“..Phil Goff insists he is not playing the race card.
And, on the face of it, he would seem justified in saying that.
You would be hard-pressed to find any statement in the speech delivered on Thursday by the Labour leader which taken alone is so blatant it warrants the race-card accusation.
The key words are “taken alone”.
Put all the statements together and it is patently clear that Goff, at the very least, has grasped the race card and is flashing it ..
.. if not playing it for all he is worth.
He is not as yet strip-mining this potentially vote-rich conservative terrain to the same extent Winston Peters and Don Brash did.
But it is only a matter of degree.
By Labour standards, the tone and language of Goff’s carefully crafted address signify a dramatic lurch in the direction of the stance on race taken by those other two political luminaries.
It is impossible to conceive Helen Clark delivering such a speech.
Or David Lange.
Or Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
Mike Moore, the last Labour leader to pitch so overtly to Labour’s evaporating conservative male support, had a strong antipathy to those exploiting divisions over race.
He also knew that being tribal Labour .. meant he could not do it.
Goff’s sudden repositioning of himself to the right on race matters runs counter to that tradition.
But it may be only a temporary manifestation.
Like his repositioning of Labour on other matters such as monetary policy ..
.. it has one simple objective –
- lifting Labour’s and his own parlous ratings in pending pre-Christmas opinion polls..”
go to source/story>>John Armstrong: Goff leaps out of his comfort zone – Politics – NZ Herald News
