Labour are muscling up, despite the smiles from Jacinda Ardern, over work for the dole.

Richard Harman at Politik reports:

Employment Minister Willie Jackson says he shares Shane Jones’ passion to get Maori unemployment down and he has proposed a package of measures in a paper to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to address the issue.

He met Jones yesterday and agreed to incorporate some of Jones’ ideas in his paper.

But he says he stops short at Jones’ “work for the dole” proposals.

And he says that idea would never be accepted by Labour or “the boss” – Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.  

He says that jobs that are funded by the Government have to be real jobs “not just scrub cutting.”

Jackson and Jones are both outspoken, high profile Maori who have also both returned to Parliament after a period of being away.

They have both come back with a mission to address Maori unemployment.

They come from different backgrounds; Jackson the urban Maori media star and one time left-wing MP and Jones the establishment bureaucrat and businessman with strong connections into more conservative provincial Maori society.

They always moan about “not real jobs” but you have to start somewhere, and you have learn to get up in the morning and go to work.

However, both are seized with wanting to bring down the Maori unemployment figures.

The September 2017 Household Labour Force survey showed Maori unemployment at 9.9% against European unemployment of 3.5%.

But it was Jones’ comments on “Q+A” on Sunday when he said he was taking a “Work for the Dole” policy to the Cabinet that has provoked a more widespread discussion on the issue.

“I am not going to remain silent any longer while my young ne’er-do-well nephews in Kaikohe and other places fall victims to the gangs and they’re in Disneyland,” he said.

“They’ll be made to go to work, and where it is necessary, to pay them.

“They’ll have to receive a minimum wage, but there will be no more sitting on the couch.”

Jones’ language was probably provoked by a desire by NZ First to brand themselves as distinct to Labour.

No one should be sitting in the couch. Work for the dole makes sense, but it is fraught with difficulty.

But the imperative for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is to maintain a seamless unity between Labour and NZ First.

So at her post-Cabinet press conference yesterday she said that what Jones was calling “work for the dole”, Labour was calling “ready for work.”

We are essentially talking about the same thing,” she said.

Asked about Jones’ proposal to end dole payments if unemployed didn’t take up jobs she said there already was a sanctions regime in the welfare system.

“That’s provided us with the tools to ensure that people do take up the job opportunities that are available to them.”

Semantics. I bet there are a lot of latte sipping Auckland liberals who will be aghast that their saviour, Jacinda Ardern, is looking at work for the dole. That is a “tory” solution.

Jackson though wants to see an employment strategy which strengthens communities and provides real jobs.

“You don’t fix unemployment by following Jonesy’s idea and chucking a few Maori out there cutting scrub for a few months,” he told POLITIK.

“You have to create a real job, jobs with dignity, by forming relationships with local Maori, with trade unions, with businesses.

“We have to target the Kaitaias or Northland or South Auckland or West Auckland where there are 27,000 unemployed and target these groups who have not been supported or funded by the National Government.

“I’ve been working on getting that funding across.

“There is money that is available.”

Unions have never created jobs, usually they are wrecking jobs. There is ample evidence of that, and no evidence of them building businesses and creating jobs. Asking a union how to solve unemployment isn’t the smartest thing anyone could do.

This issue is causing problems and swapping out strong words for weasel words isn’t helping anyone.

-Politik

Andrew Little has shown typical political weasel behaviour by announcing that he will be the minister responsible and ordering recovery operations, but he won’t be responsible if anything goes wrong:

The chief executive of the Pike River Recovery Agency will be held responsible if anything goes wrong with the re-entry of the drift.

Last month, the Prime Minister and Andrew Little – the Minister Responsible for the Pike River Re-entry, announced the Government would establish a government department by the end of January 2018 to assess the risk associated with a manned re-entry, and the best way to carry out the entry.

The entry of the mine’s drift, and the recovery of any remains of the 29 men killed in 2010, would be completed by March 2019.

Both Jacinda Ardern and Little said there would be risk involved with a manned re-entry, but it was up to the agency to assess the risk and to mitigate it, and if the level of risk was acceptable, go forward with the re-entry.

They also said anyone tasked with carrying out the re-entry had the right to refuse to take part in the job, if they deemed it unsafe.

At the time of the announcement, Little said the agency – Te Kahui Whakamana Rua Tekau ma Iwa (The Empowering Voice for the Pike 29) – would answer to him, and as the minister in charge, he would have the final decision.

He refused to respond to questions on who would be held liable, under New Zealand health and safety laws, if something went wrong.

However, documents relating to the establishment of the agency show the chief executive of the agency would be held legally responsible if something went wrong.

I’m sure they will be flooded with applicants for a job where there is a high chance of being prosecuted and sent to jail or receive a massive multi-million dollar fine if something went wrong. The line will be around the corner twice over I’m sure. /sarc

These muppets have no idea of commercial risk. No director would accept that level of risk, unless of course Andrew Little is about to blow the budget for this and pay a massive salary to compensate for the risk.

-Fairfax

Andrew Little seems to have embraced Labour’s criminal friendly justice policies by announcing he is looking at emptying the prisons.

There are too many people in jail who don’t need to be there, according to Justice Minister Andrew Little.  

Name one. Most people want ratbags in prison, only Labour wants to tip them onto the streets to commit more crimes.

He plans to tackle the issue by looking at the way bail laws are being applied, and he also plans to reduce Maori offending while Labour is in office.

Yeah, how are you going to do that?

The government has been faced with projections that show if nothing is done, the prison population will increase by roughly 50 per cent over the next 10 years alone, Mr Little told TV3’s The Nation on Saturday.

Some of the issues include people who should be eligible for parole but don’t have access to the addiction or counselling courses in prison that they need to undertake, Mr Little said.

“They could be out doing productive, constructive things, but they’re banged up in prison.”

They could be doing productive, constructive things while banged up in prison…like breaking rocks.

He said people in prison with mental health problems and literacy problems aren’t getting the support they need either to overcome those issues.

Meanwhile, Mr Little said there would be a specific target for reducing Maori offending, but he did not detail the possible figure.

Yeah but how?

The previous National government planned to cut the rate of Maori offending by 25 per cent by 2025.

“I think we’ve set the overall target — the 30 per cent reduction in the prison population in 15 years,” Mr Little said.

Labour are working on putting a strategy together, but have been blindsided by the projected growth of the prison population, he said.

Labour continues with their catch and release crime policies.

Jacinda Ardern said that she doesn’t lie, and wouldn’t lie. But the more the shenanigans goes on over the release of the multi-page secret coalition agreement the more Labour and Ardern are damaging their claims to be honest brokers and transparent.

Honesty and transparency were the brands that they pushed during the election, and Labour has made much of John Key’s apparent lying. Now the boot is on the other foot and they’ve commenced with their obfuscations from the get go.

For a Government vowing to be the most transparent and open the country has ever seen, it really did get stuck in the mud this week. 

That 38-page secret coalition document that’s stored in a not-so-secret safe in Winston Peters’ office has caused all sorts of headaches, for the prime minister in particular, who has been visibly frustrated about the position she’s been put in.

On Monday, it was revealed the prime minister’s office was refusing to release the document that NZ First leader and deputy prime minister Peters had previously described as “a document of precision on various areas of policy commitment and development”.

The longer it goes on the more the mud sticks, it is already a morass up to their ankles and sucking their gum boots off. They have no one to blame but themselves.

So why has the Government spent the whole week battling headlines on this and undergoing forensic-style questioning in the House over who did and didn’t have access to the document, and other trivial matters like its font size?

Because Ardern resorted to a political operative approach rather than the one she’s better known for, honesty.

Over time, former prime minister John Key nailed the art of just saying he got it wrong, throwing his hands in the air, shrugging his shoulders and moving on.

The public appetite for that approach far exceeds the spin-doctoring one that was used this week by the Government.

Her honesty card has been handed in, now she is sneaky, furtive and obfuscatory.

The excuses used by Leader of the House Chris Hipkins and Ardern for why they ended up giving unnecessary select committee concessions to National because they didn’t know their numbers in the House were simply farcical.

Their insistence it was better to give National concessions and avoid a vote for Speaker Trevor Mallard to ensure he was elected unanimously was utter nonsense.

The Government would have saved themselves weeks of headlines if they’d just admitted they weren’t 100 per cent sure of their numbers, asked for a vote and come out the other end with their Speaker and their integrity intact.

Silly stuff from the boy wonder, who is proving to be as inept as everyone thought, along with a number of other Labour ministers.

They are so full of themselves and believe their own spin about how competent they are, but they are making amateur mistakes.

What is becoming increasingly obvious is that Labour had no plan to govern, all they had were a collection of bumper sticker slogans and they’ve been paddling furiously ever since up Shit Creek.

The Ponsoby News latest issue has a fawning article about Golriz Ghahraman.

In that article it says that upon arrival in New Zealand in 1990 when she was nine years old :

Golriz had had little education and spoke only broken English.

But hang on…schooling in Iran starts at age six, so she should have had three years of schooling. She wasn’t living in a war zone as we’ve now discovered, despite her claims to the contrary.

Worse, when she clarified her position on the witnessing of air raids, it as apparently while she was in Tehran on her “school holidays”. They were the unluckiest of holidays, coinciding with the end of the only 53 days where Tehran was targeted by Scud missiles from Iraq.

For the benefit of Ghahraman who condemns US involvement in the Iran-Iraq war and the use of US sourced weapons, a Scud missile is made in Russia…and at that time, Soviet Russia.

Nonetheless, there is another contradiction about her upbringing that needs explaining more fully.

Either she went to school and had those glorious holidays in Tehran at a time when 2 million residents of Tehran were fleeing in the other direction…or she had little education and spoke only broken English. In the meantime she has sure made up for with a classic whiny, question-asking-at-the-end-of-the-sentence Kiwi accent.

None of her multiple stories match up. This MP has been glossing over, hiding and in some instances outright lying about her past.

If only she had just told the truth, but then that was never a really sexy story that would have elevated her so high on the Greens list. Then again, having the close personal support of the leader always helps in that regard.

You may recall Golriz Ghahraman could not remember on Larry Williams radio on Monday about how she ended up as an intern for the defence team and suggested the UN may have assigned her.

It might interest readers, and those journalists who care about a lying MP embellishing her CV, that the UN does not have an intern program for the defence team. It only has one for prosecutors.

There is even a recruitment video about it that is lying around in a dark corner of the internet called Youtube.

The accused hires a counsel from a pool of lawyers that have passed a check on qualifications and a police check for criminal convictions. There is means tested legal aid paid by the UN for these independent contractors.

It is absurd to suggest that either the court or the prosecution can allocate staff to the defence team.

If the court or the prosecutor hires members of your defence team, that defence team obviously compromised fatally.

The lead counsel may choose to run his own intern program.

You must choose which side you intern for and are more likely to get a job in the defence team because the jobs are odious. The interning for the prosecution would be more competitive.

So for Golriz Ghahraman to claim she was in a paid intern role appointed by the UN is a false claim. Yet another one. She would have been hired, both in The Hague and in Tanzania by the lead defence counsel.

While we are speaking about legal teams, Golriz Ghahramen also claimed in her maiden speech that:

I remembered, getting notes and emails from my female interns, especially of minority backgrounds– telling me over and over again how much it meant to see someone like them forge that path. Some of them are carrying that mantle today. I realised then that it was important for that process to have victim of governance by repression and mass murder stand up in those courtrooms, mostly dominated by Western men. Representation matters.

Which is just her inherent racism against white people disguised as virtue-signalling, and more importantly is a lie as well that is proved by her own Facebook photos:

Note that she is the palest person in the photo. There isn’t a single Western man in that photo. This is just more of her mis-truths, lies and falsehoods designed to make her sound like she had far greater role in these tribunals than she has led us all to believe.

Make no mistake, we are going to uncover the rest of her misleading statements and right now I am aware of investigations being undertaken in Iran and in Cambodia.

So far not a single one of her statements are wholly true. Sure, there is a little bit of truth in them, but by and large they are falsehoods. We will get tot he bottom of them.

Credit: Luke

I’m starting to believe that Golriz Ghahraman can’t actually recognise the truth.

In February of this year she wrote:

Now this can’t be blamed on editors, journalists or even staff. She wrote it herself.

Note how she has now been promoted to “prosecuting heads of state”. Here is her problem, We know there were no heads of state prosecuted in Rwanda, she only defended former PM of Kosovo, Radovan Karadžić in the Yugoslavia trials and he wasn’t a head of state. Slobodan Milošević was a sitting head of state but Golriz Ghahraman didn’t prosecute him. There were no heads of state prosecuted in the Cambodian trials, in fact only 5 people were prosecuted there and not one was a head of state.

This article contains a direct lie about her human rights legal experience.

-Research by Sally, Impolitkal

screenshot-Whaleoil

James Shaw has made two speeches where he claimed that Golriz Ghahraman was a prosecutor at the United Nations.

This is one he gave to the NZ Institute of International Affairs:

In another speech he also said:

And of course, many of you will have already read about Golriz Ghahraman, who came to New Zealand as a nine-year old refugee from Iran, and who is now an Oxford-educated human rights lawyer who puts war criminals on trial at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Was he mistaken then as well? Who precisely are these war criminals she put on trial at The Hague? The only person at The Hague she was involved with was Radovan Karadzic…and she was on the defence team!

James Shaw has said he was mistaken about what he said at the speech to the NZ Institute of International Affairs:

Green Party co-leader James Shaw is taking responsibility for a speech he gave in May in which he mistakenly said that Golriz Ghahraman had worked as a prosecutor at UN tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The admission is the latest in a week in which Ghahraman’s work history and how it has been presented is under intense scrutiny.

Ghahraman worked in the defence team as an unpaid intern at the Rwanda Tribunal for Joseph Nzirorera, who died before he could be convicted of genocide, and in a paid position representing pop singer Simon Bikindi, who was convicted for incitement to genocide.

At The Hague, she worked on the pre-trial defence of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, who was found guilty of crimes against humanity. She worked on the prosecution at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

But in the speech in May to the NZ Institute of International Affairs, Shaw heaped praise on Ghahraman, saying that she had worked as a prosecutor at the Rwanda Tribunal and The Hague.

“Having fled Iran in 1990 as a child, Golriz is now a human rights lawyer who worked as a prosecutor at the United Nations’ tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. She also worked on the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia,” Shaw said.

This morning Shaw said he made a mistake and had not run the speech by Ghahraman.

“I didn’t check the speech with Golriz before I gave it. Clearly I got those the wrong way around.”

He got it the “wrong way around” twice. What sort of an idiot does he think we are, to make the same mistake a minimum of twice.

We now have a situation where the leader of the Green party has made some pretty serious mistakes about the credentials of one of his candidates. I simply don’t believe he made a mistake…twice. He’s either lying and was in on the CV embellishment, or he was being lied to.

I’ll be generous and accept he wasn’t lying, but the way he is behaving in sticking up for her makes me wonder if Golriz has him by the short and curlies somehow.

Given the numeous provable falsehoods from Golriz Gharhaman, I believe that James Shaw has been lied to.

I think we are now at the point where the considerable damage being done to the Green party now means that they hold the mantle of the most unethical party in parliament.

Credit: Luke

Barry Soper sniffs something whiffy:

The Greens have circled their wagons around their latest MP to land herself in the fudge factory.

It seems the deeper the hole being dug for our first refugee MP, Golriz Ghahraman, the more she keeps digging.

It was the same with Metiria Turei when she admitted to benefit fraud and went on to fudge the facts that, like an attack of borer, had the little bugs coming out of the woodwork.   

That is the problem. It is obfuscation, justification, without actually addressing the isssue, which was the hiding or at the very least economical versions of the truth that existed out there.

Few would take issue with Ghahraman, as a lawyer, joining a defence team representing those accused of genocide in Rwanda where around 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered.

But most would take exception to how the Greens represented her on their website, describing her as putting on trial world leaders for abusing their power and restoring communities after war and human rights atrocities. In reality she was a bit player.

In her interview with the Herald that stirred up the hornets’ nest she said she met a defence lawyer working for the Rwandan Tribunal and he invited her over saying they needed a lawyer at the coalface. She volunteered as an intern and now conveniently can’t remember whether she was assigned to one side or the other!

In the latest batch of fudge delivered she was asked whether she’d ever posed with a war criminal, she stammered before saying, no, but admitting to a defence photo with her team in court, saying everybody did. She said it’d be bizarre to say you’d go off as an intern and refuse to sit with you team in a photo.

How could she deny the photo, it was on her private Facebook page, and strangely it has now disappeared. Too late we harvested the lot.

Well a series of photos have been sent to me, one showing her posing alone with a former pop singer called Simon Bikindi who was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to 15 years in jail for incitement to commit genocide. He was found guilty after exhorting, over a public address system, his fellow Hutus to exterminate all the Tutsis whom he referred to as snakes.

Confronted with the photo she now says her commitment’s innocent until proven guilty but she can understand how the photo could be seen by some as jarring. But being involved in the process, she insisted, she wasn’t going to go down the rabbit hole and treat him as a lesser human being and he deserved a fair trial.

That is just too trite. Never before have I seen lowly clerks pose for selfies with their scumbag clients.

Other photos showed her on a United Nations private jet, another sitting with a UN investigator and a prosecution intern at a cafe, extolling the virtues of the Guinness brewed in Rwanda.

Trying to get her to discuss the photos wasn’t easy. She initially agreed, before the lead Greens wagon occupied by a spin doctor intervened insisting on the information being flicked though to her first. When the offer was declined she simply said, okay, we’ll just leave it then.

But a few hours later they had a change of heart, at least that’s a step in the right direction.

There is plenty more to come.

At a press conference, on October 7 2017, with James Shaw and other Green party MPs on the day that Golriz Gharhaman was elected to parliament she stated:

“I used to put genocidaires and war criminals on trial”

That busts her totally on her claims that before and since the election she had been totally upfront with Kiwi voters about her past.

That statement is an abject lie. She did no such thing. Firstly, she wasn’t in a position to put them on trial. Secondly in Rwanda and in The Hague she was defending genociaires and war criminals, not putting them on trial. Thirdly, she is inflating her own abilities, skills and actual involvement in those trials.

She then says later that:

“That really speaks to the Green party’s and NZ’s values”

Really? The Green party’s values? What are those?

She is an unethical Green who doesn’t know right from wrong.

She also stated:

“My dream has come from standing up for the most vulnerable”

Yeah because the guys she was defending on genocide charges and war crimes allegations were truly vulnerable. If she had in fact come from standing up for the vulnerable she would have been in Rwanda and The Hague putting these genocidal maniacs away, not defending them. If she truly was for the vulnerable she would have not defended a genocidal maniac who was fighting extradition back to Rwanda to face justice.

She has not stood up for the vulnerable, she has stood up for the powerful, murdering, killers. What she did for the vulnerable was to diminish crimes, excuse genocide, and obfuscate in court and delay. That isn’t standing up for the vulnerable victims, that is stomping all over their already considerable suffering.

After Metiria Turei’s fall from grace and now the ongoing lies and obfuscations from Golriz Gharhaman it is apparent that the Green party is the most unethical party in parliament. They simply cannot tell right from wrong.

She and her defenders are a piece of work. They won’t work with National, but they will work with war criminals.