Prime Minister’s Denial at Odds with National Party Statement

Labour’s New Zealand Council has today released an email from the General Manager of the National Party that directly contradicts recent statements from the Prime Minister in relation to the 2011 breaches of Labour Party website databases.
In his stand-up on August 14th 2014, the Prime Minister denied a number of times that the National Party was involved in the removal of data on Labour members and donors in 2011. This Thursday he said:

"What I know is for a simple fact all that stuff around the Labour Party was done by Cameron Slater and it wasn't from the National Party."

http://www.3news.co.nz/Labour-considers-Dirty-Politics-options/tabid/1607/articleID/356862/Default.aspx

Following the 2011 breach the Labour Party had proof that material had been downloaded to a National Party site. Labour wrote to the National Party asking them to confirm that they would not breach the private nature of the material. Greg Hamilton, General Manager of the National Party, responded on June 13th 2011 in part as follows:

“We do accept that one of our staff visited your public website via http://healthyhomeshealthykiwis.org.nz and read files that were publicly available. It appears that he downloaded a file named Labour Newsletter and several compressed files with the view of reading later. In fact the compressed files remain un-opened”.

Moira Coatsworth, Labour Party President, said today:

“These two statements are directly at odds. The public is entitled to clarification from the Prime Minister on two important questions:

1. Does the Prime Minister now accept the National Party was involved?
2. Is the Prime Minister asserting that Jason Ede, at all material times a staff member in his office, was not involved?”

ENDS

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