Audrey Young: Infection spreads to National's front bench

Michelle Boag. Photo / Brett Phibbs

COMMENT:

As a veteran public relations consultant, Michelle Boag is supposed to specialise in enhancing reputations, not destroying them.

There will be many hundreds if not thousands of satisfied clients she has dealt with over the years including many charities but…

…there is always a "but" with Boag.

Her life's work, her own reputation, and that of the National Party to which she has been so attached, is in tatters through her own deviousness.

She may have thought she had contained the immediate crisis on Tuesday once it became known that she was the source of the patient details given to the hapless Clutha-Southland MP Hamish Walker which she received as acting CEO of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust.

The political infection has now spread to National's front bench.

Health spokesman Michael Woodhouse confessed today he was sent similar information back in June and Boag has left the party which she has thrown into crisis.

Woodhouse was not stupid enough to pass on the information to news media and so will almost certainly survive.

But his reputation is tarnished. He received four unsolicited emails from Boag but did nothing to stop them.

He could have easily contacted her to say it is highly inappropriate to be sending such information in any capacity.

He deleted them only on Tuesday night, and he told Muller about it only on Tuesday night – after having had him visit Dunedin earlier in the day.

He put out a statement on Saturday slamming the Government for the privacy breach, having suspected that Boag was actually the original source.

As a private hospital administrator in his former life, he was the obvious choice for health once former minister Jonathan Coleman left Parliament in 2018.

He was a credible and well-briefed Opposition spokesman during the Covid-19 lockdown but his credibility is now tarnished.

The damage goes higher, however.

The more that information drips out, the more that questions mount about Muller's management of this crisis.

His initial response to getting a confession from Hamish Walker that he had sent patients' details to the media was to say tut-tut and to ask him to co-operate with the inquiry and to temporarily transfer his responsibilities.

Since getting a spine and asking the board to de-select Walker, Muller has been repeatedly asked if other MPs had received the information or at least asked his MPs whether they had received similar material.

He was asked as recently as yesterday whether he had sought those assurances and specifically from Woodhouse and he said no.

Technically that may have been because he already knew the answer, but the answer was misleading.

This crisis is by no means over.