Columnist John Armstrong weighs in on the NZ Labour Party scandal. There is nothing substantially new here, but it is significant that someone of Armstrong's gravitas has lifted up the cudgel against a Labour administration.
Some excepts:
Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the Ardern Administration? How damaging are this week’s extraordinary revelations surrounding Labour’s disgraceful mishandling of sexual assault allegations to the prospects of the party clinging onto power following next year’s election?
Will the exposure of what has to be regarded as a deep vein of hypocrisy, insincerity and cynicism running through the very heart of the governing party turn out to be a tipping point which will end with Labour being tipped out of office? Has this unseemly episode exposed Jacinda Ardern as both a fake and a flake?
In short, has Labour drastically reduced its chances of retaining the Government benches in Parliament by unwittingly blunting the fire-power of its most potent weapon? Such questions might be regarded as being somewhat over the top.
To the contrary, however, the tumult of the past week has been as serious a crisis as any that have afflicted the party since the bitter ideological warfare which tore Labour apart in the late 1980s.
The latest example of Labour’s predilection for shooting itself in both feet was kicked off by Monday’s publication by The Spinoff website of the harrowing account of a 19-year-old Labour Party volunteer’s struggle to get the party’s hierarchy to take her complaint of alleged sexual assault seriously.
The impact of that article has been devastating — especially in terms of the embarrassment that has ended up being heaped on the Prime Minister. The offhand and shabby treatment by the party of a number of such complaints of alleged sexual assault and misconduct is not just a disgrace. It sits in the realm of the despicable. Labour’s behaviour has been as callous and mean-spirited as the practices of some organisations and business entities that the party professes to abhor. . . .
It is fine for Ardern to espouse the principles which she holds dear. But the bigger the bouquets for being seen to bring a fresh and more enlightened approach to the practise of politics, the bigger the brickbats when things go wrong. And deservedly so. Labour now looks to be morally bankrupt. Ardern has a mountain to climb in persuading voters that the party still holds dear to its founding principles.
To compound matters, her response to the revelations has been inept, most notably her insistence that she was unaware prior to this week that complaints about the behaviour of a Labour staffer included allegations of sexual assault.
That simply did not square with what she intimated five weeks ago when she took the New Zealand Council to task over its procedures for handling complaints of misconduct. At the end of the day, the search for the truth of what the Prime Minister knew and when she knew it is akin to trying to nail jelly to a wall. And about as rewarding. . . .
It is a longstanding political dictum that the lifespan of a prime ministership is usually death by the proverbial thousand cuts. It had been widely assumed that such was Ardern’s star quality, she was exempt or immune from that rule.
Well, quite simply, that presumption no longer holds.
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