John MacDonald: On Line 1, it's the 1970s calling for Michael Laws

If you’re one of the people who doesn’t think Winston Peters has been showing his age lately, you might be thinking differently after the out of touch way he’s handling the Michael Laws situation.

 Because he seems to think that a telling off and a meeting after the election is the way to respond to Michael Laws’ appalling comments about women.

As the NZ First leader said to Ryan Bridge this morning, he thinks the comments were “careless”. But he’s not going to sack Laws before the election. But, in my mind, this guy isn’t fit to be in a modern day parliament and needs to go.

Laws himself - who is number six on the NZ First party list - is saying that his comments were supposed to be “wry and puckish”. And he’s been trotting out that line when people do the old Claytons apology. He said: “If people are offended, I apologise”.

Last week on his radio show, Laws talked about The Opportunity Party’s fourth-ranked candidate, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, after he’d been involved in a pre-election debate with her.

He described her as “rather severe looking” and compared her to “every officious primary school teacher, female that I’ve ever come across in my life”.

That was bad enough. But he went on. And this is the clincher and this is why there’s no way Michael Laws should be in parliament again.

Talking about the Opportunity candidate, he banged on about the length of her dress and how little make-up she was wearing and then he said this: “Must be hell dating people like that, just quietly. Can you imagine what it’s like post-sex?”.

What a muppet. And I’m being generous.

National leader Christopher Luxon obviously agrees. As soon as these comments came to light yesterday, he swore that Laws will never be a cabinet minister in any government he leads.

All the other leaders have piled-on too. Except Winston Peters. He thinks Michael Laws just needs to be pulled into line. But what hypocrisy. Because, why is it that Michael Laws gets a slap on the wrist when, three-and-a-half months ago, Winston Peters was perfectly happy to accept Stuart Nash’s resignation over his comments about a female MP?

I know why. He was happy for Stuart to go because he wasn’t a few days out from an election.

Nash criticised his local National MP Katie Nimon, for taking time off after having a baby and described as her being the laziest MP he’s ever come across.

Dumb. But Michael Laws talking about what it would be like after having sex with a candidate from another political party is next level.

Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong says the comments were “awful” and “misogynistic” and she thinks Michael Laws should stand down. As I do.

Now I’m not going to pretend that, even in this day and age, some guys don’t talk the way Michael Laws did. That stuff might get said at the pub or on a boys’ weekend.

But that’s private. What Michael Laws did was public. And for him to think that it’s OK for politicians to talk like this, well - as Nicola Willis said yesterday - it’s from another era and he should go back to the ark.

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