Grant Robertson

Labour has had their Summer School this weekend past and what do you know they had a session about improving Leadership selections and how to make them better.

Not only that they invited the not so lame Duck coup plotter and master numbers man, Trevor Mallard, to run the session. Of course they had to fit the timing around his busy schedule as a professional cyclist.

Labour really are in bad shape when they are running session already on eladership challenges, when they have only just got the last guy in place.

Doubly hilarious is that the facilitator of the session was Grant Robertson the guy who who switched sides, was part of the campaign committee along with Mallard that scored the worst result in 1928 and is also touted as a future leader.

You may be sure that Mallard and Robertson will be suing their new found knowledge to roll Shearer unless the polls improve significantly.

Good grief, all the wailing about Ben Hana aka Blanket Man is ridiculous. None more so than this headline from Stuff.

It is complete rubbish. What he meant to people was he was a boozed, smelly, indigent man with clothing issues. He means more in death to people like Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern who can see political opportunity, but the reality is that to most people he was simply a nuisance.

How do I know this? ….Grant Robertson put up a post at 6:24pm about Blanket Man…there wasn’t a single comment until 11:11pm. That’s how much Blanket Man means to people….No comments on a Labour party MP blog for nearly 5 hours.

Yesterday it was Grant Robertson that jumped on the death of an indigent man to score a political point about “poverty”.

This morning it is Jacinda Ardern who is cuddling corpses to score political points.

Labour has reiterated its call for a cross-party approach to fighting child abuse following the death of two-month-old Hinekawa Topia.

…Labour’s social development spokeswoman Jacinda Ardern said she did not want to comment specifically on Hinekawa’s case while the investigation was continuing, but speaking broadly about the issue of child abuse, she reiterated Labour’s call for more cooperation across Parliament to tackle the problem.

“We know that our child abuse stats in New Zealand are appalling, we know we have an enormous issue that we need to be dealing with. I don’t believe we need another inquiry to tell us what we already know, we need action.”

The Government announced last year that it would set up a ministerial committee to look at the issue of child poverty, and Ms Ardern said with poverty and abuse being so inter-linked, the group could be an opportunity for parties to work together.

“We’ve asked the Government to allow us to be a part of that group … as yet the Government hasn’t taken us up on that offer but we’ll keep making it,” Ms Ardern said.

Labour doesn’t want to talk about the individual case, they simply want to use the case for an excuse to try and embarrass the government into let them come along in a “me too” capacity on a committee. That isn’t going to address the issue of Maori killing their kids now is it?

Labour really are shameless. They don’t care about the issues, they are simply trying to score points against the government. In doing so though they are trying to lay the blame of child murders at their feet which is shameless politicking using dead people.

Ben Hana aka Blanket Man has died. Sadly this was a slow sad spiral towards death marred by mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse. Ultimately though it was about personal choices in life, and he made bad ones.

There is no excuse for homelessness in New Zealand, none whatsoever. We have a welfare state, we have care facilities. If Ben Hana wanted to get dry, wanted to get off the streets he could have.

So it is with incredulity that I saw his MP tweet last night, as Labour MPs are prone to do, politicizing the death of one of his constituents:

RIP Ben Hana. Let's make his memorial addressing homelessness in Wgtn, and it's causes, esp access to mental health and addiction services.

January 15, 2012 10:33 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@grantrobertson1

Grant Robertson

As I pointed out to Grant, Ben Hana had choices, he made bad ones, but they were his choices. I also pointed out that Grant Robertson was his MP and wondered just what he did for Ben Hana when he was alive rather than politicizing him now he is dead. He could have for instance given him a bed in his state funded Maritime NZ building office…but he didn’t.

There is no need to for people to live on the streets, but they do. No amount of wailing or gnashing of teeth can obscure the fact that we live in a state with a welfare system that Ben Hana could have but didn’t avail himself of.

Is Grant Robertson suggesting that if citizens do not want to enjoy the largesse of the state that they should be forced to? Frog marched to camps to be dried out? If he isn’t then quite what he proposes to do after Ben Hana has died is akin to shutting the stable after the horse has bolted.

Yesterday The Standard made a scurrilous, false and defamatory attack on me, there are 356 comments on their post accusing me of something that is an outright lie. Their intent in attacking me was made clear today with their attack on David Farrar, they think it is fair game to go after what we earn and attempt to spike it.

Mickey Savage aka Greg Presland, a key Labour person in Auckland was the first commenter on the attack on Farrar and called for him to lose all his contracts. This is how the Labour party roll. If you dare to challenge them they try to attack your sources of income, they smear, they lie and they defame.

I prefer to deal in facts when it comes to monetary arrangements. So let’s look at some facts.

The Maritime Union is an affiliate of the Labour party. The Maritime Union has made donations to Len Brown who was claimed as Labour’s Mayor of Auckland by Phil Goff. They also made a donation to Mike Lee, another long term Labour politician. The Maritime Union also registered, along with 9 other unions to lobby and support MMP, along with the Labour party. These are established and verifiable facts.

The one thing I haven’t been able to find though is a donation to Labour by the Maritime Union, but I will get to this later.

Grant Robertson though does rent an ofice in the Maritime Union building at 220 Willis Street, Wellington.

Now I checked the ownership details of this office. It is owned by the The Waterfront Workers Union according to the title, and has a rateable value of $4.1 million. The Waterfront Workers Union was subsumed into the Maritime Union of New Zealand in 2002 when they merged with the NZ Seafarers Union.

This means that Parliamentary Services is funneling rents from Grant Robertson’s Labour party branded office into the coffers the Maritime Union. But it is much worse than that. If you look on Google Street view for that address, you can see that the office used to be Marion Hobbs office so the rort has been going on for longer than just Grant Robertson.

This raises a number of questions:

1. Is Parliamentary Services paying market rents for the office in central Wellington?
2. If yes, then has the difference between what Parliamentary Services has been paid and the real commercial market rent for the premises been declared as a donation to the Labour party?

Donations in excess of $20,000 per annum from the same donor must be declared to the Electoral Commission. That is is just $385 per week. It is highly likely that given the floor area of this office that the normal commercial rents for an office in Willis Street would exceed the limits of Parliamentary services and by more than $288 per week. The differential must be declared as a donation. If that is the case then the sweetheart deal both the union and the Labour party have going may well be illegal as well.

There are no such donations recorded with the Electoral Commission.

I’d be interested to know what the going rate is per square metre in that building…shouldn’t be hard to find out there are offices for lease from the look of the photo.

UPDATE: There is a set of accounts for the Maritime Union available at the Incorporated Societies register. According to the latest available (2009) accounts the Maritime Union received rent (presumably net of GST) to the tune of $285k for that building.

As to who pays this rent and what each tenant is charged? Your guess is as good as mine .

UPDATE 2: via the tipline, Check the following independent research PDF prepared by CBRE.  This article states that secondary CBD office space in Wellington will go for somewhere around $127 psm.  Even if the office was prime (which is obviously isn’t) it would rent at $266 psm.

Mike Williams has written about Labour’s strategy, or rather, the lack of it:

It also points to a very basic strategic error by the Labour Party’s campaign planners.
It seems that Labour’s strategists decided that it was pointless and possibly counter-productive to attack John Key on the grounds of his stratospheric popularity.

This was probably right but the next decision, to leave Leader Phil Goff largely out of campaign publicity, was plainly a serious mistake. The Party Vote is presidential in nature, and no matter how your leader is scoring in the “beauty contest” it is essential that he or she is top-dead-centre in any campaign.

I take the attitude that Phil Goff was much more saleable than Labour’s strategists assumed, and I think that Goff proved this point late in the campaign.

In Te Atatu, the contrast between the two big parties’ approaches was plain.
National’s hoardings featured John Key and Tau Henare’s smiling faces with the slogan “Party Vote National”, whereas Labour heavily promoted its candidate Phil Twyford without any apparent attempt to feature Goff, or promote a party vote for Labour. The result was entirely predictable with Twyford scoring a heavy victory over Henare and National taking the all-important party vote in the electorate by a country mile.

The same happened all over the country. It was not a local phenomenon.

I think Mike Williams is talking about Trevor Mallard and Grant Robertson when he talks about the “campaign planners”.

Probably the most irritating aspect of this approach is that it exactly duplicated National’s 2002 election strategy and produced the same result. If we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it (or something like that).

Yep, Labour nicked Bill English’s playbook and then implemented it flawlessly with almost the same result.

Chris Trotter looks at David Shearer’s first major speech and his metaphor of turning the page:

To “turn the page”, in common English usage, means “to stop thinking about and dealing with something”. As in: “Your divorce came through over a year ago, it’s time to turn the page”.

So what is Mr Shearer so keen to stop thinking about? What’s he so tired of dealing with? Is it Helen Clark’s Labour Party? The Labour Party that Phil Goff inherited but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, change? Turning a page on that would make a huge difference.

But has he?

A party leader reveals a great deal about his character and intentions through the people he chooses to sit alongside him, and those he relegates to the back-benches. If Mr Shearer really is determined to stop thinking about and dealing with Helen Clark, his ‘Shadow Cabinet’ ought to show it.

What it actually discloses, however, is that the Shearer-led Labour Party is more about continuity than change. Mr Shearer’s two big winners, Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern, though certainly younger than Ms Clark’s generation of politicians, have yet to demonstrate the slightest ideological deviance from her “social-democratic” prescriptions.

Some of Mr Shearer’s other picks: David Parker, Clayton Cosgrove, Shane Jones, Nanaia Mahuta, Su’a William Sio, Trevor Mallard, Phil Goff, Annette King and Damien O’Connor; suggest a greater willingness to acknowledge the ideals and aspirations of his more conservative caucus colleagues. This could presage a turning away from the social-liberalism that cost Labour so dearly in Ms Clark’s final term, although the inclusion of David Cunliffe, Phil Twyford, Charles Chauvel, Lianne Dalziel, Chris Hipkins, Darien Fenton and Clare Curran in the Shadow Cabinet, points to the rather mundane conclusion that, more than any burning desire to turn over a new leaf, Mr Shearer’s choices reflect the need for “rejuvenation” and the balancing of caucus factions.

No page turning there…same old, same old is Trotter’s conclusion on the personnel changes. But what about the policy changes?

In pledging to “grow the pie”, Mr Shearer’s speaking in code to New Zealand’s wealthiest men and women. He is telling them that they need not fear a future Labour Government. Wages will continue to be subsidized by Working For Families, and the government will pour millions into scientific research and development. Mr Shearer will use the additional revenue flowing into the state’s coffers from innovative new business ventures to boost spending on education and health. The new jobs created by these business will reduce the government’s welfare obligations, allowing it to repay debt and rebuild surpluses.

If you’re asking yourself: “Weren’t these the economic and social policies of Ms Clark and Dr Michael Cullen?” The answer is: “Yes, they were.”

Mr Shearer and the Labour Party aren’t turning the page forward – they’re turning it back.

I could be reading Chris incorrectly but I get the distinct impression that his feeling towards the prospects of Labour and their new fondness for page turning is distinctly brown bread.

Spotted by a Whaleoil Army spy.

Grant Robertson on flight 725 today to Melbourne, doing a video call in the koru lounge talking to Clare Curran very loudly and obnoxiously. The whole lounge now knows their plans.

We won’t be hearing any moaning from Labour about overseas holidays by rich prick politicians will we?

John Key mentioned Labour’s real problem yesterday in his address in reply speech:

“David Cunliffe doesn’t like David Parker. David Parker does not like Grant Robertson. Grant Robertson does not like Clayton Cosgrove. Clayton Cosgrove . . . he’s not real fond of Andrew Little. Andrew Little doesn’t like Shane Jones. Shane Jones doesn’t like anybody in the Labour Party. Phil Goff does not like David Cunliffe, and Annette King doesn’t like anyone that Phil Goff doesn’t like. And I say to myself, it’s not hard to see why they chose someone who’s spent half his life in war-torn places like Somalia and Bosnia, because that’s what the Labour Party’s like now.”

It might sound flippant but it shows that Labour after a term without the steel of Heather Simpson to control caucus and the ambitions of pretenders Labour is now akin to street gangs with knives drawn giving each other the eye.

There isn’t any caucus unity, and just watching their body language yesterday as David Shearer stuttered and fumbled his way through 30 minutes of yawn inducing faux-rhetoric said more than their silence during the speech.

David Shearer might have stared down armed Somali warlords but having the big guns of UN peacekeepers or US Marines at your back in no way prepares you for the sharp shanks of political competitors waiting for you to trip up.

David Shearer has announced his new “refreshed” rankings:

Labour leader David Shearer has put five new people onto his front bench and given the number five slot to David Cunliffe – the man he defeated as Labour leader last week.

Mr Cunliffe has lost his finance portfolio and previous number 3 ranking to David Parker – but has managed to get the significant economic portfolio of economic development.

Jacinda Ardern has received a significant promotion from 19 to 4, and becomes Labour’s highest ranked woman. Ms Ardern will do the social development portfolio, putting her head to head with Minister Paula Bennett during a period of welfare reform.

As expected David Parker has taken the finance role, and Shane Jones has been boosted from 13 to the front bench. He will take a new ‘regional development’ portfolio and is an associate finance spokesman.

Mr Shearer said the team focused on new areas of priority including the environment – a portfolio given to his deputy Grant Robertson – and rebuilding links with business and provincial New Zealand.

“I have built a team that brings forward new faces.”

Maryan Street is a fresh face? David Parker? Clayton Cosgrove? Oh please.

The funniest appointment of all is Jacinda Ardern, she couldn’t even beat Nikki Kaye and for some reason she is going to deliver killer blows to Judith Collins, Hekia Parata and Paula Bennett?