A statement from The Opportunities Party, supplied by its communications director Sean Plunket, responding to Mike Joy’s assertion that he did not endorse TOP. Mike Joy has since accepted this version of events, and we have updated his story to reflect this.
Let us start by saying we have enormous respect for Dr Mike Joy and his longstanding and continuing advocacy for genuine policy change to protect and enhance our precious environment, in particular our fresh water resources.
Such is our respect for Dr Joy that on Monday this week at 10:34am our Media and Communications Director, Sean Plunket, rang him to seek an endorsement from him prior to polling day on Saturday.
At 10:48am Dr Joy rang Mr Plunket back and they talked for two minutes. Mr Plunket asked Dr Joy for an endorsement which he agreed to give. Dr Joy then asked if Mr Plunket could help him write such an endorsement given his skills in writing media statements. Mr Plunket declined, simply telling Dr Joy his own words would be best, and passed on his email address.
At 11:17am Dr Joy sent an email to Mr Plunket. It read:
“Sean how is this? I don’t like to endorse political parties but TOP has made a huge difference to this election by putting policy before personality and I want their policies to make a real difference.”
At 11:44 Mr Plunket replied:
“Lovely Mike many thanks. If you have a twitter account could you tweet this and put it on Facebook.”
Dr Joy did publish the statement on his Facebook page and TOP issued a press release directly quoting his email.
Since then Green Party supporters and MP Julie Anne Genter have made a number of false claims about Dr Joy’s statement on social media and falsely accused TOP of some sort of skulduggery.
TOP can fully understand the type of pressure such abuse can place on an individual such as Dr Joy.
Dr Joy has not contacted TOP to withdraw his support or suggest it was in anyway coerced from him.
We wish Dr Joy well for his continued work to protect our environment and again thank him for his support.