Rodney Hide reckons MPs are nervous about their pasts.
There’d be nothing to worry about if they had nothing to hide.
That doesn’t mean they have to have blameless pasts, it does mean they should be upfront about anything which might have a bearing on their work as MPs.
David Garrett’s experience should be instructive. It wasn’t the identity of a dead infant to get a false passport, despicable as that was, which was his undoing.
It was the hypocrisy of having done that and kept it hidden when he had such a hard line stance on crime.
I agree. Hide doesn’t seem to understand that Garrett’s problem was not just the crime, but the hypocrisy surrounding it.
Hide understands the hypocrisy perfectly, he just employs hypocrisy of his own to manage it.