Larry Williams Drive

Here’s a tip for the Maori Party: if you’re going to go out and suggest an entire electorate is racist, you need to get your facts straight.The Party’s announced today it is not standing a candidate in next month’s Tauranga’s by-election because doing so would mean “consciously sending out people into an unsafe environment”.You might wonder why is Tauranga so unsafe for the Maori Party? Apparently, they back up this claim in their press release by saying this: “A Department of Internal Affairs report published in April this year confirmed that Tauranga is a hotspot for hate speech from white supremacists on social media.”The trouble is if you go to that report, there is not a single mention of Tauranga. So that report did not say that Tauranga is a hotspot. Not at all.So the Maori Party just made this up.Now they have since corrected their press release. Now their new press release say it’s just their own reckons, not the Department of Internal Affairs’ reckons that Tauranga is a hotspot for hate speech.They