Newshub can reveal there are new allegations of bullying behaviour against sitting Labour MP Ginny Andersen from a young person.
In an exclusive interview on Monday, he accused Andersen of being manipulating, nasty and making comments to body-shame people she worked with. Labour is refuting the allegations.
So this is the third allegation in just one week of bullying behaviour – two from young activists and one from a former staffer.
Not a great look for someone touted as a future Deputy Leader for Labour.
The Post reports that Wellingtonians may be facing annual rates increases of 20%.
This is due to the choices Council has made. They are proceeding with a town hall renovation of $330 million, $40 million corporate welfare for a multinational cinema chain and trying to spend $100 million to get rid of cars from Lambton Quay.
A household paying $3,000 in rates two years ago will face a $5,000 rates bill next year. This is staggering. This hits house owners and renters as it pushes up rental prices.
The only way to stop this will be to elect more fiscally responsible councillors.
A young child was allegedly hit on the head by a shovel-wielding man while leaving a pro-Palestine rally in Auckland’s Aotea Square yesterday afternoon.
Hundreds of people gathered in the square around 2pm on Sunday, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
A member of New Zealand’s Palestinian community who was at the rally, Rand Hazou, said witnesses described the attacker waiting off to the side on Greys Ave between the Town Hall and the square.
“At the close of the rally around 5pm, we got a report he had attacked a young child.
Superintendent Sunny Patel, the acting Auckland District Commander, said police had arrested a man after a child was seriously hurt as he was leaving a protest.
The assault occurred behind the Auckland Town Hall as crowds dispersed, Patel said last night. The victim was in a serious condition in Starship Hospital. The boy was described by witnesses as being about 5 or 6 years old.
“Prior to this attack, the man arrested had been receiving support of the mental health services. Police are still working to establish the events that occurred in the lead up to this incident and we are speaking with a number of witnesses.”
It is unclear the motivation of the attacker but regardless of motivation, the attacker should face serious criminal consequences for their actions. To attack a child with a shovel is disgusting.
The Term 2 attendance data finally came out, and as Alwyn Poole pointed out, it is a shocker.
The number of students who are attending less than 70% of the time is at almost 100,000 – 97,016. This compares to 37,904 in Term 2 of 2017. That’s an additional 60,000 kids basically not attending school. Under 70% attendance means they were absent for at least three weeks of the term.
The number of Māori students attending less than 70% has gone from 16,393 to 41,091. How the hell can you close the gaps between Māori and non-Māori when that is happening.
Less than one in three Māori and Pacific students are attending school at least 90% of the time. What a terrible legacy left for the incoming Government to inherit.
The Better Public Media Trust should now be registered as a charity under the Charities Act 2005 with effect from the date of its application.
The Better Public Media Trust is a lobby group that demands more taxpayer money for public media. It is no more a charity than the Taxpayers’ Union.
The courts have now decided that BPMT and Greenpeace are charities, but Family First are not. I think this is inconsistent. I think the law should be amended so no lobby group should be eligible for charitable status with a test that would exclude any organisation whose lobbying goes beyond a minor aspect of what they do overall.
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:
Aotearoa New Zealand 🇳🇿is deeply concerned at the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Gaza. We call for the immediate cessation of violence. The protection of all civilians, and upholding of international humanitarian law is essential.
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.
Confirmation that Nanaia Mahuta’s office was directly involved in objecting to the suggested MFAT tweet responding in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 atrocities; substituting it with a hopelessly tone-deaf tweet that required correction by the Prime Minister. Did Mahuta… pic.twitter.com/m1CI1JjXwN
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
