Jacinda Ardern

Chris Flatt is the General Secretary of the Labour party. He is the flea lawyer that wrote to me over the exposure of Labour’s membership database.

There is talk amongst Labour folk that it is time for him to go and that he is ineffective and useless.

When you look at some of the more public footprints of Chris Flatt you can see why:

Take the Socialist International organisation of which Labour states it is proud to belong….except Chris Flatt has failed to pay Labour’s membership fees resulting in them being demoted to observer status only. Even Wikipedia is up to date on their status.

Jacinda Ardern will be aghast. She was of course the President of the IUSY, the feeder organisation to Socialist International, in 2008.

Transtasman has the following to say about Labour:

The Labour caucus must be a peaceful place to be these days for those who don’t seem to be doing much. A handful of MPs are showing some spirit, among them Jacinda Ardern, Sue Moroney, David Cunliffe, David Parker, Chris Hipkins, Phil Goff and Clare Curran. There’s hardly a peep from Nanaia Mahuta since she was given the education portfolio in a peace-making move after the leadership contest, Shane Jones is an invisible man, Parekura Horomia has lapsed into silence, Phil Twyford wakes up sometimes, Maryan Street is taking her health portfolio seriously but isn’t making much of an impact, not much would be heard from Andrew Little if Judith Collins wasn’t suing him for defamation and Rajen Prasad maintains a profile which isn’t on the radar. Deputy leader Grant Robertson, a very sharp operator, has to leave most of what he would like to say to David Shearer. When Robertson is front man because Shearer isn’t around he’s way better at putting Labour’s case and it’s being noticed. Shearer is at the dangerous point where, if he doesn’t start to shape up, rumours are going to start he’s going to ship out.

Yikes!

Headline of the day.

Greetings brothers,

By the look of her she would and does eat everything that gets within lunging distance of her mouth.

Which leads me nicely into a topic close to my heart (and stomach).

Gerry Brownlee needs to take one eye off the buffet and keep it on Mike Sabin because his crown as the fattest Tory may well be snatched by the incredible bloating MP Mike Sabin.

I spotted him today at a Cafe up north and he looks to have gained 20 kilos since I last saw him parking that sign written V8 in Kaitaia before the election.

In fact I would suggest that he has gained more weight since November than Socialist Cindy managed to put on her arse in her first six months on the parliamentary gravy.

Of course you are going to have to take my word for it on the Sabin heft because as I lined up behind a palm to snatch a pic on the iPhone I got a murderous look from the table next to him which was populated by the gym bunnies who looked like they were considering a lynching if  I was snapping them in the sweaty lycra.

Despite the privilege of guest posting here it is not worth getting a kicking from the middle aged mummies just to snatch a pic of Mike Sabin.

I agree with Jacinda Ardern, and glad to see Labour supporting the requirement to have all prospective parents licensed and trained before they procreate:

Labour social development spokeswoman Jacinda Ardern said unqualified, unvetted babysitters were not the answer and not in the best interests of the children.

Totally agree with Jacinda on this one. Their smart proposal would see a dramatic decrease in the incidence of child abuse almost over night.

I wonder what we are to do about remedial training and licensing of existing parents outside of Labour’s proposed regime, after all it would not be in the “best interests of the children” to expect parents to be trained properly, especially those in receipt of a benefit.

Yesterday David Farrar has a photo of Socialist Cindy and Caropotamus looking fetching in their National party blue t-shirts supporting the sexist, racist and bullying Maritime Union.

Also yesterday, via the tipline:

Was at Auckland Uni today, it’s our O-Week so all the clubs have their stalls. Went to the Young Labour stall to have a nosey, and saw that they had a petition in support of the wharfies. Asked if Labour was officially supporting the wharfies and was told that they were but that it just hadn’t received much media attention! At the stall were Goff, Ardern and Robertson, so they would have been fully aware of the existence of the petition.

So now you have read what I discovered from bothering to drive out to rural South Auckland and have a chat with Tania Wysocki.

We have discovered that this woman is not a bludger. Sure she has made mistakes, sure she isn’t a brain surgeon….but she does have pride and drive and ambition.

We have discovered that Jacinda Ardern couldn’t even be bothered driving out to see Tania, instead preferring to shop the story to Simon Collins.

We have found out that new Green MP is actually doing the job an MP should be doing, and though she is struggling a bit by thinking that asking questions in the house will deliver results, she is at least trying, which is a whole lot more than Jacinda Ardern

We have found that Simon Collins would rather focus on the sensational than the detail as he seeks to manufacture stories of misery as he pimps out the lives of the poor. He is more concerned with the number of views on his article than solutions and outcomes for the people he writes about.

But what we haven’t explored is the real issue that Tania Wysocki is experiencing difficulty. This is the reason why she contacted all the agencies, and politicians in the first place. the agencies were intent on covering their butts and the politicians intent on scoring points. the “journalist” was intent on something else altogether. Not a single one of them was intent on actually understanding the real issue.

The Issue

The essence of Tania Wysocki’s problem is that she is aiming too high. She is attempting to complete a NCEA Level 6 course in Veterinarian Nursing at UNITEC.  For some bizarre reason child care extended hours are only available for people attending NCEA Level 3 and below courses.

We are expending millions of dollars on child care for basic courses that are supposedly going to qualify people to be work ready when the reality is that any course at NCEA Level 3 or below is basic stuff and mostly remedial.

What we aren’t doing is encouraging more people like Tania Wysocki to enter and complete training. They are left feeling rightly or wrongly that they are having additional barriers put in their way whereas less able students, and frankly unemployable students are enjoying a largesse that will probably never be repaid to society.

When I spoke with the Ministers office they told me that the childcare changes were brought about in the 2009 budget when the economy was severely constrained. The thought was that those most vulnerable needed help and should be prioritised and that it perhaps wasn’t fair that in more advanced courses it wasn’t fair that people were attending the courses and sitting next to highly subsidised beneficiaries.

I suggested to the Ministers Office that perhaps we were encouraging the wrong people into training, that I witnessed on a daily basis in Manukau what these wrong kinds of incentives deliver and suggested that they might like to use this case as a good reason to review the policy. Who knows, perhaps they will.

Of course when making policy that affects large numbers of people there are always those at the crossover points that prove the exception to the rule. The unwieldy beast that is MSD is neither willing nor able to consider every little exception and sometimes intervention is called for.

This is issue that Tania Wysocki was trying to explain, but it got missed in the shameless point scoring and headline grabbing of politicians.

It took an unpaid blogger to do what highly paid politicians either couldn’t or wouldn’t do…drive out to see the person concerned and actually listen to the issues.

It astounds me that a politician as lazy and self-centred as Jacinda Ardern is touted as a future leader.

I don’t know what the solution is to our burgeoning and mis-directed welfare system is. But I know it isn’t listening to anything Jacinda Ardern or Labour has to say…or Simon Collins for that matter.

In their haste to get into print they ignored a constituent and a larger problem that seriously needs addressing and instead Pimped out the Poor in multiple stories of manufactured misery.

This is part three of the continuing series Pimping the Poor, where I explore how the media in collusion with shameless politicians Pimp the Poor in order to manufacture stories of misery.

We have covered the timeline and the back story of Tania Wysocki. It was necessary so that you can fully understand what happened next.

After Tania, utterly frustrated with an intransigent WINZ office in Pukekohe and seemingly being ignored in her plight, sent out an email to all parties she was contacted by two politicians. The attitude and behaviour of those two politicians are in stark contrast with each other.

One shamelessly shopped the story to the media and the other actually treated the issue as any competent MP should.

As they say…Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Help from The Greens

Let us look at the actions of Jan Logie first. The good news.

Jan Logie is a new MP. She lives in Wellington. She stood in Mana electorate against Kris Fa’afoi. Whilst Fa’afoi is invisible Jan Logie is extremely visible and has got involved in a case way outside of Wellington, in South Auckland. I asked Tania Wysocki to rate her interactions and resolutions with Jan Logie and she have her an 8 out of 10. Jan has kept in contact, emailed, phoned, sends txts as well as arranged a flight to Wellington to attempt to get some resolution to the issue.

Credit where credit is due, this new MP is actually trying to make a difference. Even during no doubt what is a busy time as she tries to get her mind around being a new MP and the responsibilities and workload that brings in a small Party.

No Help from Labour

Now for the bad news.

When Jacinda Ardern received the cry for help from Tania Wysocki she made a phone call to Tania. It was a short call. In that call she didn’t garner extra details, she simply told Tania that she had “friends in the media” and that Simon Collins would giver her a call.

She was true to her word on that Monday. Quasi Electorate agent for the List MP, Simon Collins called a short time later and arrange to drive out with a photographer for his scoop of the week, a beneficiary who wants to prostitute herself to pay for vocational training.

Simon Collins did attend Tania’s modest house in rural South Auckland. He then proceeded to actually ignore the issues regarding training and child care, focus only on the prostitution angle. He ignored Tania’s back story, clearly he didn’t deem it relevant to the picture he was trying to portray of an uncaring government expecting women to prostitute themselves to pay for training.

We know that Simon Collins doesn’t care about his subjects because he threw Craig and Carla to the wolves without a simple background check on Facebook and other social media and dating sites. Had he done even the basics he would have realised that in that case Carla was hardly a fit subject for his touching stories. She suffers from severe depression, from her own Facebook updates has a marriage on the rocks as she looks on dating sites for some comfort, and had discussed suicide. I can’t imagine how Carla now feels after having been shamelessly pimped out by Simon Collins in his manufactured series on misery.

He didn’t care because he had a story about misery to manufacture. He aslo didn’t care about Tania Wysocki either, because he printed the names of her children, the area in which she lives and worse, the only contact he has had since the story was a quick email to let Tania know just how many people read the article online.

How touching. No comments about how she was doing. Nothing about if there was any progress with the authorities. Nope, just how many views his cool article Pimping out the Poor, manufacturing misery had got.

Worse though is that Jacinda Ardern followed up with a single phone call about how awesome the article was. That’s it. One phone call before the article to sell tania out to Simon Collins and one phone call after to congratulate herself ont eh publicity coup.

All the while Jan Logie is doing what Jacinda Ardern either couldn’t or wouldn’t do….actually try and help.

How do I know she couldn’t or wouldn’t help?

Well because yesterday I contacted the Minister’s office for a comment and to ask some questions. My questions were simple. Has either Simon Collins and/or Jacinda Ardern been in contact with the Minister’s office, or with the Ministry of Social Development with the case of Tania Wysocki or with the case of Craig and Carla Bradley?

The answer was an emphatic no in the case of Jacinda Ardern. Labour’s vaunted super star, who leap-frogged over all the women in the caucus to take this portfolio, appears to have been too lazy to care about people she is the opposition spokesperson for. Instead she was highly motivated to shop the stories to her quasi-Electorate Agent Simon Collins. In the case of Simon Collins, he only contacted the MSD regarding Tania Wysocki and that was only to ask about her entitlement and confirm details for his manufactured story. He has never contacted the Minister’s office for comment on any of his articles about poverty, the very areas that Paula Bennett is the Minister responsible for.

We now know that Labour, especially Jacinda Ardern is closely working with and feeding stories to Simon Collins. Even if Simon Collins won’t confirm his source for the stories we know that the story about Tania Wysocki was directly fed to him by Jacinda Ardern.

The most shameful thing about Jacinda’s actions is that she either couldn’t or wouldn’t travel 35 minutes from Aucklad Central to at least visit Tania. The best she could muster was two short taxpayer funded phone calls…plus the one to Simon Collins of course.

Jan Logie meanwhile, from Wellington has managed to provide a level of pastoral care to Tania Wysocki that would put most MPs to shame. It really isn’t any wonder that The Greens are currently out-performing Labour in parliament and acting as though they are the real opposition. It isn’t really a surprise that whilst Jan Logie scored an 8 out of 10 for her help Jacinda Ardern was rated by Tania Wysocki at a very low 2 out of 10 and then only barely scraping through to that level.

For the past few weeks Simon Collins in the NZ Herald in collusion with Jacinda Ardern, Labour and to a certain extent The Greens have been Pimping the Poor in a bid to embarrass the government.

They manufactured misery as they went painting a picture that they wanted to paint and have been extremely economical with the truth along the way.

I am going to explore precisely how they have operated and will use the case of Tania Wysocki to prove their shameless pimping of the poor as they manufactured misery.

BACKGROUND

Last week Simon Collins reported the story of Tania Wysocki. On the surface this looked just another case of a beneficiary bludging off the state wanting more. Predictably talkback and the blogs went off on it and equally predictably the left wing politicians jumped on the band-wagon for some cheap headlines and grandstanding at the expense of a woman and her family.

Something didn’t ring true about this case…things didn’t add up…and on Thurday night last week I received an email from Tania Wysocki, who was indignant that her story hadn’t been told properly and that she was being painted as a bludger on large, flipping it up for random blokes to create a lifestyle. It is fair to say that she was mad as hell.

After exchanging emails over a few days I can now understand why she is mad as hell and I will explain why. But in order to do so I need to provide a timetable for you. then in subsequent posts I will explain why Tania Wysocki should feel aggrieved, but not with who you would think.

TIMELINE

Back in October last year Tania Wysocki decided that she no longer wanted to be a benefit dependent solo mother, that she wanted to train for a decent job and become a taxpayer again. Tania is not some young thing exploited the DPB for personal gain. She is 38 years old and freely admits in conversations with me that she has made mistakes in her life but at 38, after leaving school at 15 has actually worked for most of her life. It is only in the past 4 years that she became a beneficiary. That story in and of itself shows some steel and I will cover that later as it is material to the case against Simon Collins.

Tania approached the WINZ office in Pukekohe, it is the nearest office to her home. It is fair to say that they were less than helpful, but it is also fair to say that the rules and regulations surrounding training at the level Tania is contemplating are perplexing. She was confused and struggling to see how she could actually extricate herself from a life on a benefit.

She went and visited her local MPO, Paul Hutchison. Tania agrees that at the time Paul Hutchison treated her with respect, with caring and agreed to write to the Minister and to the WINZ office in Pukekohe…both things he did.

Despite repeatedly informing the local office of the details of the course she was enrolled in, and I might add approved for a student loan, WINZ could not see a way to accomodate her child care requirements. The rules, which I will discuss later, are a little silly. Tania experienced the frustration of dealing with a government department. On December 27, two days after Christmas and after most of Wellington had shut down for she emailed John Key’s office.

Later in in late January and early February with the start of her course imminent she started emailing other political parties until un utter frustration she sent out an angry email asking if anyone cared about her situation.

That is the lead up and timeline. I have seen the emails and I have read them all. It is what happens next that is truly appalling when you understand the full details. Details Simon Collins omitted and details Jacinda Ardern has kept quiet.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

A Young Nat posted a photo on Facebook of herself with Socialist Cindy at the Big Gay Out.

She took some gentle teasing about having a photo taken with such a raving pinko but that is expected. What isn’t expected is the following abuse from the head of Young NZ First and Board Member of the party, Curwen Rolinson.

I wonder whether Winston  thinks it’s appropriate for one of his board members, and the head of his party’s youth wing, to behave like that. He probably does after all he referred to his partner in parliament as an “Associate”.

Jacinda Ardern probably isn’t too happy either about Labour’s preferred coalition partner holding such misogynistic views about women.

Crusher schools the two “stars” of Labour and the Greens in one smooth smackdown. A hard welcome to the front bench for Socialist Cindy from The Crusher.

Jacinda Ardern is going to have to do better than this in order to retain her number 4 spot. Trevor Mallard was probably contemplating his pending trip to Auckland to attend sports awards when he isn’t even the sports spokesperson, rather than protecting the precious ego of Socialist Cindy.