Harre quits Internet Party

Laila Harre says she will quit as Internet Party leader by Christmas when the party has completed its post-election review, but would love to return to parliament.

The party is cconsidering options for its future including winding up, or continuing in another form, the former Alliance leader told TV3's The Nation.

The future of its partnership with Mana depends on Mana and if the Internet Party continues, but “all bets are off”, Ms Harre says.

The Internet Party “completely mismanaged” the last month of the election campaign, she says.

That's a verdict Mana is unlikely to dispute. The Internet Party's contribution — heavy on cash, but also silly conspiracy theories that failed to resonate with hard-scrabble Te Tai Tokerau voters — backfired, with Mana leader Hone Harawira losing his seat to Labour challenge Kelvin Davis.

But Labour and the Green Party are also to blame for their attitude to Internet-Mana, and bought into the “John Key’s narrative”, Ms Harre maintains.

She also says the Greens leaked news of the collapse of Labour-Greens alignment talks earlier this year — a claim that presumably rules out the Greens as a vehicle for her fulfilling her ambition ot return to the Beehive.

Mr Harre said she is not on Kim Dotcom’s payroll anymore and the party has spent the record $3.5 million donation it got from him

She is confident Mr Dotcom was not connected to Dirty Politics hacker Rawshark. John Key knew it wasn’t Dotcom even when he was claiming it was the German entrepreneur, she says.

In terms of the accused pirate's "Moment of Truth" event, which centred on an email from Warner Brothers that the studio said was forged, Ms Harre says she doesn’t know if it’s a fake but knows Mr Dotcom believes it to be real.

Ms Harre's defection from his political movement caps a bad month for Mr Dotcom. The accused pirate has learned he faces a court date with his estranged wife over a trust. His law firm (Simpson Grierson) and QC (Paul Davison) have said they no longer want to represent him, and the Crown has successfully applied for tough new bail restrictions ahead of a hearing Monday to revoke his bail altogether.

See the full interview here.