Tauranga MP Winston Peters has welcomed news that ACT list MP Ken Shirley has given up the ghost and is quitting the race for Tauranga.

“It now seems that all the rhetoric that Mr Shirley gave the people of Tauranga about wanting to be their MP, and taking an interest Tauranga issues was fiction. Mr Shirley has proven the old adage that talk is cheap, and all his talk of commitment to Tauranga was just that—talk.

“A few weeks ago he, Mr Prebble and Mr Hide were ACT’s only contenders for electorate seats—since then there has been the National Party Conference, and Mr Shirley has toured around five Pacific Islands for twelve days and has then traveled to East Timor, of all places, to make up his mind about his political future.

“My prediction is that Rodney Hide is next to go, and that this is the price ACT are paying National to give Prebble a free run in Wellington Central.

“The plain truth is that Mr Shirley has been overwhelmingly rejected by the people of Tauranga because they will not be bought, just like the people of Ohariu-Belmont weren’t fooled last time by Mr Shirley, or the people of Tasman before them, and the people of Richmond before that.

“The people of Tauranga know that Mr Shirley is a political rolling stone—where-ever he lays his hat, that’s his home”

“I would also love to see the results of ACT’s poll—it will prove once and for all that the people of Tauranga have no time for ACT and Mr Shirley. Obviously he didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis of standing in Tauranga, otherwise he would have never stood in the first place.

“Mr Shirley should sell his painted truck to an unemployed person in Tauranga to start a business so that it can be used for some useful purpose,” concluded Mr Peters.

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