By Patrick Gower
A Labour MP has attracted the wrath of a Wellington couple for voicing his opinion that their children should "shut up".
Charles Chauvel was travelling on an Air New Zealand flight from Auckland to Wellington, with three small children and their parents in the rows immediately in front.
Read Jeremy Elwood's Political Animal blog on Charles Chauvel's outburst
Mr Chauvel quite simply wanted the children to “shut up”.
“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” says the children’s mother, Stephanie Phillips.
“I wouldn’t talk to my children like that. I wouldn’t tell them to shut up.”
Mr Chauvel admits loudly saying the Phillips family should just “shut up” during the flight on Sunday.
“I turned to my partner and said, ‘I wish these kids would shut up’. If that’s something I shouldn’t have done then there we go.”
He also admits the children, aged three, four, and one, were annoying.
“I certainly was on a flight with some badly behaved kids.”
He says he uttered it just once but the children’s father wrote about it on a right-wing blog, saying Mr Chauvel had a go three times.
Mr Phillips wrote;
[Mr Chauvel] hissed: ‘Will you just shut up!’ then a more vocal ‘will you just shut up!’ and finally, ‘I don’t know why they let them up there’.”
Mr Chauvel says the parents need to take a look at themselves.
“It would have been good if the parents kept the kids better amused than the way they were.”
“He would have no concept of how young families are and how they live,” says Ms Phillips.
This is not a hanging offence for Mr Chauvel, although he is mildly embarrassed it’s become public.
Labour leader Phil Goff says it’s no big deal.
But in politics there is an old saying – never work with children or animals. For Mr Chauvel, he may want to extend that to include never sitting close to them either.
3 News