I don’t think Clare Curran was cut out to be political. After working in Parliament she managed to get herself into a fairly safe Labour seat in Dunedin South, and was a fairly committed and decent electorate MP, but she never seemed a good fit for party or Wellington politics. And she ended up being brutalised by it.
Actually, not by ‘it’. by people.
Some of it she brought upon herself as she tried to message manage in social media. She was involved in Labour’s attempt at a blog that gradually banned people.
But once Labour got into Government and Curran became a minister, people in the National Party, MPs, targeted Curran and help destroy her political career. and Cameron Slater and others who see destroying people as a game.
She also made some dumb decisions so her demise was partly self inflicted, but dirty politics came close to destroying her as a person.
The Spinoff: ‘I physically felt like I was going to die’: Clare Curran opens up on politics, toxicity and trauma
Curran says she was a top target for the likes of rightwing blogger Cameron Slater and lobbyist and commentator Matthew Hooton throughout her four terms. “They hated me.” In some of his many posts about her, Slater described Curran as “something dreadful” and “dumber than a bag of hammers”.
That’s fairly mild by Slater’s standards.
Curran commissioned research on coverage of her from September 30, 2017 (the week after the general election) to October 27, 2018. Of the 509 (non-broadcast) articles about her, 139 were negative blogs on Cameron Slater’s WhaleOil site. The Otago Daily Times produced just 62 articles. Slater produced the most articles about Curran – more than twice as many as any other writer.
Curran seems a bit obsessed with Slater’s attacks, but that shows how relentless he was in trying to destroy someone. remember that at this time he had been distanced by National, and was promoting Winston Peters and NZ First, so this was probably just combat sport to him. Until he got involved in the crash and burn of Jamie Lee Ross (sort of supporting Ross but that may have been more to try to damage National).
Ross has responded to Curran’s revelations via https://twitter.com/jamileeross
I had such mixed emotions reading this. You would have to be heartless, or so partisan that you’re now devoid of humanity, to not feel empathy for Clare. But at the same time, I recall being on the other side when it was all happening.
I was in the 8am strategy meetings when we were deciding to throw everything we had at her. I was in the morning procedures meetings as Melissa Lee would share what her latest hit on Clare was going to be.
Clare was a weak link. National wanted to break her. And we did. Watching those question time answers, from about 10 metres away, you could pinpoint the very moment her career ended. I can only now imagine what it felt like. But at the time all we felt was excitement and success.
Parliament turns normal people in to savages. Another human was going through probably the most traumatic experience they’ll ever go through. Clare lost her job, reputation, her mental well-being. What were we doing? Laughing. Backslapping. Praising the destroyers. We were awful.
Yeah, accountability is important. But why enjoy the destruction of others so much? Do we really need to revel is someone else’s downfall? Sure, we all signed up for what Parliament is. But why did we also sign up for forgetting decency when we walked in the door? Sorry Clare.
At least he has said sorry two years later, but MPs and party hoodlums seem to get caught up in the dirty politics game.
There’s a big difference between holding the Government to account and trying to politically and mentally destroy people. Slater only does that because he was part of a party that has done that for a long time.
Curran received six to eight months of psychological treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder after that disastrous afternoon. “I’m not Shane Jones. I didn’t have a pat answer. I don’t do bluster and I was trying to answer honestly and I couldn’t come up with the words and my mind went blank. It was the worst nightmare in front of everyone. I remember a sensation of pressure that built up, and quite honestly, during those first few days I felt like I was literally going to die. I felt physically that I was going to die because the stress had got so much and there was nowhere else for it to go.”
At times, she admits, she thought she might even quite like to die.
Very sad to see her get to a dark place like that.
Curran says within weeks of the formation of the coalition government in 2017, a person she won’t name told her that she was the main target for the opposition. “Around the time I came into parliament, and even before, I was squarely on the radar of Hooton and Slater and [blogger and pollster] David Farrar. I had a disproportionate amount of focus on me. I was seen as an easy picking.”
Openly at least Farrar (on Kiwiblog) wasn’t anywhere near as relentless or nasty as Slater, but the two are seen by some to work in tandem – Farrar continued to support Slater even after the latter fell out with National.
I don’t know what Hooton’s involvement was. I would have to see evidence before I will see it as more dirty politics, Curran seems to have been very sensitive to any sort of criticism, and may see it all as trying to get to her.
She says senior National MP Nick Smith labelled her “Goebbels” after her 2006 paper to a regional Labour Party conference, in which she discussed how the party could reframe public debate and resonate with voters by communicating with “values-based” language. When she became a minister in 2017, she says her efforts to reform public broadcasting faced “hostility and disdain” from media commentators.
That sounds like more super-sensitivity to criticism of Curran’s performance as a minister. Political journalists have their faults, but they can usually pick when ministers aren’t up to the job.
I don’t think Curran was up to being an effective Minister – just a few people in each government end up being very capable ministers, the rest turn out to be ok or mediocre or poor. There’s no way of knowing until they try, but the success rate of ministers (and leaders) isn’t high.
Curran can see why they might see her as a weak link and, in the manner of a pack of lions hunting a gazelle, pick her off from the rest of the herd. She accepts that’s a reasonable strategy to embarrass a government. “Oh yeah, and I’m not angry about that. This is the business we are in. But there was a coming together … In my opinion there was a view within the press gallery that they were on board with that.
“I have strengths but I also have weaknesses and one of those is that in the political arena, I’m not a great orator. I’m not hugely quick off the mark. You are either naturally good at it or you have to learn how to do it at question time.”
It wasn’t just her lack of skills at speaking, despite her training in PR. Lack of confidence and lack of being on top of her portfolios, and making basic mistakes not just once but repeatedly, and not being open as Minister of Open Government all contributed to Curran’s downfall.
Curran’s beef seems to be not with the fact that she was held to account, but that the persistence of the pursuit was out of order. Asked why she did what she did, she replies: “Tell me what it was that I did”, seeming still not to grasp why an apparent lack of openness – even if unintended – is especially problematic for the minister for open government.
It’s fair enough to hold her accountable for her mistakes, she says. “It’s the kind of accountability that you get held to, it’s inequitable for some people. It became apparent to me reasonably quickly, by February, around the time of the Carol Hirschfeld scrutiny, that it was an unrelenting focus.”
Because she wasn’t handling her job well. There will be no respite for a wounded minister, and there shouldn’t be.
Perhaps part leaders and Prime Ministers should be much more on to this and either support or demote poor performers and those who are mentally struggling.
What Curran highlights is three things:
- MPs promoted to ministerial roles may or may not step up to the workload, responsibilities, and pressure.
- Prime Ministers should deal more quickly with under performing or struggling Ministers.
- Politics is often a nasty, dirty brutal game of deliberate attack and attrition, and it needn’t and shouldn’t be.
Your NZ 
The taking of the photos is just a small part of the problem.
The photos were then handed on to The BFD, which has been acting as a shill for NZ First (and running an agenda of trying to undermine Bridges and drive a division in National).
The nature of the original post using the photos was threatening towards the journalists – implicating them in illegal activities that were the subject of a complaint to the police.
Threatening legal repercussions is not new to Peters, he has used lawyers, police complaints and legal actions for years to try to shut up and intimidate critics.
Legal threats and actions were also used by Cameron Slater via Whale Oil and via the courts. They contributed to his crashing and burning, but his associates at The BFD sem to have learned nothing and are trying the same legal intimidation tactics.
On Friday SB/Juna Atkins/Slater’s wife took some ownership of the photos and attacks on journalists investigating the NZ First Foundation.
https://thebfd.co.nz/2020/02/a-radio-station-is-scared-of-a-website/
And yesterday ‘Xavier Theodore Reginald Ordinary’ ramped up his attacks and threats.
He confirmed that NZ First supplied him with the photos:
That’s nonsense, but confirms the connection.
I think he is probably right, Slater may not have published the photos. But he looks like a long time associate of Slater (and user of Slater for a lot of the WO dirty politics).
But Atkins is obviously involved. And ironically Slater did his first (under his name and not via SB) post himself when this blew up on he BFD and NZ First on Friday, unfortunate timing for him perhaps.
More legal threats against journalists, this time defamation (you’d think that Slater’s disasters would have taught them something, perhaps it did, but it hasn’t stopped the use of legal threats).
It was a ‘tough’ post, but when it’s about hypocrisy that’s really funny. Slater was a big cry baby when things blew up on him. Mr Ordinary may find out that getting too close to the dirty action himself may backfire on him. I expect journalists will be doing some investigating.