Labour MP Charles Chauvel has been left clearly disgusted at a National MP's antics in showing a picture of him the back of his partner's car and referring to it as "Driving Miss Daisy". During general debate on Wednesday, while raising the Mad Butcher as a 'working class hero', Tau Henare tried to paint Chauvel as the opposite by whipping out a blown up copy of a picture one of his staff members took of the Labour MP in the backseat of a Labour-logoed Mercedes Benz while his partner drove. The vociferous National MP shouted "he's not even driving his own car; he's got somebody else to drive it for him. Talk about driving Miss Daisy," he finished, as members of his party cackled and clapped in support. As he arose to speak about the surveillance bill, Chauvel described Henare's speech as an extraordinary spectacle, saying "from a person who was recently caught abusing a constituent while driving his Audi it was a bit ironic to be mocked because my partner, a working class man who spent 15 years as a cop, started a business to do well enough for himself to buy a nice car." The out Labour MP continued "I'm very proud to sit in that car, in the back or the front. In the back when my partner has his mum and needs her to go into the pharmacy and get some medication, only to be snapped by some National Party spook, lying in wait to do some dirty tricks in the election campaign. "Well you know, we're just going to come to expect this, but we know that people are actually going to focus on the issues, not on this sort of nonsense and distraction that we get from Tau Henare and the rest of the cream of the National Party," he continued. "And I'm not even going to respond to the homophobic reference about 'Driving Miss Daisy' that we heard at the end of the speech because the voters will judge the urban liberals, oh, well, the old Tories who masquerade as urban liberals, opposite," he said from the opposition benches. You can watch the video where Henare makes the 'Driving Miss Daisy' reference thanks to Parliament's video on demand service 'InTheHouse' below, and Charles Chauvel's response here
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Friday, 7th October 2011 - 11:39am