Andrew Laming: No Criticism Please

Federal Liberal MP Andrew Laming went on a trolling warpath earlier this month in regards to his perception that the National Broadband Network (NBN) was being rolled out in the Brisbane area on a politico-geographic agenda.

“The cold, hard reality in Brisbane is that households in Labor seats are eight times more likely to get the NBN than those in Coalition seats.”

“Worse, the odds are around 50 per cent better if your Labor MP is a minister. This is a save-the-political-furniture strategy. They are not targeting marginal seats here. They are just trying to survive.”

Of course, there are many reasons why his position was completely wrong, as I highlighted in my article last week on how the Coalition – (deliberately or otherwise) – manage to get their facts on the NBN completely wrong.

Constantly.

At the time of his rant – (spread throughout the media over several days) – myself, @CameronWatt and @Gwyntaglaw engaged in a terse dialogue on Twitter with Laming, pointing out clear, well documented facts in regards to the NBN and its rollout schedule, that were contrary to Laming’s own beliefs on the matter.

He ably demonstrated his inability to grasp even the basic concepts of how the NBN works, how it connects together, and how technical matters – (in most cases) – dictate which parts of the network are rolled out first.

He clearly didn’t like being shown up as being wrong about it.

In fact, he hated it.

How much did he hate it? Well, he blocked me on Twitter, a fact I discovered when putting together the aforementioned article last week.

The dialogue centers around this tweet, but as he has blocked me, I can’t see the entire conversation any more.

So what’s wrong Andrew? Why don’t you want to hear the facts?

Shouldn’t you be listening to the people?

Of course, all of this goes against his own “social media guide” on how a politician should be dealing with their communities on social media networks, where he declares:

“Politicians reaching out to their communities via social media should avoid getting into public slanging matches with critics.”

You got yourself into a very public slanging match on Twitter, didn’t you Andrew?

Further, he also declares that:

“…disconnecting or blocking constituents is ‘the most damaging thing a candidate can do’…”

Oh dear, really?

Politics will always come with attached criticism – that’s a given – but if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!

Especially when you break your own social media rules.