Monday 18 February 2008

Silenced by sex?

Deborah Coddington defends the wetness of Katherine Rich.  Rich was right to resign, says Coddington, and right to resist her former leader's welfare policy requiring a bare minimum of responsibility in those receiving the taxpayers' involuntary largesse.

How could Rich, mother of two very small children and sitting pretty on a substantial taxpayer-funded salary, tell struggling beneficiaries to live on the smell of oily rags?

Lindsay Mitchell answers the question that Deborah clearly hoped would remain rhetorical:

If Katherine refused to say these things because it made her feel personally hypocritical or, heaven forbid, judgemental, then she was either letting her opponents silence her or she was in the wrong party...

Since National is the party of never saying what you pretend to believe in, the latter clearly can't be true.  Can it.  In any case, Mitchell sees more than a whiff of collectivism in Coddington's comments on Rich's whinge.  After all, surely it's not a matter of who says something but of whether or not they're right?

Hell, do we have to find a beneficiary to stand on a soap box before anyone will listen? In fact, that is what political parties do. They buy into this nonsense. Get a Maori or you can't credibly talk about matters Maori. Get someone who used to be on the DPB so we can talk about welfare credibly... But this is just collectivist crap. Your skin colour, your sex, your sexual orientation are NOT more important than the ideas that drive you...

Too right.  Something Ms Coddington, Mrs Rich and America's registered Democrats might all care to reflect on.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha! Having had the misfortune to meet with Paul Hutchison, I'd be pleading for ostracism!

Wet? Katherine Rich wouldn't come close. Neither would a sopping dishcloth.

With assets like the good doctor, who needs liabilities! :)

Anonymous said...

Deborah Coddington talks like a dumb person. She quoted:

Until the right starts valuing MPs like Rich for their loveliness, as equally as they promote MPs like Judith Collins for their balls, they'll never get women like me to vote for them.

You don't fuck'n vote for loveliness or good looking Coddington, you vote for the party with good policies. If this is your criteria for voting, then you might as well entice the likes of Julia Roberts into politics.