Duncan Garner writes:

The heat is seriously on Grant Robertson to tell us what he knew about the sexual assault allegations, when he knew it, and who he shared the information with.
What happened to this self-labelled, so-called ‘most open and transparent’ Government? How much longer can Grant seriously hold this unsustainable position of “sorry not going there”.
He can’t. Silence is not golden, and silence shouldn’t be rewarded.

Grant will duck and weave but, at some stage, he’ll have to be forthcoming.

I predict Grant will never ever say what he knew and when. To do so would be fatal.

The provision election results for the 2nd Israeli elections this year are:

1. Blue and White 33 seats
2. Likud 31
3. Joint List 13
4. Shas 9
5. Yisrael Beiteinu 8
6. UTJ 8
7. Yamina 7
8. Labor-Gesher 6
9. Democratic Union 5

You need 61 seats for a majority.

The rough groupings are:

Right 46

Likud 31
Yisrael Beiteinu 8
Yamina 7

Centre 42

Blue and White 33
Shas 9

Left 24

Joint List 13
Labor-Gesher 6
Democratic Union 5

So pretty unlikely to be a Government led by a party of the left. Likud can’t govern without Blue and White as Shas is not enough. And why would Blue and White accept 2nd place as they got more seats.

So I’d say a Blue and White led Goverment either sypported by Likud or by Shas and the left parties.

Their conditions for a peace deal with Palestine are:

• The Israel Defense Forces being authorized to enter Palestinian territory if they are aware of terrorists planning an attack on Israelis.
• The Jordan Valley remaining in Israeli hands.
• No Palestinian right of return.
• Jerusalem remaining the undivided capital of Israel.

The leader, Benny Gantz, is a former Chief of General Staff for the IDF.

The BBC reports:

Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau has said he cannot remember how often he wore blackface as a younger man, as a scandal deepened ahead of an election.
He was speaking after more images of him wearing black make-up when he was younger emerged.
“I am wary of being definitive about this because of the recent pictures that came out, I had not remembered,” he told reporters in Winnipeg.
The revelations have rattled his campaign in a tight election race.
Canadians will go to the polls on 21 October.
The images are so embarrassing for the prime minister because he has positioned himself as a champion of social justice, inclusivity and diversity.

He seems to have had a fetish for it as there are now three different situations where he was in blackface or brownface. Not a great fit for Mr Diversity.

With my black sense of humour I have dressed up as mass murderers and paedophiles at costume parties. Ironically that is less damaging than if I had ever worn blackface,

I did once wear redface but I wasn’t dressed as Pocahontas, I was dressed as Satan. I had red paint over my entire head, chest and limbs plus the normal trident, horns and tail.

Reactions were interesting. A couple of girls actually screamed when they saw me at the pre-party. The best reaction was from Bill English who looked at me and said “You were meant to come dressed up David”. Second best was Jonathan Hunt’s “I always thought you were a redneck”.

After the ball, we went clubbing in town. Turns out being dressed as Satan is a great way to get random strangers dancing with you 🙂

Out university hostel had an annual “reverse hop” where girls and guys would come dressed as the opposite gender. So there are probably a few photos of me dressed as a woman around. I guess today reverse hops are also deemed offensive.

NZ First have released their SOP for the End of Life Choice Bill to result in a public referendum if passed. It is a model of clarity, defining the wording of the questions and options:

(1A) The wording of the question to be put to electors in a referendum for the purposes of subsection (1) of this section is—
“Do you support the End of Life Choice Act 2017 coming into force?”
(1B) The wording of the 2 options for which electors may vote in response to the question is—
“Yes, I support the End of Life Choice Act 2017 coming into force.”
“No, I do not support the End of Life Choice Act 2017 coming into force.”

This is far superior to the Government’s planned referendum on cannabis legalisation where we don’t know what the questions will be, and we don’t know what the law will be if we vote for yes.

Anyway good to see such a well drafted SOP from NZ First.

Stuff reports:

“Words matter, the words used by John Tamihere matter,” Chris Harris, the chief executive of the Holocaust Centre.
There has been widespread condemnation since the Auckland mayoral candidate used the Nazi slogan “sieg heil” during a debate in a central Auckland bar on Tuesday night.

Tamihere was trying to make a point that Goff should not be the arbiter of who is allowed to speak at Auckland Council venues. But his use of “Sieg Heil” was stupid, offensive and wrong.

Newshub reports:

Drug-smuggler Karel Sroubek has been denied parole due to his “undue risk”.
The Czech kickboxer, also known as Jan Antolik, fled to New Zealand on a false passport before being convicted of importing ecstasy. He was sentenced to five years and nine months imprisonment.
On Monday, he told the Parole Board  he accepted he had made a “terrible mistake”.
“I’ve learnt that there’s no shortcuts in life and that I’ve lost everything that I really care for.
“I want to be a good member of the community. I don’t want to be remembered as a criminal or portrayed as a criminal because that’s not who I am.”
However on Wednesday, the Board announced he will stay behind bars, describing his risk as “significantly higher than low”.

This makes ILG’s initial decision to grant him residency even worse. The Parole Board is saying we don’t even think it is safe to release him from prison yet, while ILG said hey let’s make this guy a resident.

This graph shows annual GDP growth for the last five years. Has dropped from 4% to just over 2%.

The Herald reports:

Customers have lashed out at vegan protesters who stormed St Lukes Countdown on Sunday, disrupting shoppers in the process.
During a tense standoff, vegan activists stood in front of the meat section and held signs which said “stop eating animals” and “it’s not food, it’s violence”.

They’ve got every right in the world to protest outside the store. But they don;t have the right to do so inside the store and block people from buying the food they want.

The video shows shoppers being interfered with from buying meat, with customers losing their patience and lashing out at the protesters.

One woman can be heard shouting: “Take your camera off me, I’m doing my f**king shopping. I’m doing my shopping, unless you’re going to pay for my shopping you can f**k off.”

Good on her.

Power to anyone who chooses to be a vegan. But save us from the wankers who want to force their veganism on everyone else.

The Herald reports:

The Māori king, Kīngi Tūheitia, says mana whenua have finally reached consensus over what to do with Ihumātao – they want it back.

What an amazing surprise. How did that take two months to decide?

“Mana whenua agreed the return of the land is outside of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process and therefore requires an innovative and modern solution that does not financially disadvantage iwi.”

The mana whenua can agree what they like, but there is no way other Iwi will not see any Govenment grant or loan to buy the land as anything other than an additional settlement. It will incentivise every other Iwi to do the same.

Also it would destroy the 40 years of near-unanimous support in Parliament for historical Treaty settlements as the support was contingent on them being full and final.

Margarette Driscoll writes in The Telegraph:

When Kathleen Stock pressed “send” on a blog about the gender recognition act last summer she knew she was pressing a detonator. The government was consulting on whether legally changing sex should be a matter of feeling – self-identification – rather than surgery and emotions were already running high. Angry accusations of transphobia were hurled at those, like Stock, who questioned or opposed the idea that men who felt like women could simply declare themselves female and claim all the consequent privileges: access to women-only changing rooms, or being allowed to appear on women-only shortlists or sports teams. A high-profile professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex wading in was bound to raise temperature.
The fight soon came her way: students brandishing a placard reading “Transphobia now in STOCK at Sussex”, a condemnation from the students’ union refusing to tolerate “hate” on campus, attempts to have her fired and a stream of abuse online. What she did not expect was to uncover along the way a deep-rooted seam of fear and intimidation spread through universities nationwide that is, she says, now stifling academic debate.
As soon as she published her own opinion – questioning the validity of self-identification – she began being contacted by colleagues who told her they agreed but dared not say so publicly for fear of ruining their careers. Most were women, some with children and most on short contracts they could not afford to lose.

Ironically the biggest threat to academic freedom today for lecturers is their own students!

Stock’s most recent correspondent has been ‘let go’ from a women’s studies department for wanting to teach menstruation: “You can’t talk about the female body in some gender studies departments anymore because that’s called having “vaginal privilege”. It’s just ridiculous.”

Oh dear. Vaginal privilege.

Tova O’Brien writes:

It should never have taken a scared young woman publicly laying out all the harrowing details of an alleged sexual assault for the Prime Minister to act. 
The message Jacinda Ardern is sending is that she needed a young woman to risk being retraumatised and having her account of a serious sexual assault pasted online, in the media, for her to take it seriously. 

Six weeks ago the Prime Minister and her office were alerted to the fact sexual assault allegations were taken to the Labour Party and that complainants said it formed part of an investigation by the party. Six weeks ago.

Which is why the media are so sceptical of the claim by the PM she had no idea there was a sexual assault allegation.

On the 5th and 6th of August Newshub had made it clear in reporting, and to the Prime Minister’s Office, that a violent sexual crime had been reported to the Labour Party by the alleged victim of the assault. 

That should have been enough for the Prime Minister to request full details from the Labour Party about the sexual assault allegation and to then make the call she finally made to Nigel Haworth last Wednesday which precipitated his resignation as Party President. 

Instead she received an assurance from the party that no allegations of a sexual nature had been raised nor investigated. For some unfathomable reason that was enough for the Prime Minister. She took the party on its word, sweet as, never mind the fact that young, scared members of her party were saying otherwise.

Note the bolded part about how Newshub communicated this directly to the PMs Office.

We’re now hearing that complainants’ names are being leaked and spread around the parliamentary gossip mill. Some complainants feel a witch hunt is underway. 

Just getting messier.

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?