Unite's candidates' debate [+pictures]

I finally got to have a chat with David Shearer at the Mt Albert community hall - what a nice chap. Finally got to have a brief chat before the meeting with Melissa Lee...She is... awful really.

It was an amicable meeting, the audience of hard-core unionists were very well behaved and at this late stage in the campaign the candidates have formed a type of camaraderie on the hustings.
She's barely keeping her head above the red tide.

So I want to say something positive, but she gave us nothing. The backdrop was Unite's $15/hr minimum wage referendum campaign and Lee responded to a question about income with an idiotic remark that she only gets paid $2 an hour. Flippant and dumb - the same sort of thing that got her pinged about South Aucklanders at one of her first meetings.

This is not a naturally friendly or even neutral territory - this is Matt McCarten's Unite Union - the most militant union representing the poorest paid workers starting their minimum wage campaign - and the last thing you say as an MP on a six figure - a list bloody MP - on a six figure income is: I only get paid $2 an hour. After the initial shocked reaction she tried to explain herself - but it was too late.

And the sad thing was she actually had a very good hard-luck story of surviving on minimum wage as a solo mum - but that came out much later and the damage was done.

She is a very slow learner. She's so bad in these situations I feel a bit sorry for Dr Jonathan Coleman (who she described to me as being kind of like her campaign manager - which begged the question: don't you have one?) who is handling her. He's a Cabinet Minister, so you'd think he must have better things to do than attempt a rescue operation on this terminal patient. She needs - she needed, let's use the past tense and write her off now - some sort of media training. Ironic, given her media background; so one may speculate that she's not taking things onboard because she thinks she knows it all. She'll find out the hard way on Saturday that she does not.I think she deserves to come third or fourth from what I have seen of all the main candidates.

And the other candidates are left on the outer in these debates. Like the Backbenchers TV debate last night the Libz and the ALCP guys were not at the table. However they did at least get a minute to say something at the end (unlike Backbenchers) and Dakta Green (who had been heckling intermittently from the side of the hall) got the biggest round of applause, although Russel Norman won on the hand vote that was taken at the conclusion.

The National and Act candidates refused to sign the petition. The Green and Labour candidates did and now they need about another 300,000 or so people to do the same.It's not a proper union until you have protest folk songs played on a banjo.