PM stands by his minister

Minister Judith Collins will be spending the weekend with her feet up – or perhaps gardening – as she takes a short break from parliament after a torrid week.

The opposition has been calling for the Prime Minister to sack Collins, over her visit to export company Oravida during her official visit to China last October.

Radio New Zealand reports Collins’ husband, David Wong-Tung, is a director of Oravida, and owner Stone Shi and managing director Julia Xu are close friends. Emails released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade last Friday revealed Ms Collins' office had lobbied the ministry to include Shi and Xu in official engagements.

But, RNZ reports the PM is standing by his minister, saying she enjoyed his full confidence and had done an outstanding job.

“Over the almost six years Judith Collins has been a minister, she’s made a significant contribution to the government and New Zealand in the portfolios she has held,” he told Parliament.

Collins has told media she has suffered a health scare in the past month, but says she is feeling good about test result she’s had. TVNZ reports she doesn't know if the stress of the past few months has contributed to her illness.

In the New Zealand Herald, John Armstrong says this week’s question time was the rowdiest of the year. “It was only a matter of time before the high political stakes wrapped up in the Opposition's relentless efforts to secure the political scalp of Judith Collins would prompt a boilover of emotions in Parliament.”

Collins will also be taking some time off Twitter, with Key saying it is full of “trolls and bottom feeders”. In some ways, it comes as a surprise that the often-combative Ms Collins was allowed free rein on Twitter for so long. Her feed, which mixed policy launches with gardening and her dog, once descended into a fight with Green party co-leader Metiria Turei over fashion.

 

 

 

In a long wrap-up of the affair, Bryce Edwards (also in the Herald) asks “how well are the politicians handling the media, and how well are the media handling the politicians?” 

Metro has just published a long piece on Judith Collins, and in a piece titled ‘The Queen Is Dead”, its author, Steve Braunias revists his time with her.

I looked at her face when she shot her mouth off to Sabin and saw someone unstable, someone on the verge of a kind of nervous collapse. She blinked rapidly, her mouth twitched, her words came out in a tumble, as though she were daring herself to keep on going, to match the speed and urgency of her beating heart.I didn’t recognise that face. It was excited, schoolgirlish – Judith of the fifth form, fizzing with foolish gossip. Our conversations were civil. Her face stayed in one place. She remained calm, mostly, with occasional minor instances of rage and scorn and distaste.

Focus on Politics will have more on this story this morning.