WHEN IT WAS revealed that Kerrin Leoni had met with members of the Mongrel Mob, New Zealand's political and media reactionaries immediately sensed an opportunity. Here, at last, was a chance to turn the conversation away from the National Party's own vulnerabilities and onto familiar terrain: law and order, gangs, and the insinuation that Labour and the Greens are somehow soft on criminality. Never mind the context. Never mind that politicians, community leaders and public officials routinely engage with difficult and controversial groups as part of their work. What mattered was the image. A photograph, a video, a meeting, a connection, however tenuous, could be weaponised.
Leoni's mistake was not extremism. It was political naivety. She probably underestimated the willingness of her opponents to deliberately collapse the distinction between engagement and endorsement. She failed to recognise that, especially during an election campaign, a meeting with gang members will be treated by some commentators as evidence of ideological contamination. Once the pictures emerged, the facts became almost irrelevant. The outrage machine had found its target.
But the ferocity of the attack might have been more persuasive had it come from people who apply the same standards consistently. Instead, it exposed a pattern that has become increasingly common in New Zealand politics: outrage for opponents, excuses for allies.
The same voices attacking Leoni's conduct have often shown remarkably little concern when comparable standards are applied to figures on the political right. Foreign Minister Winston Peters launched an attack on a Green MP that drew heavily upon the fact he was Chinese-born. Yet the political consequences for Peters were minimal. The people now presenting themselves as guardians of acceptable conduct, like Christopher Luxon or David Seymour, were considerably less outraged about Peters behaviour.
The hypocrisy becomes even more obvious when one examines some of the media personalities who eagerly joined the pile-on. Newstalk ZB host Heather du Plessis-Allan was among those questioning Labour over Leoni's judgment. This is the same broadcaster who described Pasifika people as 'leeches' in 2019, comments that were later found by the Broadcasting Standards Authority to have breached broadcasting standards. More recently, she refused to apologise after another BSA ruling found that she had made dehumanising comments about former Green MP Benjamin Doyle. Yet du Plessis-Allan continues to occupy a prominent media platform from which to pronounce on the apparent moral failings of the liberal left. Evidently, some forms of poor judgment are career-defining scandals, while others are merely unfortunate misunderstandings.
The same double standard is visible in the commentary of prominent Zionist and genocide denier Juliet Moses. Mocking Labour and the Greens, the President of the Zionist-controlled NZ Jewish Council has suggested that perhaps she needs to rebrand herself as a gang member in order to secure a meeting with them.
Yet Moses herself maintains a warm relationship with Brian Tamaki of the Destiny Church. Tamaki has built a career on inflammatory rhetoric directed at a range of minority communities and has called for New Zealand to 'purge' itself of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. Yet Moses has said nothing.
The hypocrisy evident on the right is entirely predictable because the attack on Leoni was never really about associations or standards. It was never about the principle that politicians must be careful about the company they keep. Had it been, many of Leoni's loudest critics would have found themselves subject to the same level of examination that they have demanded for her.
Instead, the controversy reveals how selectively such standards are enforced. When someone on the centre-left engages with a controversial group, it becomes evidence of sympathy, weakness or ideological alignment. When figures on the right maintain relationships with their own controversial allies, the context suddenly becomes more nuanced. Explanations emerge. Distinctions are drawn. Complexity is acknowledged. The benefit of the doubt appears as if by magic.
The right understands something that Labour too often forgets: politics is rarely about consistency. It is about framing. The objective was never to establish a universal rule governing who politicians may or may not meet. The objective was to create a story that reinforced existing prejudices about Labour and the Greens. The gang angle was simply the vehicle.
What makes the episode particularly revealing is how neatly it fits into a broader political pattern. For years, New Zealand conservatives have relied upon a set of recurring cultural narratives. Beneficiaries are portrayed as irresponsible. Maori activism is portrayed as threatening. Public services are depicted as wasteful. Progressive politicians are characterised as detached from ordinary people and indulgent toward criminals. Facts matter less than repetition. The objective is not to persuade through evidence but to strengthen prejudices that already exist within parts of the electorate and which probably spends most of its time listening to Mike Hosking or Heather du Plessis-Allan.
Seen in that context, Leoni's treatment was entirely predictable. Once National began returning to familiar themes of beneficiary bashing and social division, it was only a matter of time before stories emerged involving gangs, Maori communities and Labour politicians were folded into the same political narrative. Leoni simply happened to provide an opening.
Kerrin Leoni was not destroyed because she crossed some universally recognised ethical line. She became a target because she was useful. Her critics found a convenient symbol through which to attack Labour and the Greens, and they pursued it with an enthusiasm that exposed their own inconsistencies and hypocrisy far more clearly than it exposed any flaw in her character.
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| National's Tama Potaka meeting the Mongel Mob...and posing for a photo. |
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