The Labour party appear to be participating in the #MeTooNZ campaign for all the wrong reasons. The public statements by Andrew Kirton and Jacinda Ardern over the sexual assault scandal smack of a coverup.

The party General Secretary hasn’t reported the alleged crimes to police, hasn’t told the parents of the alleged victims and, according to Jacinda Ardern, hasn’t informed her.

For someone who claims to not have been briefed she knows an awful lot more in her answers than she should.

The video on Stuff is very revealing when it comes to body language.

Labour’s general secretary has defended not telling the police or parents about complaints teenagers were sexually assaulted at a summer camp last month.

A Young Labour supporter has been barred from future events after allegations a 20-year-old man sexually assaulted four teenagers, all aged 16, including putting his hands down the pants of at least three of them.

Andrew Kirton, the Labour Party’s general secretary, said he stood by the way the party had handled the situation, which he said was done with a “victim-led” focus on the back of advice from a Wellington sexual violence charity.

He said he wasn’t aware of any of the victims taking their complaint to the police, although both he and Labour Party president Nigel Haworth had offered their support to the victims if they chose to do so.

Parents of the victims hadn’t been told about the incident because “we wanted to deal with the young people in the first instance,” Kirton said.

“We didn’t want to assume the young people involved had told their parents. They’re 16 so that had an impact on that decision and that was the advice we got.”

Hush it up, more like. He is aware of serious crimes that carry penalties of years in jail… and he hasn’t told police?

The Prime Minister was also kept out of the loop because Kirton said the advice he received was that it could cause more damage to the victims if they were “under the impression or feeling or knowledge that a widening circle of people were being told”.

“We took the decision to deal with it as a party issue and keep it between myself and the president and keep it tight in terms of the people who knew.”

He said he wouldn’t change the way the party had handled the situation but in future would tell Ardern if that was what she wanted.

Andrew Kirton, at the very least, needs to resign. He’s made the wrong decisions. For a start, this is the party that likes to claim that they are better than all the others, virtue signals on equality and sexism and was shoving it in everyone’s face on International Women’s Day all the while sitting on a massive scandal.

If you thought John Key pulling pony-tails was bad, this is far, far worse, and it appears at least one MP was in attendance for the whole weekend.

Ardern opened the summer camp on the afternoon of the first day, on February 9, and said she would investigate allegations of sexual assault and underage drinking.

“Certainly none of that was apparent when I was there. This is the first I’ve heard of any such allegations but now that you’ve made them I’ll happily investigate, because that is not the behaviour I would expect of any Labour function,” she said at her post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.

How on earth is she going to investigate? Is she abrogating the role the police should have in investigating this? Is she interfering in police operational matters now?

She should know better than that; her father was a senior Police Officer after all.

Ardern said in a statement on Monday night that she was “disturbed” to hear about the allegations of “harassment and sexual misconduct that occurred at the summer camp”.

“I expect young people, and indeed anyone, attending our camps can do so knowing the environment is safe.

“I’ve sought assurances that everything is being done to support the complainants. I’ve also asked the party to take every step possible to ensure that our events are safe for everyone who attends in the future.

“I understand this work is already underway, and started as soon as the complaints were received.”

Hang on, in your press conference you said that this was the FIRST you’d heard of it, and now you are saying that you’ve put all that in place. Sounds like porkies to me, Prime Minister. If you had only heard about it first in your press conference how could you possibly understand all that and have issued orders to fix it?

Heads should roll.

-Fairfax

Here are some questions, for the Labour party and the police, after reading around a few articles related to the Young Labour Summer School camp allegations.

Questions for the Labour party regarding the allegations of ‘sexual assaults’ at the Young Labour Summer School camp recently:

Have the police been contacted? If they have, is an investigation underway or concluded? If they have not been contacted, why not?

Was there any discouragement of laying a complaint directed toward the victims? If there was, by whom?

What was the alcohol policy of this weekend event?

Why was the camp supervisor, Tess Macintyre, in bed when there was a party that clearly had alcohol present with minors?

Who was responsible for the operation of the party in question if Macintyre was unavailable?

Who bought the alcohol?

Were any MPs present at the party?

Was the accused person related in any way related (genetically, by marriage, business etc) to any Labour party MP? If so, has that MP (or MPs) been involved in any discussion regarding this incident?

Given the high profile sexual assault has around the world at this time, do the Labour party believe that a straight ban from any future events is acceptable final punishment?

Is ‘highly inappropriate behaviour’ an acceptable description of allegations of sexual assault?

How come Jacinda Ardern doesn’t know anything? Does she know mobile phones work in the Pacific? Couldn’t she have used Winston’s one? Why wasn’t she told?

Is this Jacinda’s ‘Darren Hughes’ moment?

Were any Swiss balls injured at this event?

Questions for the police:

Have any complaints been laid regarding this event? If they have, are you able to clarify where you are at with any investigation?

Has any member of the New Zealand Police had any discussion with any politician (central or local) regarding the handling of this situation?

(Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Labour seem intent on being a one term government and losing Auckland.

Grant Robertson has expressed his delight at considering a tax on property if it is near one of their cool transport projects…because apparently it will have improved in value.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson has signalled that property owners benefiting from the building of the Auckland rail links could be subject to a special “value capture” tax.

Speaking at the Auckland Chamber of Commerce/Massey University annual finance lunch at the Pullman Hotel in Auckland, Robertson said the Government was investigating “innovative” ways to bridge the funding gap to pay for the rail and roading infrastructure the country needs, especially in Auckland.

An “innovative” way to bridge…oh you mean piles of new taxes.

“Between the balance sheets of the Auckland Council and the Government, we still don’t have enough,” Robertson said.

“Minister Phil Twyford and I are actively looking at opportunities for how to do that.”

They’d have more if they didn’t splash cash around the Pacific.

Those options included “value capture” which the Productivity Commission championed early last year.

This is a process under which a special tax is levied on property owners deemed to have benefited from the building of infrastructure.

“If we are going to make big investments in things like [Auckland’s City] Rail Link, and a series of different rail links, people will benefit from that. How do we capture the value of that, and use that to fund the development?” Robertson said.

Oh great. So, the council embarks on an expensive, unfunded project, they block roads, redirect traffic for months on end. Cause traffic chaos and carnage, then also add in cycleways, remove carparks and generally disrupt your life, your home and your business for years on end. Then they turn around and say, that your business, property, building etc has now improved in value because you have no carparks, and a cycleway or a trains station…so we are going to tax you.

Boy, they have a cheek. This is a sure fire way to turn people off infrastructure projects and kill community support.

Worse still, they will tax you on unrealised improvements.

In March last year, the Productivity Commission gave an example of how that might work.

If the land value of a property benefiting from a new rail link increased in value from $100,000 to $250,000 over five years – a 150 per cent increase compared with a rise of 120 per cent in land values in the wider area – a tax could be levied on the $30,000 gain attributable to the infrastructure improvements.

The tax could be levied alongside of rates, the commission suggested.

That is an unrealised value, and now you have to find some cash from your after tax income to pay their new tax. Welcome to the advance Venezuelan plan to tank the economy.

This is day light robbery, and far from increasing the tax take it’s likely to crash property values in the dead zone of increased taxes as no one will want to live there and pay the new taxes. Those properties will become boat anchors. That in turn will reduce people using that infrastructure and not only is there no way to pay for the infrastructure there is also a massive white elephant no one uses as well.

What concerns me is who determines whether or not there is an improvement in value, and then who determines where the value starts and ends. Imagine a situation where on one side of a street it is deemed to be a higher value and you pay the tax and just metres away on the other side of the street they are tax free. You may laugh, but you are letting bureaucrats determine this…so outcomes like that are highly likely.

Robbo has no idea. What this speech signifies is that they don’t have enough money for all their promises and the budget is likely to signal tax increases despite their promises. They will try and blame the former government and sell it that way. Good luck with that strategy.

Mind you, there is something delightful in watching all those virtue-signalling wankers on the left who push rail and cycleways having to pay massive taxes on their inner city properties because they have cool new infrastructure.

-Fairfax

Twyford is doing his level best to screw up bigly with housing:

The Government’s KiwiBuild programme could add as few as 9200 extra properties to New Zealand’s housing stock over the next four years, an economist says.

Just 9200 properties… when they promised 40,000. That is a massive fail.

KiwiBuild has been touted by the government as a key part of the solution to the country’s housing woes. It aims to deliver 100,000 houses over 10 years, over and above what the market would have produced otherwise. Half will be in Auckland.

But economist Gareth Kiernan, of Infometrics, said the scheme looked set to disappoint.  

Data released by Treasury showed that, including the existing Crown building programme, 29,000 houses will be completed between now and 2022. The existing programme, including redeveloping and reconfiguring Housing New Zealand’s portfolio, will account for almost half of those homes.

Another 22 per cent of those homes will be off-the-plans purchases.

The Government has argued that these developments would not otherwise have obtained funding, so the houses can be counted in its “over and above” target.

“We accept that government backing for these projects will provide greater certainty and is likely to accelerate the development process,” Kiernan said.

“But the assumption that the projects would not have gone ahead at all, and that finance is the limiting factor on construction activity, is questionable given the strength of demand for housing and the labour capacity constraints currently being experienced.”

Without those two components, the net increase in construction was just over 9000 dwellings, he said.

Typical Labour, trying to claim credit for houses that would have been built anyway. Their policy was nothing more than a slogan and now it is coming apart on them faster than they thought possible.

“And that figure makes no allowance for the crowding out of private sector work by the increase in central government activity – something that we see as being a substantial risk in the near term.”

Kiernan said the government was also understating how much income would be needed to buy its “affordable” KiwiBuild homes.

“Other OIA documents released by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) suggest that only 25,000 households renting from private landlords in Auckland would have sufficient income to purchase a KiwiBuild home.

“In other words, the government could potentially get only a 50 per cent take-up of its ‘affordable’ Auckland properties at $500,000 to $600,000 each.”

Another complete fail.

He said, assuming buyers could get a 10 per cent deposit, a single person would need an income of $71,200 to get into a $500,000 house, while a childless couple would need a combined income of $88,400 to get into a $600,000 property.

“In other words, the government risks bringing a large number of properties to the market for which there are few buyers who are realistically able to obtain or service the mortgage.”

He said there was also a risk that the government would not be able to deliver its houses at $2000 per sq m, as hoped.

“Any costs not properly allowed for will either make the properties even less affordable for first-home buyers or result in the government making a loss on its developments.

“All in all, Labour’s KiwiBuild policy is looking like much less of a game-changer for the construction sector and housing affordability than the government has made it out to be.

“The policies aims might be admirable, but we think that solving Auckland’s housing crisis will prove to be a lot more complicated than Labour has thought.”

Again, this is what happens when you get idiots who have no commercial experience in charge of things they have little or no understanding of. Issuing press releases in opposition is easy compared with actually delivering on the promises of those press releases.

-Fairfax

Jacinda Ardern loves photoshoots in ‘Vogue’, ‘Woman’s Weekly’, or any other soft glossy magazine, but when it comes to hard interviews she is dodging them or trying to manipulate the narrative, only agreeing to appear if they talk about the things she wants to talk about.

Kelvin Davis is acting PM right now and he won’t even front.

Mike Hosking was not happy about that:

It is gutless and pathetic for these two to fail to front.

Prime ministers don’t get to dictate what can and cannot be discussed on radio shows. What we have here is a politburo approach to media where they can only talk about what the government agree to talk about.

Where is the holding to account?

If John Key had done this then the media would have called him a coward. What our media are doing instead is glad-handing a pathetic leader who is afraid to face the hard questions.

Kelvin Davis is just hopeless. He should be sacked. He’s lightweight, ineffectual and out of his depth. To be fair, he’d be out of his depth in a carpark puddle, but right now he is the deputy PM, and he should be answering questions not hiding behind ignorance.

-NewstalkZB