokes the Ego from Double SS, aka Candidate Stevens?