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The screaming heart of the beltway.
The screaming heart of the beltway.

PoliticsOctober 18, 2018

In NZ politics, do expenses leaks matter more than sexual harassment?

The screaming heart of the beltway.
The screaming heart of the beltway.

Allegations raised today by four women about the conduct of rogue MP Jami-Lee Ross, and the response to complaints, send a bleak message to women in Aotearoa, writes Morgan Tait.

Remember that time a senior political figure was the subject of a long and sustained pattern of allegations of sexual harassment and abuse of women and barely anyone seemed willing to do anything about it?

No, I don’t mean Donald Trump. And I’m not talking about US Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, either. I’m talking about the New Zealand member of parliament Jami-Lee Ross and the New Zealand National Party.

I’m talking about the new allegations from at least four New Zealand women that were revealed today. We can’t say for certain how much senior politicians knew, but several knew at least something of the allegations, and as far as we can see their response was to do something close to nothing.

The way the saga has played out, the sexual harassment allegations – the first of which we heard about from Ross in a pre-emptive denial on Tuesday – have been made to seem trifling in comparison to, say, leaking some expenses records. It all sends a great big message to the women of Aotearoa – once again – that their safety is worth less than a man’s reputation.

Newsroom this morning published accounts of four people that contrast sharply with Ross’s insistence that he has always been respectful to women. They say they have been harassed, manipulated, abused, and threatened by the rogue Botany MP for years in a string of extramarital affairs with the politician, as well as making allegations of workplace bullying.

The reporting, the result of a year-long investigation by Melanie Reid, alleged a pattern of behaviour in which Ross wooed women with ties to the National Party and its staff, “grooming” them for information and access to power, and making threats against their careers and families if they betrayed him.

One spoke of “brutal, misogynistic sex” and jealous rages, another detailed being embarrassed through rumours and lies, and they all shared fears for their personal and professional reputations – and even their safety.

At least one of the women says she was driven to seek medication for stress and anxiety.

Beyond these disturbing details, the women said they did not want to speak publicly for fear of harming the National Party, and told Newsroom they were speaking now in light of Ross’s comments this week that he “had never harassed a woman”.

One of the woman said she raised her concerns with members of the National Party leadership, “At the time, those people did what they felt they could to address the situation by discussing Jami-Lee’s behaviour with him,” she told Newsroom.

“Unfortunately Jami-Lee is a very manipulative individual and he had plenty of ways to continue to intimidate and undermine me without it being particularly obvious to the National Party leadership.”

If that account is true, the National Party knew there were allegations about Ross’s conduct, but it wasn’t enough to threaten Jami-Lee Ross’s role in caucus. It apparently took the leaking of information to media to set in motion the end of his career.

Bridges, when quizzed this morning about the Newsroom allegations, said he was “completely unaware” of any criminal matters and praised the women’s courage in speaking out, but said he was aware only of accusations of inappropriate conduct. His comments focused, however, on Ross’s deceit to him, and to the party; the behaviour towards the women was made to seem somehow incidental.

After everything #metoo has exposed about workplace cultures of power imbalances, protecting powerful men by minimising the experiences of victims, and blaming those victims for their own harassment and abuse – it shouldn’t need to be said, but …

Where was the investigation into this conduct by National? Were there reassurances to the people being interviewed that they could speak openly and honestly with investigators with no fear of career hindrance? Where was the announcement to the public that the inappropriate conduct was being taken seriously, a full review was under way, and any behaviour remotely close to what is being alleged is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated?

And no, the remarks earlier this week by Paula Bennett about Ross’s “inappropriate behaviour for a married man” don’t count.

Pretty sure that’s not simply inappropriate, sweetie. If it’s true, it’s illegal.

National don’t have a monopoly in this area. The Labour Party’s handling of sexual assault allegations at a Youth Summer Camp were woeful. We should be able to expect far better of our political leaders.

New Zealand women deserve to be heard and have their words acted upon. They certainly don’t deserve to see a scandal playing out in which traumatic experiences appear to have been  used as leverage. They deserve representation in parliament by people who value their safety more than they do a man’s reputation.

Update: In a statement today, Jami Lee Ross said: “You will be interested I am sure in any comment on the Newsroom article. I make no comment on that. I am considering my legal options.

Keep going!
jlr-donations

PoliticsOctober 18, 2018

Was that $100k National donation legal, or not?

jlr-donations

Jami-Lee Ross’s ever-changing story about the $100,000 donation originating from businessman Zhang Yikun makes it hard to assess precisely what Police would be investigating. Either way, we’re all the poorer for the way it’s played out, writes writes law professor Andrew Geddis

When Jami-Lee Ross re-enacted the Joker’s “everything burns” scene from The Dark Knight in his press conference at parliament, much was promised. Simon Bridges, we were told, had instructed him to divide up a $100,000 donation from a businessman into smaller, non-disclosable amounts. If established, that was not only the end of Bridges’ political career, but also the basis for potentially serious criminal charges.

https://twitter.com/acgeddis/status/1051969556980236289

Then, yesterday, Ross’s story changed at his press conference after visiting the police. This money had not actually been divided up by him personally (because, we should note, if Ross had done so then he would have been guilty of those potentially serious criminal charges). Rather, the donation had appeared in his electorate bank account already split into these smaller, non-disclosable amounts.

That raised the question, of course, as to who had done the splitting up. Because Ross had stated in his original parliamentary press conference that the businessman in question had done nothing wrong. Which would not be true if that businessman had been a party to the donation splitting.

Then Ross released his recorded conversation with Bridges, and things changed again. For that recording showed that while Bridges clearly had knowledge of a donation being in the offing, he didn’t seem to know much more about it than that. And in the recording Ross explicitly states this about the donation’s source:

“the way they’ve done it meets the disclosure requirements – sorry, it meets the requirements where it’s under the particular disclosure level because they’re a big association and there’s multiple people and multiple people make donations, so that’s all fine.”

To me, this reads as though the businessman has told Bridges that the association he heads would like to support the National Party. The members of this association have then come together and chipped in individual donations that in total amount to $100,000, but none of which individually exceed the $15,000 public disclosure threshold. And that is all entirely legal.

It also would be legal for Bridges to indicate to (or even instruct) the association that he’d like the donation given in this way. It’s only if the businessman has funded the entire $100,000 amount himself, while getting friends and colleagues to transmit bits of it under their own name as “straw” donors, that the law would have been broken. But then the main party to that offending would be the businessman involved – whom, remember, Ross has said has done nothing wrong.

I assume that the police investigation will focus on which of these fact patterns actually is true. That may involve getting production orders to trace the flow of funds to the Botany electorate account, as well as where those funds originated. So, any final judgment on all of this has to await the outcome of that investigation.

But for now, a word about the Politics of what we’re seeing here. I don’t mean “politics” in the sense of partisan battles over policy, or what will happen in the polls, or the like. For, as Bryce Edwards has rightly noted, this whole saga is ultimately empty: “the meltdown has been about personalities, leadership and ambition.”

And the way this small-stakes, nothing-of-real-significance battle is being waged is harmful for our (capital P) Politics, in the sense of how we as a community collectively govern ourselves and decide what we ought to do as a nation. Ross clearly is operating from the play book of Simon Lusk, whom he has admitted to taking advice from. Lusk is, of course, most well-known for his appearances in the pages of Dirty Politics where he is caught boasting:

I’m just motivated to cut throats. Unfortunately the biggest buzz I get is when I wreck someone, only done it three times, but I was on a massive high

The raising of serious accusations that, upon closer inspection, seem to turn out to be far less than promised; only to then be replaced by a new set of accusations. The recording of conversations to get “dirt” that can be used at a later, unspecified date. The slow, drip-feeding of information designed to keep the story running rather than establish what actually has occurred. All of these are designed to do nothing more than visit personal destruction on a political enemy.

While there’s a certain irony in the National Party now being roiled by the tactics of some it held far too close for far too long, this episode ultimately is bad for us as a country. It’s not what our Politics, or our politics, should be. There is nothing to be won (and a whole lot to be lost) through it but the office and egos of small and petty personalities.

So, based on what I’ve seen so far, I actually hope Bridges survives this onslaught and remains National’s leader. I hope that he and his party are soon able to return to arguing for their view of what New Zealand ought to be. I then hope they lose those arguments, because I disagree with them on many issues in a quite fundamental way. But I want them to lose on the arguments, not because of tactics designed to do no more than “wreck” someone.

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