Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

Sitting Dunedin South MP David Benson-Pope will likely spend the next few months looking for a new career, after losing the 2008 Labour Party nomination to local PR woman Clare Curran over the weekend.
Quelle demage.

Curran, an elected Labour Party official, has been involved with the union movements in both Australia and New Zealand in recent years. She currently runs a small public relations/communications business in Dunedin with her partner.

However, Clare Curran is more well known to the general public as the "woman who was awarded an uncontested contract with the Environment Ministry", at the request of Labour MP David Parker (Climate Change minister). She was also described by his Private Secretary as Parker's "right-hand woman".

TV3's coverage of the Dunedin selection result was rather ominous... "The coffin lid is closing on the political career of David Benson-Pope"...


Benson-Pope said after the 2005 election campaign that he thought media coverage of him was "way over the top", and that reporters and interviewers at both TV One and TV3 were "downright rude really".

DBP has been the Labour MP for Dunedin South for almost nine years, following a period as a Labour Dunedin city councillor. His de-selection follows a long run of embarrassing sagas, including Tennis-gate, Nightie-gate, Panty-gate, and Setchell-gate.


He eventually lost the backing of his Popular and competent Prime Minister, for his habit of being unable to tell the truth... As one commentator put it, "less for what he had done, than for his repeated inability to simply say what he had done".

As a comment on the Labour-funded blog The Standard noted last year...

Dunedin South is a rock-solid Labour seat. It’s hugely important organisationally: the LEC has one of the largest memberships–at around 200, around 5% of Labour’s entire membership–and is asset-rich.

Benson-Pope’s electorate office is leased by the LEC to Parliamentary Services. It’s a cash cow to the Party.