Stuff reports:

Lawyers are in gravy and ratepayers are getting a stuffing as Lower Hutt councillors rack up big bills to settle disputes over such vital questions as whether a roast chicken buffet counts as “lavish”.

Ratepayers have been footing bills totalling more than $20,000 since a change to Hutt City Council’s code of conduct resulted in its chief executive calling in lawyers to adjudicate scraps between councillors.

The most expensive stoush, between deputy mayor David Bassett and councillor Campbell Barry, cost more than $14,000.

Astonishing.

Another, also involving a complaint against Barry, cost $7500 and centred around whether Barry had been accurate to refer to councillors eating a “lavish” buffet of roast chicken after voting to exclude some low-paid staff from receiving a living wage.

Cr Barry seems to be very costly.

Another scrap, between Lisa Bridson and Chris Milne over a karakia (Maori prayer) at a meeting in April, resulted in a bill for $5720, and a finding that there was no need for further action.

Milne had earlier told council chief executive Tony Stallinger that he was unhappy the complaint had been made, and he regarded it a waste of time and money.

Bridson complained because Milne disagreed with her on the need for a karakia!

When two of your own MPs say the party is morally compromised by having a fraudster as their leader, it is very damaging. This is very different to having opponents say it.

With Labour finally having a leader that appeals to the same demographics as the Greens, there is a risk their support could collapse below the 5% threshold, which would put them out of Parliament. Their recent results are:

• 1999 5.2%
• 2002 7.0%
• 2005 5.3%
• 2008 6.7%
• 2011 11.1%
• 2014: 10.7%

Before Labour started collapsing post-Clark they were a 5% to 7% party. If Labour claims back their lost supporters, then they only have around a 2% buffer over the 5% threshold.

Lloyd Burr at Newshub says:

Thanks to Metiria Turei, the Green Party is in the midst of an identity crisis.

It’s a crisis that cuts to the heart of what the party stands for, and what its priorities are. 

Just as importantly, it cuts to the heart of its name: The Greens.

The party doesn’t look like the strong, unwavering voice for the environment anymore.

It is not focussed on forests and rivers, or climate change, or conservation underfunding, or waste and pollution reduction.

It is now a party focussed on fighting for the rights of beneficiaries. It is focussed on legitimising benefit fraud, boosting welfare payments, and removing welfare obligations.

Yep.

Patrick Gower chips in:

Metira Turei has switched the Green Party into a meltdown mode that it refuses to switch off.

The Greens seem to be in pathological denial about the damage that Turei’s benefit fraud admission is doing.

If Monday’s double resignation of two senior MPs isn’t enough to send the message “enough is enough”, then what is?

The Greens need to step back and ask themselves the most simple and important of questions – how does this look to voters? It obviously looks appalling, but the Greens can’t see that.

The Greens are curled up in a collective “defensive crunch” of self-denial.

They need to realise Turei has not started a debate about poverty; she has started a debate about Metiria Turei’s benefit fraud.

They need to realise the resignations of David Clendon and Kennedy Graham are not going to look to the wider public like clearing out of dead wood; rather, it will make the party look woefully unstable just seven weeks out from the election.

This is the issue for voters. Do they want a National-led Government or a Labour-Greens Government?

They need to realise very serious charges may yet come from the Ministry of Social Development – charges of fraud under the Crimes Act are possible.

If charges are laid, and only then Turei stands down it will be too late.

Audrey Young writes:

The party establishment moved to contain the fall-out in the way that other parties do – to criticise the two rebel MPs as pretty useless and lazy, which is particularly unfair on Kennedy Graham who works his butt off in strange areas of international law.

That accounts for their joint statement sounding more like a judgment from The Hague.

But the telling line is the one that says “the timing by Metiria of her admissions, and her continuing justification of her actions, we see as incompatible with the standards of leadership of the Green Party.”

It is the “continuing justification” of her actions that have caused so much division across the country, not the original offence.

This is the key. It is not what Turei did 25 years ago that is the real issue. It is the Greens trying to portray what she did as right, claiming she had no choice.

It is comforting to know that there are some in the Green Party who do not see Turei as a perpetual victim, and that there are members in the party who are trying to have normal standards apply.

But there she stays at No 1 because to resign would be to admit that Turei’s calculated gambles, including admitting benefit fraud, had been a disaster.

A poll showed a majority of even Green voters were critical of her.

And this is the response from the Greens youth wing. Speaks for itself.

Stuff reports:

Two senior Green MPs have resigned in protest at their co-leader Metiria Turei’s refusal to step down in the wake of revelations she lied to obtain a benefit. 

Kennedy Graham and David Clendon made the threat to quit in protest on Monday afternoon. It is understood their resignations were accepted and they will retire at the election.

The pair are two of the longest-serving members of the Green Party.

First congratulations to Graham and Clendon for putting principle first. A very brave thing to do.

It is good there are some in the Greens that do not condone fraud and are willing to say so.

Green Party general manager Sarah Helm said the pair had done very little in the way of campaigning, and suggested they had been disgruntled for some time. 

“Neither of these candidates have been campaigning for us all year. David’s made one phone call, and Kennedy’s put in about three or four hours worth of calls. 

“My understanding is that both of them were not happy with their list placings either,” Helm said. 

Kennedy Graham was ranked No 8, only one lower than last time. This is a safe as houses ranking for him, so to suggest his resignation is not a matter of principle is just smearing him.

What this makes clear is how unstable a Labour-Green Government would be, with the Greens having split over Turei’s frauds.

The Herald reports:

Sir John Key will be awarded a Doctor of Commerce honorary degree from the University of Canterbury. …

University of Canterbury chancellor Dr John Wood said Key was a valued alumnus.

“Sir John provided strong support to the University of Canterbury, especially in the years since the 2010/2011 earthquakes,” Wood said.

“His leadership has been critical to the rebuild, not just on campus but in the region in general, and we will be eternally grateful to him for that.

“He has also been a supporter of the university in a personal capacity and I sincerely hope that his connection with this institution will continue and strengthen in time to come.”

Asked if Key could now use the title “Dr”, a university spokeswoman said she believed the honorific “Sir” outranked it.

That is correct. He will be just SIr John Key, not Dr Sir John Key.

If he was not knighted he could be The Right Honourable Doctor John Key. That would really upset some people 🙂

The Herald spent a day with David Seymour:

David Seymour takes after his mother, Vickie, says Nicola.

“He is intelligent, compassionate and driven. Vickie was incredibly special and gorgeous to look at. She had a huge personality.

“She was determined and she would never take no for an answer. She was passionate about education – she would be so proud David is the under-secretary for education.”

Victoria Seymour was 50 years old when she died from liver cancer, 10 years ago. Seymour was 24. He admired his mother’s tenacity and insight.

“My mum was a strong individualist – she was one of the last people in the Western world to contract polio. She was told she wouldn’t be able to work, go to university, have children or drive a car – but she did all those things.

“What she showed to me was you can overcome anything if you are determined to.”

24 is an awfully young age to lose your mother.

Before she died, Vickie recorded a DVD message for each of her three sons’ future partners.

Seymour says it has taken years to process his mother’s death and he still hasn’t watched it.
“I am saving that because I haven’t got a partner locked in yet.

God that would be an emotional thing to watch one day.

Seymour strongly supports euth­anasia, although his mother’s death didn’t factor in his views.

“Mum died very comfortably in ­palliative care and for a lot of people that works. But I am worried about those people for whom it doesn’t. I ­believe people should have choice. I think it’s barbaric in 2017 that some people are trying to impose their values on others.”

Which is the crox of the debate – allowing individuals to decide what is best for them.

He left school with a bursary at the end of the sixth form to study engineering at Auckland University because he wanted to meet girls. “It wasn’t the smartest strategy,” he adds.

Considering the gender ratio in Engineering, no it wasn’t!

Seymour rents a two-storey house in Remuera with three flatmates.

The white stone house has no ­garden and feels like a student flat with ­minimal furnishings. There are no photos or paintings in the lounge, just a huge heat pump, a big TV and a wall of books.

David may be one of the poorest people living in Remuera!

Seymour is keen to show off his tidy bedroom – he says he made his bed for our ­benefit. His seven suits, “one for each day of the week”, are hanging neatly in the open wardrobe and his shoes are stacked in rows.

Very organised.

He has recently ­rekindled the flame with Rachel Morton, former TV3 reporter and now senior adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Paula ­Bennett.

“I think Rachel has tremendous ­tenacity – the way she has got all her jobs – mostly by bloody mindedness and harassing people. She has ­enormous self-belief and drive.

Rachel was one of the first television reporters to interview me. Can’t quite recall what it was about – something to do with the Internet.

The Greens have announced their new tax policy, to reflect the principles of their welfare policy. The summary is:

1. If expenses are tight, just pay as much tax as you think you can manage. It’s fine if it is less than what the law says.
2. No more will you be harrassed by the state by being asked to verify things such as expenses or income. No more tax audits. We will simply take your word for it.
3. You can income share if you want to. Split your income between flatmates or don’t. Up to you.
4. Lying to the IRD is no longer an offence if you have children.
5. If your business receives income from new clients, you don’t need to pay tax on this income until they have been a client for three years.

If it is demeaning and harrassing for people applying for a benefit to prove things such as whether they actually are looking for work, or actually are sick, then it is surely demeaning and harrassing for taxpayers to have to prove things to the IRD.

Stuff reports:

ACT leader David Seymour is promising to “cut red tape” to allow at least 600,000 Auckland homes to be built.

Seymour made the announcement in the west Auckland suburb of Henderson on Sunday morning.

It doubled as the launch of his book, Own Your Future, which opens with the story of a Waitakere family blocked from subdividing its land as the property falls outside the region’s Rural Urban Boundary. …

“Land use restrictions are now responsible for 56 per cent of the average Auckland house price, according to one of the Government’s own reports released last month,” he said.

“This cost is the single largest cause of poverty, inequality, and sickness in Auckland and beyond.

“ACT says it’s crazy to ban people from building homes during a chronic housing shortage.”

Seymour said ACT would move to abolish the Rural Urban Boundary and push to reclassify areas like Waitakere, Karaka, and Clevedon as residential. 

“These areas are not treasured natural landscapes. They are grassy fields with the occasional barn or horse.

“Allowing housing in these areas should be a bare minimum for any Government.”

The party would fund the infrastructure to service the new homes by sharing the GST on construction with councils, he said.

This is the only policy that is a sustainable long-term solution to land and house inflation.

The Herald reports:

Labour’s new deputy leader Kelvin Davis has shown a willingness to be his party’s attack dog – calling the Health Minister the “doctor of death” and comparing Bill English’s personality to that of a rock.

The nasty party just can’t change its spots.

Jenny Ruth writes:

The EY business journalism awards have been particularly kind to me.

In their first and second years, I won the radio section and was awarded prize money of $1000 each time. …

So I felt sick last Thursday when I learned EY had disqualified the work of my colleague, Karyn Scherer, on printing company Fuji Xerox New Zealand and its questionable sales tactics and dodgy accounting.

The pride I’d taken in receiving my awards evaporated when I learned the reason for that disqualification was that Fuji Xerox was an audit client of EY’s.

The EY awards, excluding stories on EY audit clients, are worse than no awards at all.

This has particular resonance for me.

Since May, I’ve been working on one of the biggest series of stories of my more than 30-year career as a journalist.

That’s the worsening news from Fletcher Building’s construction division and the seeming inaction – until last month – of its board.

Now guess who Fletcher Building’s auditor is? No prizes for guessing it’s EY.

EY’s stance has also destroyed the value of the awards I’d already won.

The prize money was always of less importance to me than winning the awards themselves but, the longer I thought about it, the more the money felt tainted.

So, on Friday afternoon I posted the framed certificate from the second award and wrote a cheque for $2000 and sent them back to EY

This is doing huge damage to EY’s brand, and to make it worse they have not responded in any way to the controversy. This is just not acceptable. If they did censor the entries on the basis of whom their clients up they need to front up and apologise for doing it, and say it will not happen again.

But by letting this fester, firms will start to conclude they don’t want EY as their accountants or auditors due to the brand damage.

The Washington Post reports:

In a nation where malnutrition is soaring amid shortages of food and medicine, the nearly worthless currency, the bolívar, has entered free fall. The Venezuelan currency lost 45.3 percent of its value in one week, as the price of the dollar on the black market nearly doubled.

In a supermarket in eastern Caracas, shoppers expressed sticker shock.

“I came a week ago and saw rice for 5,700 boliívares,” said Gina Angelats, a 62-year-old retiree. “I didn’t buy it because it seemed too expensive. But now it’s 18,000! This is unaffordable. . . . Blame the government and its socialist policies. They’ve ruined the country.”

Those who hate socialism the most are those who have experienced it. Those who love it the most travel around the world celebrating it, but never going to a country that practises it.

The Herald editorial:

One act of dishonesty may be forgiven, two becomes harder to overlook. On top of her admission that she withheld information from Social Welfare about her living arrangements on the domestic purposes benefit, Metiria Turei has been found to have enrolled for an election at a false address. It begins to look like a pattern of behaviour of a person with too little regard for the obligations of honest citizenship, and we can only wonder, what more might emerge?

I am sure there is more.

The Green Party has reason to be worried, so much so it is remarkable that it stood by her yesterday when she did no more than renounce any claim to a ministerial position in a coalition with Labour. 

A position forced on them by Labour. Otherwise I suspect they would not have ruled her out.

Despite Turei’s presence, she would no doubt prefer to deal with the Greens. But it would be much better for both parties if Turei did the decent thing and resigned, certainly from her Greens leadership and ideally from its candidate list for the next Parliament.

That is what National’s Todd Barclay has done, though Turei and her co-leader James Shaw have been calling on him to go sooner.

Barclay is going and Turei was one of those loudest in calling for him to go. But she won’t go.

Having mounted a high horse against Barclay, Shaw is now in the embarrassing position of defending Turei’s effort to stay. Both of them are at risk of much more emerging from the past she has opened for examination. Newshub’s discovery that she was listed at the same address as the father of her child while she was on the benefit, plainly caught her by surprise. She had forgotten she gave that address for electoral enrolment so that she could vote for a friend. What else has she forgotten?

Most people will be very forgiving of someone who made mistakes in their youth, if they show they have learnt from their mistakes and regret them. None of us are perfect. But Turei has been the opposite or regret. She has portrayed herself as the victim and used her personal circumstances to try and justify the Greens welfare policy. What has come out is because she decided to try and portray herself as a victim who had no choices.

The reality is she did have choices. She could have chosen to get a job. She could have chosen to seek support from the father (I suspect in fact she did, and simply didn’t declare it). She could have applied for hardship grants. She could have done less papers each year giving her time to do part-time work. She could have asked the father to sell the house he owned and use the proceeds to support them. She could have asked grandparents for support.

Instead she chose to lie to MSD and steal from taxpayers. It was a choice. She had other choices. They may not have been wonderful choices but they were choices.

Her self-portrayal and lack of remorse is what has done her the most harm.

Judith Collins announced:

Finance Minister Steven Joyce and Revenue Minister Judith Collins have today announced the Government’s final decisions on proposals to address base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS).

“The new measures will significantly strengthen our tax rules and our ability to ensure that multinationals are taxed fairly and on the basis of their actual level of economic activity in New Zealand,” Mr Joyce says.

In combination the new measures will:

• Stop foreign parents charging their New Zealand subsidiaries high interest rates to reduce their taxable profits in New Zealand.

• Stop multinationals using artificial arrangements to avoid having a taxable presence in New Zealand.

• Ensure multinationals are taxed in accordance with the economic substance of their activities in New Zealand.

• Counter strategies that multinationals have used to exploit gaps and mismatches in different countries’ domestic tax rules to avoid paying tax anywhere in the world.

• Make it easier for Inland Revenue to investigate uncooperative multinational companies.

These measures won’t solve the issue of base tax erosion, but they wil help significantly. At the end of the day though companies which operate globally will seek to have as much tax as possible paid in countries with lower corporate tax rates. This is why the corporate tax rate needs to be globally competitive – otherwise fewer companies will be tax resident in NZ.

Some tributes in the Herald:

Auckland Grammar School

“Sir John’s passion for quality education saw decades of his life committed to the education sector. His role as the 9th headmaster of Auckland Grammar School from January 1973 to May 1993, was defining. “We are grateful for Sir John’s connection and continued contributions to Auckland Grammar School until the day of his passing.”

New Zealand Cricket

“The thoughts of NZC are with the family of former All Blacks captain and Black Caps manager Sir John Graham.”

Steve Tew, NZ Rugby CEO

“DJ was a great all-round New Zealander. From his exploits on the rugby field to those in the classroom he was simply exceptional. His commitment to all aspects of the game and New Zealand society is legendary. DJ was a person I feel extremely privileged to have met. He was a leader in every endeavour he turned to, and his long list of honours and achievements are testaments to his exceptional character.”

Jonathan Coleman, Sports Minister

“RIP Sir John Graham – a great NZer who made a huge difference for so many young people. A major influence in my formative years, sadly gone.”

 

Sean Fitzpatrick, former All Blacks captain

“Our thoughts are with the family of Sir John Graham who has passed away. A good man who influenced so many lives.”

Murray Deaker, broadcaster

“I don’t know of any other single individual who has had such an influence in education in particular. Twenty-eight young men who taught under him became principals or headmasters. On top of that, his influence in the areas of rugby union and cricket are almost beyond parallel.”

Sir Michael Jones, All Black

“I was privileged to be part of the Auckland rugby team in the early and mid-90s and we were coached by Sir Graham Henry of course, and Sir DJ was our manager. They were just wonderful father figures for us, particularly DJ being the patriarch of the team and the senior statesman. He was just a wonderful presence in that squad. We were very successful and I do give credit to Sir DJ, just his mana that he had about him but also his rugby nous.”

Sir John excelled in many areas but I have little doubt his greatest impact on New Zealand was as a principal for 20 years. A strong principal can have a huge impact on the lives of the kids who go to their school, and I am sure there are tens of thousands who have benefited from his educational leadership.

Newshub reports:

An overwhelming majority of New Zealanders think Greens Co-Leader Metiria Turei was wrong to commit benefit fraud. …

In the latest Newshub Reid Research poll 74 per cent of Kiwis said it was wrong for Ms Turei to lie to get a bigger benefit. Eighteen percent said it wasn’t wrong and 8 percent didn’t know.

So do the 74% who say it was wrong, want Turei as Welfare Minister in a Labour-Green Government and implementing their policy of lifetime welfare entitlements where you can 20 years on the dole and never have to attend even a single job interview.

The vast majority of National, Labour, and NZ First voters said it was wrong for Ms Turei to lie to WINZ, as well as more than half of Green voters

Those saying it was wrong are:

• National voters 85%
• NZ First voters 77%
• Labour voters 67%
• Green voters 51%

Of course Turei still doesn’t think it was wrong. She blames taxpayers for not giving her more money. Her decision to lie is out fault, not her fault.

This is now Jacinda’s first test as Labour Leader. They have an MoU with the Greens. Does Jacinda think Metiria can serve as Deputy Prime Minister in a Labour-Green Government? Does she think she can serve in any capacity? Does she condone or condemn her welfare and electoral fraud?

To date Jacinda has said she doesn’t want to comment on other parties. I am sure she doesn’t. But her party has an MoU with the Greens. It makes it relevent.

UPDATE: Ardern to her credit has said she would be uncomfortable with Turei as a minister, leading Turei to say she will not seek to be a Minister if they are in Government. However Turei is still defiant and will not resign as co-leader.

Richard Harman writes:

Labour’s leadership change may have dealt a serious blow to National’s ability to form a Government after the election.

Not only is the Maori Party now saying it could work with Labour but Party President, Tukuroirangi Morgan, says the decision which party to support into Government will be made by the party’s whole membership.

And he concedes that the membership as a whole leans towards Labour.

Actually the Maori Party have never ever ruled out working with Labour. They often vote with them. They have always said if they have the balance of power, they will consult their members on whom to support to form a Government.

The fact Labour has been saying they are the last cab off the rank and they want to wipe them out, has made it more likely they would choose National. But this has never been a done deal, or far from it.

In my poll summaries I always include the Maori Party with NZ First as a centrist party that could go with either National or Labour.

The latest revelations about Metiria Turei have fatally compromised her position as a political leader and potential Deputy Prime Minister. If she is not removed before the election, I suspect she will be challenged at their next AGM.

Let us look at what we now know in terms of her fraud. First it is important to reflect on what the DPB is for. It is for parents of children with no partner and no significant income for the upbringing of the child or children.

It covers situations where your partner dies, or you split up or you were never in a commited relationship and the father doesn’t want to contribute etc.

In many situations such as a split, the custodial parent doesn’t go on the DPB. You work out a support arrangement. In our society the primary responsibility for paying for children is the family or families. The Government has a secondary role where they provide the DPB as a backstop and also WFF to boost incomes of parents etc.

So the DPB is for when you are having to look after the child fulltime and hence unable to work and not receiving any money from the other parent. If the other parent is not contributing to their child’s upbringing, then they are legally obliged to pay child support to the IRD to partially offset the cost of the DPB.

Here’s what we now know about Metiria’s case:

1. Lied over a period of at least three years covering at least three different houses about how much rent she was paying
2. Was either living with the father of the baby for at least two years (which was welfare fraud as ineligible for DPB) or lied to the Registrar of Electors about where she lived in order to illegally vote in an electorate (electoral fraud which had a maximum penalty of three months jail under the 1956 Electoral Act)
3. Refused to name the father of the baby, making it impossible for MSD to detect whether or not she was living with him at the time
4. The father not only lived with Metiria (according to the electoral roll) but had a mortgage on the property, which almost certainly means he owned it. So are we to believe that despite being wealthy enough to own a house, he was contributing nothing to the upkeep of his child? He certainly wasn’t paying child support to the IRD as Turei refused to name him.
5. The father’s mother was at the time the Mayor of North Shore City. Are we to believe that the Hartley’s were not contributing to their grandchild’s expenses at all? If so, this should be disclosed to MSD. The DPB is an income tested benefit.
6. Metiria was living with her mother for at least two years but claims they were financially independent. So again we are meant to believe Metiria was receiving no support from either set of grandparents, despite living with them.
7. Metiria never sought employment during this period, but did find time to twice stand for Parliament despite claiming to be so poor that she had to lie to MSD in order to get more money from taxpayers
8. Was believed to be living with her new partner for some of the time she was on the DPB, which also could invalidate her eligibility or mean his income should be included

Now you can have a view, as Metiria does, that taxcpayer support should be unconditional. That if you want the DPB you should get it as of right. That you should never ever have to look for a job. That you can be in a relationship with someone of extreme wealth but still get the DPB. They are all legitimate views, albeit ones I strongly disagree with.

But what you can’t do is unilaterally decide that your view of what the welfare system should be trumps what Parliament has decided, and simply lie in order to get more money.

What is astonishing is that at the time Turei was lying to MSD and lying to the Registrar of Electors, she was studying to be a lawyer. She obviously missed the classes on legal ethics.

Newshub reports:

Ms Turei says she claimed a benefit between 1993 and 1998. The habitation index – that’s an official public record of addresses collated from the electoral roll – shows Ms Turei listed at the same address as her daughter’s father, Paul Hartley, in both 1993 and 1994.

That’s significant – if she was living at the same address as her baby’s father she would not have been eligible for the benefit she claimed, the Domestic Purposes Benefit.

We showed the evidence to Ms Turei on Tuesday, and asked whether the electoral roll had not been updated or whether the father was living with Ms Turei.

“I’m not sure”, “I’d have to have a look”, “I was living in Mt Eden at the time”, she told Newshub.

“I’m not talking about the personal relationships or other people.”

This is very significant. If she was living with the father of their child, then she wasn’t even eligible to get any DPB at all. Saying “I’m not sure” is very suspicious. You know where you lived. Why would you be enrolled in a house you don’t live in?

But there is even more to this than Newshub has reported. Property records shows that there was a mortgage on the property in the name of Mr Hartley. That very strongly suggests he owned the property. So the rent she was claiming, was possibly being paid to the baby’s father.

Of course there may be mroe to this than what the electoral roll and property records suggest. But beyond doubt this will be information MSD will be wanting to evaluate to determine how much money Turei owes taxpayers, and if her deception rose to the level warranting criminal prosecution.

Turei has said:

So Turei’s defence to welfare fraud is it was electoral fraud, not welfare fraud!!!!

Keep digging that hole deeper.

There were what seemed like dozens of articles yesterday full of outrage that Jesse Mulligan and Mark Richardson had asked Jacinda Ardern about balancing family plans with the new job.

As I understand it, Jesse Mulligan is very good friends with Jacinda and her partner. So this was not a hostile question. In fact I suspect it was asked deliberately so that it would generate the coverage which it did. It successfully got 36 hours of non stop publicity for Jacinda.

You’d think there would be someone in the media who would point out that this outrageous question was asked by a close friend, not by some hostile journalist. But alas no. It was a rush to join in the virtue signalling.

On the wider issue, first let me say that women in politics do have to put up a lot of sexist questions that men do not. I am still outraged over how a friend of mine who sought a candidacy was told by a party official she should wait until her children were older. So there is a double standard often, and whether or not you have children, do not have children and/or plan to have children should not be a litmus test for politics.

But as Jacinda had done interviews in the past where she explicitly mentioned she would not become Labour Party Leader as she wanted to start a family, I don’t think it was out of bounds to follow up on that previous statement as Mulligan did.

I do think however Richardson was boorish and offensive in demanding to know her plans. No politician should be pressured that way.

A number of people have said that Bill English never gets questioned on how he copes with being a parent and politician. This is incorrect. Just a week ago the media reported how he is skipping question time to watch his son play rugby, and this got plenty of criticism on social media.

When Bill was opposition leader he was asked about how he can do the job and be a father to six kids. In fact there was criticism of him by some former colleagues that he would go home at 6 pm every evening to have dinner with his family (something he has continued to do) rather than be in Parliament all the time.

We also have double standards from Labour MPs. Yesterday Trevor Mallard said:

“I wouldn’t ask that question of anyone I was going to employ in any job… it’s an indication of deep-rooted sexism. I don’t do that sort of stuff… it’s the stuff of 1950s and prior. You have to be pretty stupid these days to do it.”

This is the same Trevor Mallard who has repeatedly attacked Chris Bishop for not having kids having said:

• “my successor knows what it is like to have a young family. Grounded not privileged” (14 Jan)
• “Keeps keep my successor grounded. Ginny knows how the world works like most families do. No privilege there.” (21 Jan)
• “kids help keep my successor grounded. Contrast that with the privileged opponent.” (15 March)

So Trevor Mallard thinks not having kids means you are not grounded and privileged. No uproar on media about this.

Now again certainly female politicians get it much harder than male politicians in terms of people questioning their ability to be MPs in terms of their family status. But it is not all one way traffic. All those who condemned two broadcasters for asking Jacinda about her family plans, have been silent on an actual MP attacking his opponent over not having kids.

The Herald reports:

Auditor-General Martin Matthews has resigned after a critical report about his handling of a fraud case.

“It is with great regret that I have tendered my resignation as controller and Auditor-General,” he said this afternoon.

“The issues and speculation about how I handled matters in relation to the fraud committed on the Ministry of Transport during my term as CEO have made it untenable for me to continue in this role.”

In a highly unusual case, his resignation comes despite his appointment being approved by all political parties. His suitability for the role, however, came into question after it became apparent that MPs were not told the full details of his response to a major fraud case at the ministry.

This is the right call. Matthews is an honourable man and has served the public well in various roles. But the fact there were multiple warnings about Harrison’s fraud while he was CEO of Transport does undermine confidence in him as Auditor-General. Any other public sector role he would be fine for, but not that one.

UPDATE: As Matthews has resigned, the Officers of Parliament Committee has decided not to release the report into whether the fraud by Harrison could have reasonably been detected earlier. This is a very bad decision. The public deserve to know the full facts about what happened, especially if it has led to the Auditor-General’s resignation.