Editorial: Looking for signs of innocence

Billionaire Owen Glenn says he contributed $100,000 toward NZ First leader Winston Peters' legal expenses because Mr Peters asked him for help and that Mr Peters later thanked him for his assistance.

Mr Peters says he did not ask Mr Glenn for help and was unaware he had donated money toward the cost of his 2005 electoral petition till advised by his lawyer, Brian Henry, in July.

To the Government's political rivals the pair's differing accounts of how $100,000 of Mr Glenn's money ended up in Mr Henry's practice account are easily explained. Either Mr Glenn or Mr Peters is not telling the truth. No prizes for guessing which of them they blame.

But Prime Minister Helen Clark says both are honourable men and she assumes there must be some "innocent explanation".

National and ACT have seized upon this as evidence of a decline in the lofty standards Miss Clark set when she took office nine years ago.

But, as NZ First's supporters - 52 per cent of whom, according to a recent survey, believe the United States knew about or planned the September 11 terrorist attacks and 35 per cent of whom believe world governments are hiding evidence of alien visits - could have told them, things are not always what they seem.

There is a very simple explanation for the disparity between Mr Peters' and Mr Glenn's version of events. Mr Peters is the victim of an inter-galactic practical joke.

Elvis is not dead. His death was faked by aliens who held him captive for more than 30 years before returning him to Earth to impersonate New Zealand's former foreign affairs and racing minister.

In this guise he has gone about offering honorary consulships to people he bumps into at international sporting events, soliciting funds from wealthy expatriate businessmen and plying wealthy locals with alcohol before hitting them up for donations.

Meanwhile, the real Mr Peters, who has stumped the country, telling supporters NZ First does not accept political donations from big business, has been made to look like a hypocrite and a charlatan because of the wayward activities of his malevolent doppelganger.

Miss Clark has not offered her "innocent explanation" of how she believes Mr Peters and Mr Glenn came to have such contrasting views of the transaction, that resulted in $100,000 being knocked off Mr Peters' legal bill, but it would be a surprise if it differed greatly from that outlined above.

The only alternative would be that either the man on whom her party relies for its parliamentary majority, or the man who underwrote her party's 2005 election campaign, is telling lies.

If that were the case, disinterested observers might be led to believe that the reason Miss Clark chose not to try to establish who was telling the truth, when Mr Glenn told her in February that Mr Peters had asked him for money, was that she did not want to do anything that might precipitate an early election at a time when her party was trailing National by almost 25 percentage points in public opinion polls.

Surely the prime minister is not that cynical.

- © Fairfax NZ News