On Monday at Kim Dotcom’s Moment of Truth event, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden produced evidence indicating that our spy agencies are engaged in mass surveillance activities directed at New Zealand citizens.

The evidence is deeply alarming, but will it bring down the government? Probably not. Edward Snowden may well be a hero for exposing the activities of the NSA and other intelligence agencies, but his problem is that he’s earnest and nerdy. His evidence would have carried more weight with the voting public if he’d been photographed joking around with a few All Blacks. He also made the mistake of contradicting our Prime Minister. Snowden may be a hero, but our John is the closest thing going in these parts to a saint.

Most people don’t give a stuff about the things our spies get up to (they should, they absolutely should!), so it’s hard to see the Dotcom Moment of Truth event as being anything other than a triumph for John Key. Sure, Key will now have to lie some more in order to explain away his previous lies, but Key is one of the better liars on the political circuit at the moment, and my guess is that the public will back his version of events over what actually occurred.

Having said all that, Key hasn’t been in the best form this last week or so. He has been all over the place in his various statements about whether our government spy agencies conduct mass surveillance. But it must be bloody hard to keep track of all those lies. Let’s all cut John Key some slack.

The event was a triumph for John Key thanks to the sterling work put in by the organiser, Kim Dotcom. The German internet mogul had promised for weeks and weeks to provide evidence that John Key knew all about him long before the raid on the Dotcom mansion, but all we got in the end was an email. An email released prior to the event and which may well be a fake. The only reputation that now seems to be in tatters is Dotcom’s.

If John Key organised an event designed to embarrass and expose Kim Dotcom, while starving the opposition parties of crucial publicity in the last week of the election campaign, he wouldn’t have delivered anything as powerful as last night’s big show. Dotcom may hold a grudge against Key, but he may also have done the PM a huge favour. With enemies like these…

Anyway, none of the revelations that we are most probably being spied upon, and lied to about being spied upon, really matter. At the end of the day it’s not John Key’s fault, all governments do it, nothing to hide nothing to fear, terrorists, All Blacks analogy, bad people, keeping your children safe, the last Labour government, Norton Antivirus, henchman, I don’t recall, I refute that, left wing smear, The Issues That Matter, and Three More Years.