Conference 2009: Deborah Coddington
It’s safe to say that Deborah Coddington hasn’t been ACT’s greatest cheerleader in recent years. Even when she was an MP, she wasn’t one to mince words, calling Richard Prebble’s stunt-like suggestion in 2004 that ACT merge with National in the wake of Don Brash’s Orewa speech “disastrous”. In 2007, Coddington criticised Hide for being “rapt in his own dancing, flash suits, swimming and catwalk modelling”, instead of promoting policies such as “radical personal tax cuts”. If the criticism from Coddington has in the past been blunt, it is now razor-sharp. In her Sunday newspaper column published during ACT’s conference...