Mike Hosking: Could Todd Muller have had a worse start?

COMMENT:

I despair. Todd Muller's first full day out including Parliament was little short of a disaster.

He took the MAGA hat story and gave it life. Massive, massive mistake. It wasn't a story, it was an agenda-driven rant by Jacinda-loving, lefty-obsessed, tyre-kicking hand-wringers who fail to do their job as journalists. That bit was on them. The bit where he gave it life is on him. And he successfully managed to give it four days of life by not treating it with the contempt it deserved.

And then Nikki Kaye joined the shambles. Paul Goldsmith became Māori. Once again the mistake was made in responding to PC bollocks driven by PC media, who continue to ask for support to save their jobs while at the same time can't help but drum their hand-wringing, navel-gazing dogma.

Racial diversity is not a rule or a law, or a requirement, especially not in a crisis. What's needed in a crisis are the best people. If they happen to be Māori, Pacific Islanders, German, or tall, shorter, ginger, then all the better, but talent is the key and that was the answer. The answer, astonishingly, wasn't given.

They genuflected and offered Paul Goldsmith as a Māori, and as a result they got what they deserved.

Yet again, Judith Collins came up trumps by simply saying what the rest of them should have said, "is there something wrong with being white?" No there isn't, as long as you're good at what you do. And that actual requirement for work, not race, height, weight, or colour.

Paula Bennett didn't help by basking in the disaster, and saying that was a question you'd need to ask the new leadership. This indicates that the vote on Friday was razor thin. Muller wasn't ready to go, wanted to wait till after the election but got flushed out, and there are many still very aggrieved and ready to exact revenge.

Need I raise Nicola Willis, the biggest winner of the whole reshuffle, who with all that talent that Muller clearly saw, went and called her leader Simon Bridges.

Yes Phil Twyford is a problem, as indeed is David Clark and Kelvin Davis. But if yesterday is National's rebirth, and that was what they've got up their sleeve, the current Government, once they've stopped laughing, can glide easily into September without a care in the world.