Sent in by a reader to show how one class at Vic Law School uses stereotypes. A number of students in the class are unhappy with it, for understandable reasons.

Stuff reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will hold a formal bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump in the United States next week.
Ardern has previously met Trump informally on the sidelines of other events and has spoken with him on the phone but has never had a formal one-on-one meeting.

The meeting will happen on Monday, US time, when she is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly’s Leaders Week.
“I’m looking forward to discussing a wide range of international and regional issues with President Trump, including our cooperation in the Pacific and the trade relationship between our countries,” Ardern said in a statement.

This is a good thing. Trump and Ardern comes from different sides of the political spectrum but that doesn’t mean they can’t build a professional relationship which results in positives wins for both NZ and the US.

Both John Key and Helen Clark were adept at forming strong relationships with other world leaders, despite political differences.

I don’t think one should expect anything from one meeting, but as the US turns more and more to protectionism and tariffs, we want the US to not be imposing them on our exporters.

The Spinoff reports:

Differing accounts of what was said in an inquiry into the alleged conduct of a now former Labour staffer have been issued today to media via lawyers. 
In spite of PM Jacinda Ardern’s exhortation that ‘it would be preferable if this case were not in the public domain’, that is where it is currently being litigated.
Statements to media were sent today by lawyers acting for the chair of the Labour investigating committee, Simon Mitchell, and subsequently by a lawyer acting for the complainant known as Sarah.

Labour people are ropable at Mitchell for reigniting this issue in the media. Just as things were calming down, he basically comes out implying the complainant is a liar.

When you read the two statements from Simon and Sarah they are incompatible. One journalist suggested that maybe anti-virus software stripped the attachments out.

A key aspect though is:

The complainant is not the only person who made allegations of a sexual nature during the internal investigation.

It isn’t just about Sarah’s allegations. There are other complaints.

The fact there is such confusion is mainly Labour’s fault. If they had run a decent process, the complainants would have received their transcripts and or a summary of their meetings prior to the complaint being decided. They would then have been able to correct the record at an early stage. What is happened here is exactly why you always make sure people agree with the factual record, before then reaching determinations.

John Armstrong writes:

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.

They chose well in going to The Spinoff. The Spinoff is such a liberal left leaning publication beloved by Labour MPs and activists that having it published there had a far greater impact than if it was say Stuff or the NZ Herald. Also it allowed the full story to be told, not sub-edited down to size.

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.

The treatment included “Sarah” waiting 73 days for a meeting with the Labour President over her complaint and then a further 129 days for Labour to agree to look into it and 118 days for a decision after the interview.

Labour claims to be the voice of the powerless fighting against the all-too powerful. In this instance, it was trampling the powerless into the dust.
It has all made a nonsense of Ardern’s positioning herself as a promoter of women’s rights and a voice of young voters.
The dereliction of duty on the part of Labour’s New Zealand Council, the party’s governing body, has simultaneously made a mockery of Ardern’s declared intention to inject kindness and compassion into the conduct of politics.

Also this is not the first time young activists for Labour have been treated appallingly. The first was the poor interns from overseas who ended as as unpaid workers under false pretences. They had to go to the media to get justice. Then the victims at the Labour Summer Camp. They had to go to the media to get action. And then this incident. Every single time Labour has failed to act to protect the young activists until they go to the media.

The Drug Foundation has proposed a model to take back control of cannabis from organised crime. The key points are:

• Young people under the age of 20 would not be able to enter cannabis retail stores or buy products.
• Prohibit advertising and the development of products that might appeal more to younger people, such as confectionery.
• Set maximum potency levels for products and steer people towards less harmful ways to consume than smoking.
• Set portion sizes so that young people who do use despite the law know how much is too much.
• Require child-proof packaging and put health warnings on packets.

Ross Bell says in the introduction:

If you’re like me, you’d prefer that your kids never use cannabis. But you’ll also be aware there is a good chance they will at some point. Despite it being illegal – and perhaps partly because of it – around half of all New Zealanders do.
I want the best for my kids as they get older and the same for all young New Zealanders. If they do decide to use cannabis when they are older, I would much rather they didn’t buy it from organised crime, who might also sell them synnies or meth. I’d rather they bought from government-regulated stores where products are packaged in single-serve portions with maximum potency levels and health warnings on every packet. I want them to have their ID checked at the door and be turned away if they are under 20.
I want a world in which cannabis looks as boring as possible and where the proceeds from taxes go straight back into healthcare and treatment rather than funding the lifestyles of organised crime.

This is why it makes sense to vote to change the status quo.

Troy Bowker writes:

I believe that when these supply chain issues are fully understood by the public, and misinformation about how clean and green EVs are is replaced with facts, Genter’s “feebate” scheme will be seen for what is – Labour and the Greens jumping on the EV bandwagon without properly considering the full impact, either upstream or downstream.

What are these impacts?

To allow EVs to drive up to 500km on a single charge, these batteries are made out of lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel mined in the world’s poorest countries.

So the Greens want mining in NZ basically banned, but are all for poor countries mining at very low rates of pay.

The average EV battery weighs over 500kg or half a tonne, is heavy in lithium and lasts a maximum of eight years. If Genter wants all New Zealand’s 4 million vehicles to be EVs, she will first need to outline the plan to dispose of these millions of toxic used batteries. …

Huge areas of land would need to be converted to graveyards for toxic lithium batteries. Suddenly, the clean, green future with EVs that Genter advocates looks extremely dirty and hazardous to human and animal life.
There is no information on how we are to stop these toxic chemicals seeping through the ground into our waterways. That’s despite the fact that even tiny amounts can induce extreme nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, blurred vision and dizziness in animals and humans.

That’s 250,000 tonnes of batteries a year to be buried.

Bolivia, for example, is the world’s largest supplier of lithium but has one of the world’s worst records for child labour, with children legally commencing full-time mining at the age 10.

EVs based on child labour?

In a followup article Bowker notes:

The mining of lithium and cobalt is like a modern-day gold rush.
In years to come the price of these materials will sky rocket.
Any attempt to put a price on the inevitable replacement of the millions of EV batteries is completely futile. Consumers will be facing massive costs when they upgrade or replace their EV batteries.
To make matters worse, if we move to ethically sourced cobalt and lithium, as we most certainly should, the price of EV batteries will be astronomical.

This is highly likely. If most cars are EVs, then the demand for litium and cobalt will send prices skyhigh. And these are not small iPhone batteries but 500 kg batteries.

Genter would have us believe that most people will choose to hoist their 500kg battery out of their EV and “re-purpose” it to be used to power “stationary devices ” such as fridges and solar panels.
The claim by Genter that the vast majority of EV batteries won’t be disposed of at this point is laughable.

Yeah power your fridge with a 500 kg battery!

Stuff reports:

Julian Lee’s “tongue in cheek” mayoral candidacy could trigger an expensive by-election for Mackenzie, election experts say.
The Seven Sharp journalist joined the Mackenzie mayoral race in a story for the show on August 15 but failed to withdraw before nominations closed on August 18, he said in a statement issued last week.
The statement, which broke Lee’s three week silence on the issue, said “I would not take the mayoralty if I happened to win the vote”.

I think Mackenzie people should vote for Julian Lee and force him to take the job.

What better Mayor that someone who doesn’t actually want it. No campaign promises to implement. He’ll just do what he thinks is best.

So Vote Lee.

As someone who spent many years working in Parliament, and even longer alongside those who do, I know a fair bit about how political issues are managed, or mismanaged.

Anyone who thinks the PM’s senior staff and Grant Robertson were not meeting regularly over at least the last six weeks on how to deal with this scandal is naive. They would have known exactly what is alleged, because they’re not that incompetent. They would have briefed the PM, but possibly not in full detail to give her some plausible deniability. The notion they were leaving this all to the Party President to sort out is risible. I know these people. They are not morons. There is no way they were not dealing with this issue as a priority.

The real question is why didn’t they decide the staffer had to go six weeks ago when this went public, or even in the months before that as they learnt about the complaints. The same applies to why the Labour Party Council went with a process that seemed design to exonerate the staffer (he got a lawyer and got to see what they said, and they didn’t get to see what he said or even transcripts of what their own testimony)

This has nothing to do with whether or not the staffer is guilty of what has been alleged. It is possible he is as pure as the driven snow, and all these people complaining about him have some vested interest to damage him. It is highly unlikely, based on 12 different complainants, but the point is making a decision on the political situation is not linked to whether or not he did something wrong.

I’ll give an example involving myself. In 1996 Jim Bolger had a terrible TV debate, not helped by most National supporters being too polite to heckle, so the TV only showed Bolger being heckled, not Clark, Anderton or Peters.

As someone who was known to be a very active heckler (Paul Holmes threatened to evict me from one debate) I was asked by the PMs Office to train up the National supporters attending the next debate in heckling. So I duly prepared a sheet of my best heckles (funny not abusive I go for) and trained up the 30 – 40 attendees at the next debate.

Unfortunately someone gave a copy of my sheet of heckles to a Labour MP who anonymously distributed it around the entire press gallery. And it had my name on it. The TV news the night of the 2nd debate led with my sheet of heckles and how this showed how worried Bolger was (I doubt he even knew about the request to me). They even had someone read out my heckles on TV, and showed file footage of me.

I was summoned to McCully’s office and in a calm and polite voice (think the opposite of what I am writing) told I should get off the precinct and not come back. I think the words “dumbest fuck who ever lived” might have been used.

Now note I had done nothing wrong. I did what the PMs Office asked me to. It wasn’t my fault someone leaked them. But there was a very good chance I would lose my Beehive job over it because if staffers have to take the fall to protect the PM, you do. The PM was pretty furious too I am told.

In the end it calmed down, and I returned to my job in a week or so. But the point is that decisions like this are inherently political – do we need someone to go to kill the story off.

And this leads to the Labour leader’s office staffer who was accused of sexual assault, plus multiple other complaints. If this guy was the office clerical assistant, he would have been gone months ago. Doesn’t matter about proving the complaints – the mere fact 12 people have complained mean you’re become a liability if you are effectively employed by the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

At the point the complainants went public, it would be an absolute no brainer. You have a choice of a scandal that affects your core brand involving the Labour leader, President, Finance Minister and NZ Council. Of course you get rid of the staffer.

At the point when four of your own Ministerial staff have gone to Paula Bennett because they are so horrified Labour have taken no action, the decision is not just obvious but over whelming. Unless there are reasons why Labour were prepared to risk all this damage for this staffer.

He finally finally went, only after the PM herself was left morally and semi-mortally exposed. A decision that should have happened months ago, was delayed until the damage was done.

Now this wasn’t just due to incompetence, even though that is part of the story. This was beyond doubt a deliberate decision by the Labour decision makers that this staffer would be protected. Because otherwise he’d have been goneburger months ago (regardless of whether or not he has actually done anything wrong).

So why did Labour try to protect him for so long. There are four reasons. In ascending order of importance they are:

1. He had held senior office within sections of the party. He wasn’t just a party member. He had been a high ranking member of a certain section.
2. He has a family member who has a professional association with Labour, which is very very long-standing and incredibly valuable to them.
3. He had very close connections with senior Ministers. More specifically he had been on the 2014 leadership campaign team of Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern. Leadership campaign teams generally are very small – less than a dozen. So that means you are very very tight with those people. He was as well connected as you could be.
4. His role in the Labour Leader’s office was very valuable to them. Some roles are quite generic such as press secretary. If you lose a press secretary you can find a dozen others who can do the job. But certain roles are highly specialised, and can involved you getting to know certain systems so that you are almost irreplaceable. In this case his role was integral to Labour’s re-election activities.

So this wasn’t just Labour being incompetent. This was Labour making a calculated decision that they would try and brazen this out, because he had the right friends, and was so valuable to them in his job. The impact on the complainants and victims was a secondary or even tertiary factor.

Just imagine if he was not a party office holder, was not mates with senior Ministers and did not hold a critically valuable role in terms of targeting information to voters. Do you really think he wouldn’t have been goneburger months ago after 12 different people complaining about you?

Stuff reports:

Nelson man Steve Webster and his family have been fighting for seven years to gain permanent residency after moving to New Zealand from the United Kingdom in 2012. 
The plight of Webster gained national attention after he was photographed helping fight the Pigeon Valley forest fire in Nelson in February.
Nelson MP Nick Smith presented the petition, which has gained more than 62,000 signatures, to Parliament on Tuesday.

In April, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway granted the family 24-month work visas, but said he was not prepared to grant permanent residence to them. 

If only he was a convicted drug dealer. Then residency would be no problems.

Kate Hawkesby writes:

What we are seeing emerge now, I think, is a tale of two leaders.
We are seeing the contrast between the rise of Simon Bridges and the fall of Jacinda Ardern.
One started atop the world, all smiles, hope optimism and empathy. She even had a ‘mania’ attached to the end of her name by an enchanted media.
The other: Subterranean, invisible, unknown, constantly undermined by those around him, always looking down the barrel of potential coups.
Over the course of the past two years, their trajectories have been quite different.
Ardern is charismatic, she smiles a lot, she nods a lot, she says inspirational things and you want to believe her.
But slowly it’s being undone. The Empress has no clothes. She lacks commercial and interpersonal acumen. She is not a natural leader, she’s indecisive and farms things out too much _ reports, reviews, committees, working groups.

I lost count of the number of them when they hit 200.

She’s no CEO but she would make a great Head of Marketing and Communications – a lot of talk – a lot of PR, no substance.
Not transformational, not open honest and transparent, not decisive, not even aware of what’s going on within her own party.

Would be a great Minister of Tourism.

On the other hand, we have Simon Bridges.
Backed into a corner by conspirators sharpening their knives and people taking odds on his demise, he’s had to claw and dig his way into the fight. Today he’s looking more comfortable, self assured, and actually self effacing in respect to his weaknesses.
Yes he knows he will never grace the cover of Vogue and yes he talks with a fierce Kiwi twang, but he’s getting clearer on what leadership looks like.
And that’s the difference.

Fascinating story from ESPN:

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. “He looked like death,” grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.
In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess — or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.
Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.
“Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners,” Sapolsky says.
It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times.

That’s pretty incredible.

Duncan Garner writes:

It’s simply too hard to accept she didn’t know it was an assault of a sexual nature. 
Her staff knew.
Her party knew.
Parliament knew. The media knew. 
Grant Robertson knew (but can’t say what).
Kelvin Davis heard a rumour in Māori. How helpful.
And even the woman selling the $3 coffees by the lift knew, although Kelvin wasn’t sure if she was talking about the assaults at Labour’s summer camp or this latest one. 
And Labour’s ruling council knew too. Ardern is on that body. Did she sit in on discussions over this? She won’t say. Why not?

We’re being asked to accept that the one person who didn’t know was the one person with the ability to remove the staffer from his job.

It looks like Labour put tribalism and its survival first, and the welfare and care of this woman a distant second. It’s no surprise. What a debacle investigating itself. It’s like putting a drug dealer in charge of his own trial. Not guilty, your honour, nothing at all to see here.  
And all this when the PM was herself spouting off about the #metoo era being the cleanout and welcome change that was well overdue.

That was change for everyone else.

So was Ardern living under a rock for the past nine months, hibernating until the northern summer broke and she could safely strut the international stage without minuscule domestic annoyances like a sexual assault complicating matters. 
Why can’t life be easier? Why do silly little matters like this have to blight my best work.

And the fawning international media phase has just started again with a Washington Post profile.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will not be drawn on whether the resignation of the ex-staffer at the centre of a sexual assault claim will lead to a compensation payout.
She is also staying tight-lipped on whether she considered invoking the “relationship breakdown” clause to end the ex-staffer’s employment contract because of any safety concerns.

If they won’t deny a payout, one can assume there will be one.

Radio NZ reported Jacinda Ardern as saying:

I believe mistakes were made

Wikipedia has an interesting page on that phrase:

“Mistakes were made” is an expression that is commonly used as a rhetorical device, whereby a speaker acknowledges that a situation was handled poorly or inappropriately but seeks to evade any direct admission or accusation of responsibility by not specifying the person who made the mistakes. The acknowledgement of “mistakes” is framed in an abstract sense, with no direct reference to who made the mistakes. A less evasive construction might be along the lines of “I made mistakes” or “John Doe made mistakes”. The speaker neither accepts personal responsibility nor accuses anyone else. The word “mistakes” also does not imply intent.
The New York Times has called the phrase a “classic Washington linguistic construct.” Political scientist William Schneider suggested that this usage be referred to as the “past exonerative” tense,^[1] and commentator William Safire has defined the phrase as “[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it“.^[2] A commentator at NPR declared this expression to be “the king of non-apologies“.^[3

Matthew Hooton writes in the NZ Herald:

Were Ardern a head of state like a ceremonial president or queen, she would be in her element. As Simon Wilson puts it, Ardern personifies “who we are now” at Buckingham Palace, the United Nations or Waitangi, at least as judged by a certain demographic.
But as head of government, it was soon obvious she has no ability to formulate and progress an agenda, transformational or otherwise. There is nothing behind her words.
All her Government’s major initiatives have failed. Despite its advance billing, the Wellbeing Budget was unconnected to the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, earlier hailed by Finance Minister Grant Robertson.
Ardern has ruled out further rebalancing the tax system away from wages and towards capital gains.
KiwiBuild has entered the Kiwi vernacular as a synonym for failure. Poverty, homelessness and suicide have all worsened. Fees-free tertiary education has had no material impact.

In terms of actual outcomes (ie something measurable that has improved people’s lives), they seem to have achieved nothing except good intetnions.

Perhaps most cynical of all was this week’s Suicide Prevention Strategy which, after two years in office, consisted mainly of setting up a new Suicide Prevention Office. By the time it gets its mission statement, logo, offices and espresso machine, another thousand families will have mourned a loved one.
This seems to have been Ardern’s sole strategy through her 11 aimless years in Parliament: emote over a problem, then propose a working group or other process as a substitute for taking responsibility, decisions and actions herself.

Ouch.

So 513 days after “Sarah” informed someone working for Labour of her alleged sexual assault by a staffer in Jacinda Ardern’s office, he has quit his job.

It is incredible that it took this long. The level of incompetence here is staggering. You start to understand how the Kiwibuild fiasco also happened. Their default mode is stuff up.

Any competent organisation would have dealt with this within days, or weeks at most. You have someone trusted talk to the complainants, talk to the staffer, and then recommend an outcome.

Let’s think about how loud the sirens should have been warning at various stages on a 1 to 10 scale.

• One person makes a complaint against a staffer in the leader’s office – say a 4/10
• Seven different party members make complaints – 6/10
• Other parliamentary staff tell senior staff in the PMO they are scared of the staffer etc – 7/10
• The complainants are so unhappy they go to the media – 9/10
• The media report the complaints include sexual assault – 10/10
• Your own ministerial and parliamentary staff are talking to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition because they are so disgusted nothing has happened – 12/10

And even after that, it took five further weeks.

It is hard to know which scenario is the most damning:

• The PM really knew nothing
• The PM did know all about it, but they didn’t know what to do
• The PM did know all about it, but they valued the staffer so highly they tried to brazen it out

You have a choice of incompetence, lying or hypocrisy. You can decide which is worse.

There is a rumour it is even worse than what we already know. That he didn’t work for Ardern’s office when the alleged assaults happened, and they hired him *after* the complaints had been lodged with the party. That would be even more shocking.

The Civilian has a post from Jacinda Ardern that is so close to the truth it scorches:

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.

Kiwibuild is the highest profile failure for Labour, but far from the only one. Let’s look at their free fees policy which they claimed was the solution to the future of work, and would result in many more people undertaking tertiary education.

From the Herald:

• Tertiary student numbers dropped by 4,080 in the first year of free fees. Yes that’s right they spent hundreds of millions on a policy that saw fewer people doing tertiary study
• Labour said 80,000 students would take up fees free study. In fact only 42,150 did.
• One third of fees-free students failed or withdrew from at least one course
• Fees-free students are more likely to be European than other students, so it is not leading to more Maori in tertiary education
• Fees-free students are more likely to study at university than other students so it is not leading to more trades training.
• So the major beneficiary of fees free has been white university students

Mike Hosking writes:

Then the other Sunday they rolled out their cancer service policy, this was the one they should have rolled out before National. But better late than never… or was it?
In reality, it was nothing more than intention. They would end the postcode nature of the disease, how? No one seemed to know, they still don’t. I asked the Prime Minister last week, she told me to stand by for Heather Simpson’s DHB report. I did, it came the next day, and it recommended nothing.
I also asked about the targets they talked of. They already have targets, they are not being met, half of the DHBs are failing to meet them. So what do they do about that? Nothing. What did the report recommend about doing about it? Nothing.

They paid a member of the PM’s staff a huge amount of money to spend a year reviewing the health system, and the report comes with not even a single recommendation!

And then last Sunday, mental health. A scheme whereby you can go to your doctor and get your warts seen to and some mental health as well. Good theory, except it’s only at a handful of clinics. In other words, it’s not a policy, it’s an intention.

Which is what they did with the school lunches, the only difference being that wasn’t announced on a Sunday (given schools aren’t open). Lunch will be served at 30 schools, it may end up rolling out to 120, still a couple of thousand schools will miss out. Like hundreds of thousands of patients will miss out on mental health.
No one ever seems to point this out. Ardern is hardly ever held to account. She turns up, smiles, talks a big game, hugs one of the recipients of whatever the largesse involves, gets on the news, and is gone.
If there were votes for announcing stuff that may or may not ever happen it would be a landslide. Let’s call it ‘seed of an idea Sunday’ or ‘the policy that’s not really a policy’.
It’s a visual press release, where next to nothing changes, but you get your picture on the telly. If there are learnings, let’s at least start seeing them for what they are.

This is not new. In opposition I described her private member’s bills as press releases masquerading as legislation. Little seems to have changed.

I’ve combined together timelines from both the Young Labour Summer Camp indecent assault scandal and the sexual assault allegations against the staffer who works in Jacinda Ardern’s office.

I thought this would be a useful resource because the two are linked. They don’t only overlap in timing, but the review into the Summer Camp fiasco was meant to improve things. In fact things got worse.

A couple of things stand out. The first is that someone working for Labour was told about the sexual assault allegations almost 18 months ago.

The other is the total lack of timely action. It took 73 days for them to arrange a meeting between “Sarah” and Haworth after she complained to him. If that was an employer, he’d be in court also. And it took 118 days for the complainants to be told the outcome after they were interviewed.

Details taken mainly (but not exclusively) from the very useful timeline at The Spinoff.