It’s simple: Paula Bennett has to go

1 NEWS Columnist Dita DeBoni Source: 1 NEWS

In 2004, then-Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel was forced to resign all her portfolios. Her crime was lying about leaking information to the media concerning a deported Sri Lankan teenager who wanted to stay in New Zealand on the grounds she had been sexually abused by family members in her home country.

After initially saying her staff had leaked information – a private letter between the girl and her lawyer – to the media, Ms Dalziel fell on her sword after losing the support of then Prime Minister Helen Clark. She admitted she had wanted to show the girl’s lawyer was whipping up public sympathy through the media.

Braying the loudest about that issue was National MP Judith Collins, who laid complaints with the Solicitor General, Privacy Commissioner and the Wellington Law Society, saying Dalziel’s behaviour was particularly bad, given she was formerly a lawyer.

Strangely enough, Ms Collins, also a lawyer, didn’t quite have the same view of leakers when she herself leaked information on public servant Simon Pleasants to blogger Cameron Slater, although after much prodding she did resign her role in August 2014.

Now Collins is back, bold as brass; has there been time, I wonder, for her to have rediscovered her sense of righteous indignation about leaking? Because if so, perhaps she’d care to apply the same blowtorch of truth and justice to her Cabinet colleague, Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett.

The cases are different of course, but the underlying pattern is the same: a minister feels they are losing control of the media narrative around a highly contentious issue and shortly thereafter, the people showing them up for the poor job they are dong find themselves the topic of a deliberate smear campaign.

Paula Bennett has form in this area, having already leaked the personal details of two beneficiaries who were annoying her in 2009.

It is plain to almost any thinking person that Ms Bennett has a lot to feel inadequate about, in terms of her portfolio. This Government has had eight long years to ensure more people have access to proper housing, and have failed miserably on almost every measure. The upshot is that more children than ever before are living in substandard housing; in cars, garages and damp, mouldy and barely-affordable rentals.

When a charity steps up to do the job the Government has failed at, it is treated with disdain.

When a marae feeds and shelters almost 60 homeless families and can’t keep up with demand, the minister won’t go out to visit them, preferring instead to stay in the cozy climes of a Mt Eden café.

She is forced to give them money – while refusing to say for how long – and is also forced to conduct a ‘flying visit’ when her aloofness to the issue become untenable. Her ‘office’ then leaks information meant to discredit the entire marae operation.

It’s a farce.

Why National even has a Minister of Social Housing is a mystery as they seem to want to be shot of the whole area, trying at every turn to palm the problem off to charitable providers.

What they do have is someone who doesn’t actually seem to believe it is her job to ensure the most people possible have access to decent, affordable, healthy accommodation.

A person that, at every turn, reveals her contempt for those who need the services she is supposedly providing - even though she herself needed them at one time.

If that’s not bad enough, she now heads up an office that conducts dirty smear campaigns.