Banks for nothing

If you don’t know that John Banks is running for the mayoralty of Auckland you are either not living in New Zealand or you are very lucky. The rest of us, I hazard to say, are fed up with his pronouncements and proclamations. Never in all my years in local and national politics have I come across a more opportunistic politician. But that is not the worst. The worst is his blatant, superficial and patronising pandering to the populist vote. You may not think it, outside of Auckland, but Aucklanders are generally fairly sophisticated and are not anti-Wellington. Yet Mr Banks, in his frequent assertions that we won’t be told by Wellington what to do, suggests we are and that the populist vote is that superficial. It would hardly surprise me if he next turns his xenophobic attention to the Australians and evokes the underarm incident. It will not surprise you then that if he does I will likely commit New Zealand’s first act of political assassination. We have nine more months of him and it will get worse in the lead-up to the elections. My view is that Mr Banks has little to offer us, has not kept to any of his previous promises and is little more than a pandering, obnoxious son-of-a-bitch whose only merit is giving Fryday something to write about in these post-Bush years.

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