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Asenati Lole-Taylor
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Brendan Horan
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Father Time
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Lloyd Burr
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NZ First
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Tracy Watkins
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Winston First
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Winston Peters
Tracy Watkins doesn't mince words today. Under the headline Party in danger of Peter-ing out she opines:
Anyone who kids themselves that there is life after Winston Peters for NZ First only had to watch the party floundering in the absence of its leader this week.
Frantically trying to head off an attack by their former colleague, expunged NZ Firster Brendan Horan, Peters' front bench achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making Horan look good by comparison.
They were clueless in the face of Horan's determination to extract utu from his former party by tabling documents he claimed showed improper use of the taxpayer funded leader's fund.
Whether the documents do show what Horan claims remains to be seen; the Speaker is investigating although the explanation offered by Peters suggests the spending complies with the rules. But we know from long experience that politicians have a collective interest in not inquiring too deeply into the use of leaders' funds.
There is certainly no reason to be confident that they have cleaned up their act since an Audit Office inquiry several years ago found most parties treated it as a slush fund for party political activities. (NZ First was one of the parties pinged for unlawful spending to the tune of $158,000).
Regardless of the ins and outs of Horan's allegations, however, one thing seems clear: Horan is hellbent on using his last remaining months in Parliament to try to take Peters and the rest of NZ First down with him.
Even if he succeeds he will only be hastening by a few years what increasingly seems inevitable.
With its leader knocking 70, NZ First is a clock that has been slowly winding down since the 1996 election delivered Peters the balance of power.
This is brutal stuff from Ms Watkins, but it is is also brutally honest. There is no way that New Zealand First will survive without its founder and
Tracy Watkins goes on to profile some of the more "colourful" members of the Winston First caucus:
Since the party's return in 2011, Parliament has been collectively holding its breath waiting for the current team to implode given some of the more eccentric selections - like former North Shore mayor Andrew Williams, notorious for urinating in a public place.
The implosion hasn't happened yet but there have been plenty of flaky moments. Richard Prosser launched a diatribe against Muslims that prompted hundreds of complaints to the NZ First board. The party's Pasifika MP, Asenati Lole-Taylor, famously asked questions of the police minister in Parliament about blow jobs and has carved out a cult following on Twitter for her bizarre outbursts. Her most recent was to accuse a press gallery journalist of cyber bullying after he referred to her "shooting the messenger". Lole-Taylor thought he was alleging she had shot an actual parliamentary messenger. Horan, meanwhile, was dumped from the party over allegations of missing money from his dead mother's estate.
Horan's bitterness over his expulsion from the party is probably made even more visceral for his belief in himself as the obvious successor to Peters. A former TV weather presenter, Horan was noted for making sure he was always in screen shot when Peters was stopped on the way to the House.
Peters' dislike for his former MP, meanwhile, seems to run particularly deep, with his attack in Parliament on Horan as New Zealand's "Jimmy Savile" - a reference to Britain's celebrity child molester - plumbing the depths of personal attack.
Asenati Lole-Taylor's Twitter feud with 3News journalist Lloyd Burr was somewhat surreal. It's fair to say that there are a number of MP's in the House with a better command of English than Asenati (perhaps as many as 120 more), but she made an absolute goose of herself, and not for the first time. In the past Ms Lole-Taylor has drawn attention to herself by gleefully announcing on a daily basis how many Twitter users she had blocked that day for daring to have a contrary opinion to hers!
Winston First may squeak back in at September's General Election. However we wouldn't put money on it; Peters himself is a pale shadow of the brash young man on 1996. In recent weeks he has looked far from well and we genuinely wonder if he can pick himself up for one final campaign. He will have to, because none of his current caucus looks capable of winning a chook raffle at the local pub, let alone winning votes in an election.
Father Time has not treated Winston Peters kindly; the late nights, fags and whisky have taken a cumulative toll. And it may well be Father Time who determines whether Winston First survives beyond 20 September 2014.
