Laila Harre steps down as Internet Party leader

Laila Harre. Photo / Michael Cunningham

Laila Harre has announced she will be stepping down as the leader of the Internet Party by the end of the year.

Ms Harre made the announcement on TV3's The Nation this morning and said whether the party continued on without her was up to its members.

"For me, being outside Parliament as a political party is not a game that I think is worth the candle," she said.

Ms Harre said she had yet to make any firm plans for her political future.

"Rumours of my political career being over have circulated many times over the last 15 years. I would love to be in Parliament, I would love to be articulating the kind of fundamental agenda and values that Internet Mana promoted in the election campaign.

"I'm not prepared to say 'never again'."

Reflecting on the Internet Party's failed election campaign, Ms Harre admitted "we completely mismanaged the last month of the campaign".

"We had amazing momentum before then. The road trip, I think, worked extremely well."

The downward spiral of the party's campaign began when Mana's Te Tai Tonga candidate Georgina Beyer criticised Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom, Ms Harre said.

"Which fed into what became a narrative of a rift and division and it was one that we just couldn't knock through the rest of the campaign. It became completely distracting from the release of policy."

Ms Harre also blamed media coverage of the party for its poor election result.

"The media made a decision to focus on Kim and in a very negative way during that period. The only way that we could have avoided that was to take Kim completely out of the picture and of course then there would have been all the stories about 'what's happened to Kim Dotcom'.

"We were kind of in a lose-lose position."

Ms Harre said she no regrets about joining the party. "What I regret is actually the failure of the left overall to get its act together in a strategic and tactical way during the election campaign."

"This was always going to be a very finely balanced election outcome. There was no way, never, in any poll since the beginning of the year that Labour and the Greens were going to get sufficient support to form a majority government.

"That meant we had to rescue progressive votes, to do that we had to rescue Internet Party votes."

Ms Harre said she was no longer being paid by Dotcom and had intermittent contact with him via text message.

"Kim is focussing on his legal issues, obviously that's at a critical point."

She said her plans for the future included a "pilgrimage meets activism" walk with her sister to "connect with people over fundamental social change issues".