Soper on Little

Barry Soper writes:

It’s hard to know what’s come over Andrew Little this week but something certainly has. A couple of days ago he was leaving us in no doubt about what he’d do about banks sitting on their stacks of cash, refusing to take the Official Cash Rate lead from the Reserve Bank Guv and lowering their mortgage rates.

He’d pass a law forcing them to cut the rate as the Guv had done, although he didn’t say whether that same law would force them to raise it when the central banker did the same with the OCR.

Basically it was a world class brain fart.

But the outpouring of angst from Little was ammunition for the joker from the ninth floor. A smile as wide as Jack Nicholson’s in Batman creased John Key’s face as he contemplated the latest outpouring from Labour.

Key joyously professed to not knowing where he’s coming up with this staff.

One moment they come out against people with Chinese sounding names buying houses and now they don’t want people with the same sounding names making chicken chop suey, he crowed and we all cringed.

Little’s musing on immigration have backfired so badly he’s had to do an “explanation” on the Labour website. It is interesting you can’t find this response from the front page. Basically it is there so they can e-mail a link to it to those who complain. So publicly Andy is bashing the Chinese and Indian chefs, and privately he’s saying he has no problems with them.

Danyl McL points out:

Here’s what I love. Labour’s gone and done some research and found out that a bunch of persuadable voters want something done about immigration. And they’ve looked at the US and UK and seen what a successful issue it can be. So they’ve gone back to their office and thought about an angle and, somehow, stumbled upon the anti-immigration story that perfectly undermines all the logic of anti-immigration stories: that we shouldn’t bring ethnic migrants into the country to cook their own food because decent kiwis should do it.

There are almost certainly lots of people in the country that want the government to do something about ‘immigration’. But are there ten people in the whole country – outside of the Labour leaders’ office – who think we have too many skilled migrant cooks in our restaurants? It’s almost adorable the way they’ve tried to do something cynical, but executed it in a way that totally undermines their own attempt at divisiveness.

Dumb and dumber.

No Right Turn weighs in:

But of course Little is “reject[ing] any accusations of race-based policy”. Bullshit. This is about pandering to racists and those who fear anything “foreign”, the same demographic NZ First is chasing. Its disgusting and I expected better of them.

Fortunately, we have a principled, non-racist left-wing party to vote for. And people should do that, rather than vote for racist Labour.

Ouch.

UPDATE: It gets even better:

Winston Peters has accused Labour of “dog-whistling” on the immigration debate after Andrew Little’s comments on Chinese and Indian chefs.

Winston Peters accusing Labour of dog-whistling in immigration. This is ROTFL territory. The irony is just hilarious.