Newshub reports:

And Newshub can reveal in the six years Ginny Andersen has been an MP there’s been a turnover of nine staff in her electorate office. A Labour Party spokesperson says this is in line with other MPs with most staff leaving following an election.

Newshub can also reveal there has also been another complaint made against Andersen by an electorate staffer.

Nine electorate staff in six years is most definitely not normal. In fact I know many MPs who have kept the same electorate staff for their entire tenure as an MP.

Within hours of the slaughter of over 1,000 civilian men, women and babies by Hamas terrorists, our former Foreign Minister tweeted:

This was widely criticised for its failure to condemn the slaughter by Hamas. Now it turns out that MFAT provided a different message to her, but her office/her rejected their message and instead sent out the one above.

So MFAT’s draft started with “Aotearoa New Zealand (flag) unequivocally condemns rocket and terror attacks from Gaza into Israel and calls for their immediate cessation.” and Nanaia or her office deleted that and refused to send it.

Let us hope our new Foreign Minister doesn’t need prodding to condemn terrorism.

Newsroom has some interesting data on issues from Talbot Mills. The net support or opposition on each issue, in order, was:

1. Register firearms +66%
2. Covid mask requirements +54%
3. Legalised abortion +42%
4. Same sex marriage +37%
5. strengthening hate speech laws +37%
6. Covid vaccine mandates +24%
7. Stronger regulations to reduce farming emissions +20%
8. Bilingual road signs +1%
9. The Maori Health Authority -1%
10. Make it easier to change birth certificate sex -5%
11. Co-governance -5%
12. Seperate Maori ward in local government -26%
13. Allow trans-women to use women only bathrooms -29%
14. Allow trans-women to compete in women’s sports -46%

The Herald reports:

The Electoral Commission is under intense scrutiny over its decision to set up a polling booth at Manurewa Marae, where Te Pāti Māori candidate Takutai Moana Kemp is the CEO.

This fails the common sense test. Having a polling booth at a location where one of the candidates is the CEO is clearly inappropriate. The Electoral Commission needs to state whether they were aware of the connection prior to the election, and if so when and what did they do to mitigate the conflict of interest?

The seat was won by four votes. It is easy to imagine having a polling place in the winning candidate’s workplace would be worth more than that.

Labour delayed the release of the Term 2 attendance data until after the election. It came out yesterday.

Some low-lights:

• Only 47% of students came to school regularly in term 2 this year. an improvement on the same term last year, but one of the worst figures on record.

• 12.5% of students were chronically absent in term 2, meaning they had attended 70% of less of their classes.

• The figures were a slump from term 1 this year when 59.5% of pupils reached the regular attendance benchmark of attending more than 90% of their classes.

• In term 2 this year only a third of Māori and Pacific students attended school regularly, compared to half of Pākehā students and 59% of Asian students.

• The Tai Tokerau region had the lowest percentage of students attending regularly (32.8%),” the report said.

• Unjustified absences reached 6.1% of class time, the highest term 2 figure on record.

The first thing the new Minister can do towards this is make the submission of attendance by schools compulsory and require each school to publish their Wednesday to Wednesday – every Friday on their web-site. Make is a local community problem to see school quality and parental involvement/responsibility increase.

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
www.alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/

The Herald reports:

A leaked internal email from Labour volunteers shows MP Helen White’s team cites party leader Chris Hipkins as one of the reasons they nearly lost the stronghold seat of Mount Albert, reports Newshub.

There’s two interesting aspects to this. The first is that they put in writing the leader was part of the reason they almost (or still may) lose the seat. The second is it got leaked to the media. Not exactly unified.

The Electoral Commission released:

On Tuesday 7 November the Commission announced it had found three voting places where there were data entry errors for the party vote results.

The following additional data entry errors have been found.

• 15 voting places with data entry errors resulting in small changes for electorate candidate results.
• One electorate where the data for a small number of special votes had been entered incorrectly.
• Five voting places entered election day votes as advance voting. This did not affect the total numbers of votes for parties or candidates.   

620 votes in the East Coast electorate that were included in the preliminary count were not included in the official count. The votes were in a ballot box at the electorate headquarters and were missed during the official count. The votes have now been counted and added to the electorate totals.

So let’s see if I have this right – there were a total of 24 data entry errors and a forgotten ballot box!

This is unacceptable. The Electoral Commission has one job and it failed. They had three weeks to check, double check and even triple check the results and they published so called final results that were riddled with errors. You can forgive one or two maybe, but not 24.

There are quality assurance steps across the counting, data entry and reporting processes that have been applied. People should have confidence in the integrity of the official count and the amended results,” says Karl Le Quesne, Chief Electoral Officer.

Whatever steps they had were inadequate. They received over $60 million to run the election and didn’t have anyone checking the data entry of the results.

For around $500 you could have had two different people do the data entry, and then compare the results to see if they agree. This is not rocket science. This is basic basic quality assurance.

“The Electoral Commission board will commission an independent review of the quality assurance processes in place and what improvements can be made to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” says Jane Meares, Acting Board Chair.

What is the accountability for this? Will anyone resign? The incoming Government should commission its own review.

Newshub reports:

The bullying allegations against Ginny Andersen outlined in our Newshub story is bad for Labour, but with Andersen losing her seat, it means it’s easier for Labour to exit her if they wish.   

This all comes on top of Newshub on Wednesday revealing Labour backbencher Helen White’s volunteers were leaking against her.   

White won the precious Mt Albert seat by just 20 votes and is facing a recount, but one party insider told Newshub they were hoping 21 votes went the other way so White would be out. Another said White was condescending, complacent and entitled.   

But possibly even more problematic for leader Chris Hipkins is Labour hasn’t even hit the Opposition benches yet – and already it’s leaking like a sieve.  

So we’ve got a Labour activist in Hutt losing a complaint against their local MP and a Labour activist in Mt Albert saying they hope Helen White loses the recount.

Doesn’t seem to be the happiest place at the moment.

1 News reports:

The Labour Party has confirmed former Police Minister and current senior MP Ginny Andersen is the subject of a bullying complaint relating to her alleged behaviour towards young party volunteers on election night. 

The complaint, which 1News has obtained, came from the mother of one the volunteers. 

It said Andersen yelled and screamed at her daughter and son on election night about them not doing enough volunteering and made them feel like they were to blame for her losing the Hutt South seat. 

The complaint said Andersen behaved aggressively towards her children and made them leave Labour’s election venue. 

Andersen has repeatedly refused to answer phone calls from 1News today about the allegations.

This is pretty nasty stuff. I’ve been a young volunteer for a political party, and I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of them work for their political parties to the point of exhaustion. The Young Nats constantly amaze me with how much time they will spend campaigning for their party and candidates. young volunteers are almost worth their weight in gold.

To have an MP blame two young volunteers for her failure to keep Hutt South is not acceptable.

UPDATE: Stuff has more details:

She goes on to list other alleged incidents over a three-year period, in which the volunteer was belittled, and shouted at for choosing a family trip over working for the MP.

How dare a volunteer choose go go on a family holiday rather than campaign for Ginny!

This table shows how the six main parties did on advance votes, e-day votes and special votes.

Overall the CR parties won by 8%. However on advance votes they had a 12% lead, on e-day votes only a 7% lead and it was almost tied on specials.

National did 5% better with advance votes than e-day votes.

In my Patreon today, I look at where National did best and worst in all 72 electorates.

The importance of Auckland is hard to over-state. Nine of the top ten party votes for National were in Auckland seats, and of the 15 seats which saw the largest increase for National, 13 were in Auckland and the two Hamilton seats.

At the other end of the scale National did worse in Wellington Central and Rongotai than it did in Dunedin and Manurewa. Wellington is very hostile to National.

A very interesting analysis at Scoop by Lindsay Shelton:

Some of the blame can be put fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Client, namely the Council, the University, and the NZSO, as well as the Hobbit King himself, as together the lot of them agreed to ask the Contractor for a change in the Contract to provide a top of the line recording studio to be built into a new basement facility below the Auditorium. To those of you familiar with the ins and outs of the ways of the Contractor, you will probably realise that asking a Contractor to add a new Basement level below the level of the base isolators and thereby adding in basement level complexity on an already highly complex basement job, is going to cost a lot … I am not at all surprised there is significant extra cost there, although of course I didn’t expect the costs to double.

So the Council has gone for a gold plated option, and left ratepayers footing a $4,000 per household bill.

It seems the large number of design changes resulted in a very large number of variations from the contractor. “Naylor Love have noted that approximately 30-40 per cent of each progress claim is related to variation activities.”

So the client (WCC) keeps changing their mind on what they want – no surprise it has gone from $43 million to over $300 million.

The lesson the late Irony the Cat taught me … and my friend Burt

(This post is a one with a bit of a difference – but with significant societal and political implications.)

Two years ago my marriage ended and I moved to the small town of Cambridge as a new start. I like the town and have settled in well.

My first “friend” was a ridiculously fluffy, scraggly, sneezing-wheezing 21 year old cat. There was no sign of his owners and as the weeks went by he showed no signs of leaving. He interrupted most of my zoom – meetings. He slept where and when he liked. I called him Irony the Cat as I am guessing neither of us expected the new circumstances.

He was, at times, hard to love. His sneezes would splatter the walls. He would go missing and be brought back by neighbors. His fur was everywhere and clung like it was glued. He often chundered up remarkably dry furballs.

I had to have him put down two weeks ago and almost felt it was a relief. It wasn’t until I was re-vacuuming one of his areas today that I realised I would much prefer to have the problems of having him than a clean house.

Which is where my friend Burt comes in. A while back, telepathically (as cats do) Irony the Cat suggested I go to the Aged Care home down the road and see if there is something small I can do. Each Wednesday I walk with a group and particularly a gentleman called Burt. He and I get on well. He is only in his 70s but is wheel chair bound. I am deeply surprised when the staff tell me the difference it makes to Burt. He also has a loving wife and family that visit.

Here is my point. Although the people in the home do care – life for most residents (approx. 40 as far as I can tell) revolves around sitting in a big circle in a lounge for most of the day. Day in and day out. I have no excuse for not knowing this would be the case – or for being stunned.

While I typically advocate for the young … we clearly need to examine huge aspects of caring for those who have contributed to us for so many years. The only time their plight seems to come up is as a financial burden. Some hard thinking to be done to make whole of life of value for all NZers. I am also hearing huge loss on property/savings/inheritance when elderly people do need care. Am I hearing wrong?

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
www.alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/

Stuff reports:

Labour Māori caucus co-chair Willie Jackson is suggesting there could be civil unrest if David Seymour’s hopes for a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi are successful in the ACT Party leader’s coalition discussions with the National Party. 

He warned people are so strongly opposed that they would “go to war” to stop it. 

Rather than actually allow a debate on how the Treaty should be interpreted, a former Labour Minister threatens civil unrest and “war” if the new Government (which got elected on a mandate against co-governance) allows the people of New Zealand a referendum.

Threatening violence because you lost an election, is not something we should tolerate in New Zealand.

The Herald reports:

The Electoral Commission is undertaking “a full check” of the country’s voting resultsafter a Herald investigation led to three booths being found to have wrongly assigned hundreds of votes to fringe parties, while the National Party received none.

The commission has admitted a data entry error led to hundreds of votes being assigned to the Leighton Baker Party and the New Conservatives.

“A full check of all voting place results is being undertaken immediately to establish if there are any other transcription errors,” the commission said.

This is hugely concerning. Errors in the preliminary count are to be expected, but multiple errors in the final results are disturbing.

Even worse the errors may have never been detected if it were not for a journalist.

And the notion that wrong results have been declared because of data entry errors is also concerning. Does no one check and audit the data entry?

Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne said the number of votes involved was low and had little impact on the party vote.

“It does not affect the overall results, successful candidates or allocation of seats at all.”

Quesne said some party votes were recorded in the incorrect “row” for two voting places in the Port Waikato electorate and one voting place in Ilam.

At the Pukekohe Intermediate voting station in the Port Waikato electorate, 505 votes were incorrectly assigned to the Leighton Baker Party when they should have gone to National.

The Electoral Commission seems to be minimising the severity of this issue. Election results should not be dependent on data entry errors not occurring.

Acting Electoral Commission Board chairwoman Jane Meares said she has full confidence in the integrity of the election process and the results.

“A large amount of data needs to be entered to produce the results for a general election, and some mistakes due to human error can occur. However, the board will commission an independent review of the quality assurance processes in place,” Meares said.

How can you have full confidence when multiple errors occurred in the final results?

This comes on top on other issues such as the enrolment system crashing on election day, ballot paper shortages etc.

There is always a select committee review of each general election. I wonder if something more is needed this time, such as a full external review of the Electoral Commission by a panel of international electoral experts.

Few people realised Kelvin Davis was actually the Labour Party Deputy Leader as he wasn’t trusted to be Deputy Prime Minister. Finally Labour has ended the farce and Davis has resigned, with Sepuloni replacing him.

I suspect Davis will retire before the 2026 election, as he lost his electorate seat. Highly likely to go also are Grant Robertson, David Parker and possibly also Ginny Andersen and Willie Jackson.

David Seymour released:

“Green MP Chloe Swarbrick must explain why she is repeating statements from the terrorist organisation Hamas’ charter,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“Chloe Swarbrick was videoed leading a chant of ”From the river to the sea” at the same rally where Labour MP Phil Twyford was forced off the stage after saying he condemns the violence against civilians by Hamas. The phrase appears in the Hamas charter and there is a large group of people, at the very least, who believe it means no Israel and even no Jewish people.

“UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has condemned the use of this phrase, while UK Labour suspended an MP for using it last week. Meanwhile in New Zealand the Jewish community lives in fear of anti-semitism and must watch as political leaders repeat it with no accountability.

Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,400 Jews just a few weeks ago, to try and implement their vision of “From the river to the sea”. It is amazing the most of the media have given Swarbrick a free pass for this.

Now we have final results I have done the first of what will be a dozen or so posts on my Patreon analysing the results. I’ll cover at both an area level and an electorate level how each of the main eight parties did in 2023, and how it changed from 2020.

One interesting aspect from my initial post is that the centre right parties (Nat, ACT, NZF) beat the centre left parties (Lab., Greens, TPM) by a huge 19% in Auckland, 17% in provincial seats and 36% in rural seats. However in Wellington the CL beat the CR by an also huge 19%. This reinforces that Wellington is very very different to the rest of New Zealand.