Whoops

The Herald reports:

Labour’s Ginny Andersen admits she wrongly claimed the National Land Transport Fund doesn’t pay for road maintenance during a live radio exchange in which she also attacked National minister Mark Mitchell. 

Appearing on The Mike Hosking Breakfast on Newstalk ZB on Wednesday morning, Andersen claimed maintenance on roads wasn’t funded by the NLTF. 

The NLTF funds road maintenance with an allocation for state highway and local road pothole prevention. 

Andersen repeatedly told Mitchell that money came from a “different budget”.

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about. That is not that budget,” the Labour MP said. 

As Mitchell said maintenance money did come from the NLTF, Andersen said: “No, it’s not. It’s not. It’s a separate fund. You need to go check that. It’s a separate fund.”

She said if Mitchell didn’t understand the budgets and “you want to be credible on financial things, then you’re really kidding yourself”.

It takes a special skill to not be wrong, but to be so certain you are right that you attack the other person as not being credible, when in fact they were 100% right, and you were 100% wrong.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop said Andersen’s comments went to “the heart of Labour’s economic credibility”. 

“Ginny Andersen’s comments beggar belief. First she claimed the land transport fund doesn’t pay for road maintenance (which is completely wrong) then after accepting that was wrong, she bizarrely continued to insist there was another ‘separate fund’. There is not.”

This wasn’t an area of technical specialist knowledge. This was a pretty basic thing to get so wrong.