North Shore's "leaky mayor", Andrew Williams, apologised yet again yesterday ... this time for putting a cartoon showing Local Government Minister Rodney Hide as Adolf Hitler on his Facebook page.
Asked about the cartoon by the Herald yesterday, Mr Williams said he would remove it.
"It was a joke emailed to me the other day as a new logo for Auckland Super City," said the Mayor, who is doggedly trying to force the Government to triple its contribution to the national leaky homes repair bill.
"It's funny. I thought a few of my friends would want to see it, so I put it on.
"There is all sorts of stuff going the rounds with Hide in them, and this one actually caught my humour.
"But I'll take it off if people are offended."
That's not good enough Mr Williams. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler are not only not funny; they are deeply, deeply offensive. A glib one-sorry-fits-all apology will not cut it with us.
Our father fought against Hitler in WWII. As a member of 2NZEF, he saw active service in North Africa and Crete. Shortly before his death, he was awarded a medal by the Greek government, of which he was immensely proud. But a large chunk of his personality did not return from the battlefields with him.
He will be typical of men of his generation. The horrors of war, which we can only imagine, scarred hundreds of thousands of men both physically and emotionally. Most of those men carried their scars to the grave, and found ways to mask them. Our father worked; worked tirelessly. He found his place of comfort at work, where he could immerse himself and forget about things for a while. We mourn his passing, more than 20 years ago. But even more, we mourn the close relationship we never had; the close relationship that the war stole from us.
That's why we are so personally affronted by Andrew William's shocking lapse in judgment yesterday. It is an insult to the generation that preceded him; the men and women who put their lives on the line to defend King and Country from the tyranny of Hitler's regime.
His half-hearted apology is not enough. The only way for him to appease us now is to resign, and to resign immediately. Of course, we're not residents or ratepayers of the North Shore City, so we're not important to Andrew Williams and his A Team. We hope though that we have readers who are, and who will send the Mayor a message - that he is a disgrace to the office of Mayor, and to the citizens who elected him. And we will be doing everything we can to ensure that he is not elected again; count on it.
4 comments:
Such an error of judgement in someone who heads one of our bigger councils and wants to be part of the biggest is distrubing.
Quite so HP. The man is clearly not fir for the role.
And as Murray has helpfully pointed out, one of the Mayor's Facebook friends is Joris de Bres, the Race Relations bloke - that's interesting ....
Well, he may not be FIR for the role too, but of course I was REAlly saying that he is not FIT for the role - fat finger syndrome and a tired brain are conspiring against me today!
He may not be the right stuff for Mayor, but he'd make a great blogger.
Post a Comment