It has been revealed that another prominent NZ politician on the right has communicated with teens in SnapChat. Again, no suggestion of impropriety.
If this happened once, let alone twice, with a politician on the left, a huge right-wing attack would begin. ~
There would be column after column about it, talkback rark-ups, messages out through every party channel that would activate comment section trolls, it would become a huge issue, and journalists would follow this story and start peppering leaders with questions. It could well be a career ender.
~
The left has no attack machine. Instead we talk about it on social media and hope journalists will step up to point out the inappropriateness and the implicit hypocrisy. Which they sort of do, but they don’t like to spin up a story “out of nothing”.
~
Also absent is any kind of reflective/analytical capacity in the public conversation about our politics. There’s no one (except, again, random people on social media) who can point at this sort of inequivalence. It might as well not exist.
These gaps have consequences.
