National MP Hamish Walker resigns after massive privacy breach of Covid-19 patient information. Video / Will Trafford
COMMENT:
If there was a third sequel to "Dumb and Dumber", National Party MP Hamish Walker could play both lead roles himself quite convincingly.
Walker is the most obvious casualty of his own actions in passing on the details of 18 Covid-19 cases in New Zealand to media.
After initialattempts to thwart the inevitable, he has pulled out of standing in the 2020 election – and joins the pile of fallen Icaruses at the bottom of the political pit.
Walker was a proactive local MP, and not shy about trying to get himself into the media.
Emboldened by the stories of helping a sheep give birth and his brief appearance in the preferred Prime Minister stakes for battling for maternity services in Southland, he simply flew too close to the sun.
But National Party leader Todd Muller also suffers from burnt wings because of Walker's actions.
The reason why became abundantly clear just an hour after Walker announced he would not stand again.
It was revealed a man with Covid-19 had left self-isolation to pop into a supermarket in Auckland. The next morning he tested positive. The only advantage to that for National was that it whacked them out of the headlines: there was a new villain in town.
It is the exact type of thing Muller had thundered about in the past, baying about the 'shambles' at the border and quarantine.
National Party leader Todd Muller. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Alas, Walker had hobbled Muller's moral high horse by delivering a shambles to his doorstep.
Muller's credibility in hoeing into the Government over such matters has been severely dented.
Muller acted quickly to condemn Walker and jettison him after he found out what Walker had done. He had no other choice.
Walker had first mounted the Steven Joyce defence: his lawyer had told him he had not committed a crime. It was pretty legal.
Walker was not the first to first to find out that what might pass muster legally does not necessarily pass muster politically.
He had not passed on the information he had for the Leaders' Office to decide what to do – if anything. Had he done so, it is to be hoped it would have been put through the shredder.
But perhaps the worse crime was that Walker did not alert Muller that it had come from him sooner.
He left it for three days, knowing journalists would not name him as the source and presumably hoping to ride it out. It was a high stakes strategy.
That meant Muller waded in over the weekend to criticise the Government for it, completely oblivious his tongue was a ticking time bomb.
Muller pointed to " a government that's slipping off the side of a cliff, in terms of managing this issue, the border, the information pertaining to it."
As it turned out it was himself who was slipping off the cliff.
National Party MP Hamish Walker. Photo / Mark Mitchell
It exposed not just Muller but the entire National Party at the worst possible time.
The election is little more than two months away. Any election is partly decided on trust – and that is heightened at the moment because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In that regard National was already on the back foot against Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
In trying to claim that ground, Muller has made much of his own integrity. It is one of the words his supporters use most often about him. It is one area there needs to be no question about.
The Walker episode re-ignited the 'dirty politics' tag that the party had tried so hard to get rid of. Muller himself was not tainted by that era, predating his entry to Parliament in 2014.
But it makes it easier for opponents to question whether there were foul deeds in action.
In fact, it seemed it was not dirty politics at play but stupid politics.
It is unclear what Michelle Boag's intentions were, but Walker was not motivated by malice. It was an excess of self-confidence and hunger for headlines.
Walker did not seem to have thought through the consequences of taking the information in the first place, or of passing it on.
There seems to be something of a law of physics around political parties that when things are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad they are horrid.
Some compelling lunar force dictates that once one thing goes awry, everything goes awry.
After years and years of things being very good for the National Party, the very horrid phase has taken hold.
The very horrid phase began with Jami-Lee Ross. Then Covid-19 pitched in, sending National diving as leader Simon Bridges struggled against Ardern's increased ascendancy into the 'very good' phase.
The leadership change to Muller was aimed at trying to return things to the 'very good' phase. It is not that easy to reverse out of the very horrid swamp.
No matter how much Muller wanted to talk about Covid-19 he has found himself talking about the horrid within instead.
In some twist of coincidence, that other reminder of National's own goals also popped back up yesterday: Botany MP Ross was in court yesterday over the Serious Fraud Office charges relating to National Party donations.
The only National Party MP who could be said to be in any state of zen was former leader Simon Bridges.
Bridges was in Nelson on holiday. The only peep from him all week was a social media clip showing him wandering along a paddock in gumboots, occasionally patting a baby yak strolling beside him.
