Amy Brooke: John Key counts his chickens

By Amy Brooke

It wasn’t just undergraduate – many would have found it basically disgusting.  And we’re stuck with this man as leader of the country…

So what’s it all about? According to yesterday’s afternoon mailout of the New Zealand Herald, headlined “The question John Key refused to answer”, our Prime Minister appeared on its morning radio show, Hauraki Breakfast, playing a round of a game called, ‘Thank You For Your Honesty”.  He couldn’t have been ignorant of its basic format as, apparently, “in the regular segment, hosts Matt Heath, Jeremy Wells and Laura McGoldrick grill participants with a series of 10 silly, often rude, questions, which they then have to answer truthfully”.

These questions weren’t just rude and silly – they were degrading. And for any media outlet to think that it’s all good clean fun, shows a now extraordinary division between New Zealanders who still have standards – and increasingly foul-mouthed media show-offs who apparently bask in a narcissistic world which the Prime Minister also thoroughly enjoys. That some of the media women are now equally part of it all is perhaps the saddest thing.

This was the result – Key grunting away at the beginning of the interview, pretending he didn’t have a choice – but then we now know that our PM loves to show off, to perform. We’ve formerly had his camping down the sidewalk; being smooged by gays at the exhibitionistic Big Gay Out; Key calling women “hot” and, at the time, fooling around, claiming he envied Shane Warne his relationship with Liz Hurley. We’ve known of the tormenting of the little waitress by persisting in pulling her ponytail, and ignoring her objections.

You may think the interview above is more than degrading, for a man in the Prime Minister’s position. Certainly what it tells us about John Key will make many New Zealanders hold him in contempt – rather than in respect.

Categorically declaring the Virgin Mary was no virgin; using “Jesus Christ!” as an automatic exclamation…allowing himself to be trapped into answering questions which were not just undergraduate, but utterly unacceptable… For example?  “Key replied to he had never pashed a man, did not “trim his downstairs” and had never sent a “dick pic”. But he said he had “done wees in the shower” and admitted he found Wendy Petrie attractive.  “However Key refused to answer the rather rude question Wells put to him of whether he had ‘fed the chickens’ in the last month. ‘Jesus Christ, I’ve got to take the fifth,’ he protested, saying he didn’t want to answer in case his wife …” Read the rest here