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National leader Judith Collins refused to criticize two of her MPs for circulating a false quote from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Friday.
Collins said he did not believe MPs should remove his posts as they were “genuinely reflecting what they believe.”
National MPs Matt King and Harete Hipango have republished a meme that quotes Ardern as saying “dairy farming is a world of the past.”
Ardern did not say or imply this. In the TVNZ debate on Tuesday night, he said that a vision of agriculture as opposed to sustainability, with regulations imposing a huge burden, was “a vision of the world that has passed.” Several other national parliamentarians took this quote out of context on social media, but only Hipango and King published an explicitly false version.
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King, the Northland MP, said the quote was “amazing from the Labor leader last night.”
Hipango, the Whanganui MP and shadow attorney general, posted the quote saying “this is what the prime minister really thinks of our dairy farmers. She said it! “
RICKY WILSON / Stuff
National Leader Judith Collins.
Hipango told the Chronicle of Whanganui that despite the quotes in the image, he didn’t see it as a fake quote, but rather as a “keyword construct aligned with Jacinda Ardern”.
“It’s not a fake quote – as it’s not a quote – it’s a keyword construct aligned with Jacinda Ardern,” Hipango told the Chronicle.
There is a big quote on the text of the image.
When asked about the matter on Friday, Collins said he had not spoken to Hipango about the matter, but instead attacked the prime minister for what he had said in the debate.
“I felt that the fact that the Prime Minister completely dismissed it as an ‘old world way of looking at farming’ when I spoke about the utter anguish that many farm families are going through was an embarrassment,” Collins said.
ANDY JACKSON / Stuff
National MP Harete Hipango told the Whanganui Chronicle that the quote was a “construction of keywords aligned with Jacinda Ardern.”
When asked if she was concerned about the fake quotes that misrepresented the party, Collins said no.
Later, when asked if MPs should remove their posts, Collins said he didn’t think they should.
“No, I think they are genuinely reflecting what they believe.”
Collins rebuffed reporters describing the dating, asking “what was he saying was old?”
King has been asked to comment.
Early in her tenure as leader, Collins told the audience that no one had ever escaped from prison when she was Minister of Corrections, which was not true.
When asked about the matter later, he said he had been joking.
