Ineptitude or Lies or Both

"The Moment I Found Out That You Found Out, I Acted Swiftly"


By Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
The Civilian

[The Prime Minister explains how and why she acted and reacted to the allegations of sexual abuse from within her office.]



I am every bit as angry as you are.

I am every bit as disappointed as you must be.

The people with power, oversight and the ability to do something about these processes within the Labour Party should be ashamed. Whoever those people are, I am running out of patience with them, and the way they continually let us down, while helpless people like you and me stand by and can only watch failure after failure.

I can assure you, earnestly, that the moment I found out about the fact that you had found out about the facts, I acted immediately to see what the situation was.  I would never sit on my hands if it ever became apparent to me that something had become apparent to you, and that’s my promise.

I was immensely disappointed to learn that our party president, Nigel Haworth, had conducted himself this way. Again.

If I had foreseen that he could do something like this (again), then I would never have let him get away with it in the first place again.

Some of you are still not satisfied with the extent of my involvement in this, and that’s okay (legally).

But it was only on Monday that I learned that you had learned that Paula Bennett had learned that others had learned, and the moment I heard that others had heard, and that Grant had heard, and that Mike had heard and Rob had heard, then I acted swiftly to wait for Nigel to resign.

I was fixing myself a coffee on Monday night and Clarke said to me “What’s all this about? Didn’t you know about this five weeks ago?”

And I said “I didn’t know the extent of it! I thought it was just bullying!”

I never promised that our party would be free of bullying. Government is about compromise, and we are in a coalition with New Zealand First.

I know that many of you are sceptical of us now, in large part because this has happened not once, but twice. But if you can find it in yourself to put your trust in me once again, then I promise you there will not be a fourth time.

"We Are the Champions of the World"

Rules and Regulations Are For Dummies

What is going on?  We have not followed the story printed below in any great detail.  But it does not appear to pass the smell test.  Is this a case of the left wing parliamentary Labour Party spending most of its waking hours hectoring and lecturing everyone.  Is it so captivated by its own importance  that it feels justified in dismissing out of hand stories of its own malfeasance? 

'Process Underway' a Convenient Shield

Barry Soper NZ Herald


First of all the Labour Party dodged answering questions about allegations of sexual assault and rape by one of its workers because "the process" involved in the investigation exonerating him was under way.  Now that they've set up an appeal process for the complainants they're not commenting because that process is underway. It's a convenient shield for the party to hide behind.  And all of this from a party leading a Government that Jacinda Ardern promised would be the most transparent in our history.

Prime Minister Ardern's prior sanctimony and self-righteousness is now in tatters.  But that's a relatively minor matter.

Labour is Snookered

Winston Peters is NZ's Actual Prime Minister

Below is veteran columnist, John Armstrong's take on New Zealand's unfolding constitutional revolution.  We suspect that he has failed to grasp fully the political pressures, on the one hand, and the de facto changes to NZ's constitution, on the other. 

 Labour Has Been Outsmarted and Outmanoeuvred

John Armstrong
One News

Don’t listen to those who dismiss the current muscle-flexing by Winston Peters as nothing more than the standard fare of MMP politics.  It is anything but.

Were there a handbook covering the mechanics of forming and running a coalition government, the New Zealand First leader would currently be writing a new chapter—one which would be without a happy ending for Jacinda Ardern, her coalition managers and the rest of the Labour Party.  The latter should be worried — very worried.

It is the ongoing conundrum of multi-party governments that minor parties which behave themselves and keep their heads down have almost without exception have had their heads lopped off come election-time.  Peters seems to be experimenting with the notion that minor parties which are far less polite get noticed by voters rather than being suffocated.

If that is not enough to give Labour grief, Peters appears to be engaged in trying to pull off what would amount to a massive shift in power within the coalition.  Forget cracks about cracks appearing in the coalition’s facade.  Peters, for one, will not be going anywhere. . . .

Peters now has the dream job of foreign minister. Yet, he also remains an absolutely pivotal figure in domestic politics.  With regard to the latter, it is obvious there been a major shift in New Zealand First strategy.

Xenophobia Makes Unwelcome Return

Reflexive Cloth-Cap Labour Pollies

Commentator, Mike Hosking has written an excellent piece, published in the NZ Herald a few days ago.  It concerns the proposed NZ government ban on "furreigners" buying real estate in general and houses in particular.  This policy put forward by the obtuse Labour Party is antediluvian insofar as it comes right out of the socialist playbook written well over a century ago.  It also contains elements of crass nationalism.  It represents protectionism.  

Labour unions and left wing politicians think it makes eminent sense for New Zealand to be kept for NZ citizens.  Keep furreigners out.  However such populist twaddle turns out to be positively dangerous when the respective countries of those horrible furreigners start to retaliate with trade and investment barriers against New Zealand.  All of a sudden we are confronted with the unfortunate reality that New Zealand is a minnow in the grand global scheme of things.  We are easily netted and squashed.

Here is Hosking at his splenetic best:

NZ Labour Anti-Export

Paying Off the Boys in Back Rooms

The real price of a Labour government in New Zealand is its cloth cap attitude the trade unions.  When the unions bark, "Jump" all Labour MP's in the caucus intone, "How high?" as they are already off the floor and moving upwards.  Union money means an awful lot to the impecunious, poorly funded party.  

What this means is that Labour can do an awful lot of economic damage to the country as they do the unions' bidding.  It makes it all the more galling when one considers that unions are a pale shell of their former presence.  Here is an example of how it works:

Labour Says its Student Visa Crackdown Will Cost $130 Million

NZ Herald

Labour has admitted that its planned crackdown on student visas will chop $130 million a year off the country's education export income.  Labour education spokesman Chris Hipkins disclosed the figure at an international education conference in Auckland today, revealing that the party had done an "economic impact analysis" of its proposals.

That's a serious cost.  In effect the student visa shut down will virtually kill a busy and thriving export industry, since its earnings come from offshore accounts.  So that's bad enough.  But it gets worse.  The Government has had a look at Labour's figures and claims they are woefully shonky.

National's Tertiary Education Minister Paul Goldsmith said his analysis put the cost of Labour's proposals at "closer to $1 billion".

Independent Tertiary Education NZ chair Christine Clark said she agreed with Goldsmith, pointing to a recent Infometrics study estimating that overseas students contributed $1.1 billion to the NZ economy in 2015-16 in private training establishments (PTEs), $511 million in polytechnics and $552 million in English language schools.  "I believe he could quite easily wipe 50 per cent of the PTE benefit to the country with Labour's policy," she said.

Chris Hipkins is not the brightest pin in the cushion, nor does the noun, integrity sit well on his shoulders.  "Political hack", however, does.  Why would a Labour government want to kill off a thriving export industry?  Because in its perverted world-view the state does a better job of training and education than the non-state sector.  And the state education sector is controlled substantially by the education unions.  State unions hate competition.  Socialists hate competition.

Long May It Ride

A Hangover from Karl Marx 

The union movement is an antediluvian relic--at least in New Zealand.  The movement was decimated when compulsory membership was removed from the statute books.  The system used to be that if you worked in certain industries, you had to be a union member.  Now the unions had lots of rationalisations for such an undemocratic, oppressive system.  There were mumblings about "equalizing" the disproportionately weak powers of the employee class versus the capitalist class that did the employing.

But all of these arguments amounted to one thing: the unions knew that they did not have sufficient popular support amongst the "working classes", or the proletariat (to use a Marxist term).  To survive, the union leadership knew the proletariat required to be forced to become union members.  When union membership became voluntary in 1991, with the passing of the Employment Contracts Act, union ranks depleted more rapidly than an melting ice-cream at high noon in the summer equinox.

But the unions, whilst greatly diminished, clung on.  They have sought to return to the "old glory days" of compulsion.  They have tried to push their case--not with workers and employees as one would expect--but with the Labour Party.  But even within that relic of a bygone era they could not find sufficient support.  They had to queer the pitch, so to speak.

When Power Lusts for Money

What Now, Red Cow

The NZ Labour Party is nostalgically wishing that it could enter a time machine and get back to the late sixties.  Those were the days when Rob Muldoon, leader of the National Party, ran campaign attack ads against the Labour Party festooned with dancing Cossacks and warnings about "Reds under the bed."  Nowadays, as another election approaches, the Labour Party is wishing that it could go back to its glory days and find a few beds to hide under.

The problem is that the Labour Party has dragged out a revolutionary Pancho Villa pistol and shot every red foot in sight.  There was no force involved, you understand.  This was a pure "home goal".

Labour's coffers are a bit on the empty side.  The unions  have successfully captured the party machine and caucus but are scroogish when it comes to dolling out the lucre.  Labour therefore needs an army of gullible unpaid volunteers to work the political campaign.  New Zealand kids are pretty smart, though.  They know full-well that they can sit comfortably on the dole and do virtually nothing.  So, the uber-smart NZ young people looked at the "bargain" the Labour Party was offering them.  Live on the dole, work your butts off as a volunteer at the dirty end of a political campaign (door knocking, phone calling, working eighteen hours a day)--and all for nothing.  Just live off your dole payments.  It was an offer they refused faster than you can say, "Dancing Cossacks".  

So, the Labour Party turned overseas.

Mad As Hatters

By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

Should a political party nourish and protect racism within its ranks?  Well, if it is the KKK, it's very raison d'etre is racist, so of course it should and would protect racism.  Should that party be deemed a legal association?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But that is not what is primarily at issue here.  The question is whether racism should be tolerated within a political party. The answer to that question is in the hands of the political party itself.  

Freedom of speech and freedom of association (fundamental precepts of a free society) require that the rest of society respect the right of some to gather together to advance a racist platform.  But, of course, that leaves the rest of society free to pillory (figuratively speaking) the party and its platform . . .  as the US has done with respect to the KKK.

This leads us to consider the depths to which the Labour Party in the UK has sunk.  Even The Guardian, Labour's representative within the media, finds itself in a quandary.  Should it criticise the Labour Party for its embedded racism, or not?  Again, from our perspective, the UK Labour Party is free to become a political party with a racist platform if it so chooses.  It appears increasingly obvious that racism is the new normal--at least to many within it.

Floundering in A Self-Made Mire

Traps for Small Players

The once proud NZ Labour Party is becoming more of an embarrassment every day.  In this devolution and regression lies a cautionary tale.  You have to spare a thought for the Labour pollies.  Being in opposition in New Zealand's Westminster system of government can be a torturous experience, particularly if you are not the smartest pin in the cushion.

You sit in Parliament day after day about five metres away from the seats where real power resides.  You might as well be five kilometers away.   Everything is stacked against you.  As they say, one day on those Treasury benches is worth a thousand on the seats opposite.

The big challenge for opposition parties in the Parliament is to scrub up as a government in waiting. So often this thought rarely enters the collective head, and when it does, it usually lasts only until the next news cycle.  An old adage says that opposition parties don't win elections; the governing parties lose them.  Opposition parties in their haste and lust for power always forget this adage.  They thrash around trying to do something, and therein lies the tale.

The biggest temptation for Her Majesty's loyal opposition is to avoid magnifying problems to where the electorate reasonably ask it to proffer solutions.  At that point, electoral oblivion beckons.  That's the point Labour has reached now.

NZ Labour Party Goes Retrogressive

TPP or Die -- Why We Need It

Duncan Garner
Newshub

The political consensus on free trade is over.  Stand by for thousands of protesters to target the signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement on Thursday.

After decades of supporting free trade, Labour has chosen to veer left into the bosom of New Zealand First and the Greens and oppose the TPP. It's short-sighted and totally hypocritical, in my view. It looks like the party has had its strings pulled by anti-TPP academic Jane Kelsey.

This is a serious and controversial departure for Labour, and it may yet hurt the party among middle New Zealand voters.  Do these politicians know that our bottled wine can be sold tariff-free in Canada, Japan and the US on day one of the TPP being implemented? Why would you oppose that after we as a country have fought for this for so long? Most fruit and other produce can be exported tariff-free too, as a result of the TPP.

I travelled the world with Labour and National Party ministers for years, watching them fight bloody hard for market access for our exporters. I have seen a block of New Zealand butter selling for $25 in Japan; the same with cheese. Some of these tariffs are so high our exporters are locked out.

We Get the Politicians We Deserve, They Say

What Have We Done?

Suddenly the NZ Labour Party has discovered the idea of national sovereignty.  It is somewhat of a late conversion.  Faced with the prospect of the present government signing the Trans Pacific Partnership ("TPP") free trade agreement--a political and policy objective formerly prosecuted and advanced by the Labour Party with great gusto and some notable successes--the Labour leader has now decided that TPP is a bridge too far.  

What is on that bridge? we wonder.  Labour leader, Andrew Little has been very clear in recent days.  The reason he (and his party) now opposes free trade agreements is that they end up diminishing national sovereignty.  They obligate New Zealand not-to-do nasty things with international trade.

This is a right pickle for the Labour Party.  The dizzying intellect of Mr Little has led the Party into a position which rapidly collapses into a quagmire with a scintilla of reflection.

Common Sense Trumps An Alien Ideology

The Beginning of the End?

The New Zealand Labour Party is currently part of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.  So, true to its official position within the Westminster system of government, the Labour Party has systematically and relentlessly opposed the introduction of charter schools in New Zealand.  The government of the day has tentatively introduced a pilot programme of charter schools to "test the waters" and see how they go.  Labour has said, "No go" at every opportunity.  Its stated policy is that when re-elected to the government benches it will abolish all charter schools in the land.  "We will wipe them out.  All of them." has become a new line in the Labour anthem.

The Labour opposition has at least two faces.  The public face is a fiscal argument that charter schools undermine plain vanilla government schools by excessively consuming state funds that otherwise would be going to government schools.  This argument is fallacious, deceptive, and misleading.  It compares apples with oranges and ends up with lemons.  It rolls the start-up costs of charter schools into operational costs and derives a cost-per-pupil for charter schools.  Which, of course, is higher than the per-pupil cost of vanilla government schools, because (watch my hands) the start up costs are excluded in the case of government schools.

Down the road from us a new government primary school has been announced by the Ministry of Education.  The declared budget to develop the site and put the buildings up is around $27 million.  If apples were to be compared to apples, the Labour Party snake-oilers would add in the $27m start up cost to the operational costs for the first year of the new school, and calculate a per-pupil cost of a brand new government school with a brand new charter school.  And, hey presto, suddenly it would become abundantly clear that charter schools are much, much less expensive than new Rolly-Royce behemoth government schools.

But the Labour opposition has another face.  It's real concern lies elsewhere.