Gaurav Sharma (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

PoliticsAugust 19, 2022

Suspension, expulsion… byelection? Gaurav Sharma’s political future, explained

Contributing writer

Gaurav Sharma (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Over the last week and a bit, Labour has invited the National Party to hold its beer while it demonstrates what a truly problematic new back-bench MP looks like. Andrew Geddis looks over the issues and discusses where things may go to next.

Gaurav Sharma … Gaurav Sharma … remind me?

Up until last week, he was merely the widely-unknown Labour Party MP for Hamilton West. The high point of his parliamentary career to that date appears to have been choosing to get sworn into the House in both te reo and Sanskrit.

But now?

He has become the much more well-known “suspended” Labour Party MP for Hamilton West, following a series of highly public claims alleging intra-party bullying, misuse of public funds, gaslighting, and Satanic rituals being held on the Beehive’s 9th floor every full moon. All with “100s of pages of evidence” to confirm the claims.

‘If you regularly enjoy The Spinoff, and want it to continue, become a member today.’

Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large

Satanic rituals on the Beehive’s 9th floor? Really?

OK – I may have made that last one up.

Look, this is a very serious business. Less frivolity, please.

I guess so … but it all does seem a bit like one of those situations where your flatmate started keeping a meticulous diary of every supposed sin committed against them. “Sunday afternoon at 3.27 pm – used teaspoon placed in the sink and not in the dishwasher. HATE CRIME!”

Well, we don’t really know what went on, do we?

I guess not. However, for now no-one seems to be publicly speaking up to endorse Gaurav Sharma’s account of events. And whatever documentation exists to support it has remained in his files. While those accused – Labour’s whips, its leader, and parliamentary services – have issued the sorts of robust denials that indicate they don’t think there’s anything going to come out later to trip them up. It’s also notable that the media reporting on all of this has been careful to state how little concrete detail there is to back up what Gaurav Sharma is saying, even in terms of off-the-record confirmations from others.

Let’s move on, then. What does being a “suspended” MP mean? Sounds a bit precarious.

Here we need to distinguish between an MP’s role as an MP, and their role as a member of their party “caucus”. The former role is governed by parliamentary rules and statute law (of which more in a moment). The latter role is governed by the caucus’ own rules, including when and how your membership of caucus can be taken away from you.

On Tuesday, Labour’s caucus met and voted to, in effect, suspend Gaurav Sharma from the party caucus “club”. He’s still technically a member of that caucus, and so his vote continues to count for Labour in the House and he’s expected to turn up to do his job in Parliament as a Labour MP. He just can’t come along to the party caucus meetings or share in its decision-making or attend the warm-white-wine-and-cheese-dip socials every Thursday evening.

Hang on … did they really decide to do this on the Tuesday?

That’s a bit of a grey area. Complicating things is the fact that the night before, all Labour’s MPs except Gaurav Sharma held a “not caucus” gathering that sounds like a vent session regarding his behaviour. He’s now claiming (and apparently has a recording of another Labour MP backing him up) that this Monday meeting shows Jacinda Ardern “had already made up her mind, as did the rest of the leadership, and the caucus” about what would happen to him on the Tuesday.

Does that really matter?

Probably not, at least in terms of the law. Even if the Monday night meeting did effectively predetermine Gaurav Sharma’s fate, there’s likely precious little he could do about it. Political parties choosing who is and isn’t a part of their parliamentary team is so closely connected to the functioning of parliament that the principle of “comity” will warn courts away from interfering. And even if a court did choose to tread into this very, very fraught territory, the degree of “natural justice” that can be expected in this most political of environments is minimal-to-non-existent.

So what’s going to happen to Gaurav Sharma now?

Following Gaurav Sharma’s tour of the media this morning, during which he accused Jacinda Ardern of outright lying, another caucus meeting has been called for next Tuesday. At that meeting, a motion to expel him from caucus altogether will be debated and voted on. And according to some guy called Toby Manhire who writes for an outfit called (checks notes) The Spinoff, “expulsion seems … inevitable”. I guess even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

Alas, poor Gaurav. What then?

Once expelled from the caucus, the Labour Party can inform the Speaker that Gaurav Sharma is no longer to be considered a Labour party MP. And when that happens, under parliament’s standing orders he automatically will become regarded as being an independent MP.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea!

Very poetic. Except. Once the Speaker declares Gaurav Sharma to be an independent MP, Labour will have one less MP than they had following the 2020 election. This fact in itself “distort[s], and is likely to continue to distort, the proportionality of political party representation in Parliament as determined at the last general election.” And that’s important because it provides Jacinda Ardern, as Labour’s leader, the grounds to invoke the “party hopping” provisions of the Electoral Act 1993 and have Gaurav Sharma’s seat in parliament “vacated”. Or, to put it more simply, she can get him kicked out of parliament altogether.

Really? She can do this straight away?

Well, there is a process – Jacinda Ardern would have to give notice she plans to do it, allow 21 days for him to tell her why she shouldn’t, and then she’d have to get two-thirds of her caucus to back her decision to do so. But if she decided to go down this road, there’s no chance her team wouldn’t back her. And the important thing is that the Supreme Court has made it clear that, in the words of the then Chief Justice, if “the member of Parliament continues in Parliament as an independent member or as the member of another party, I am of the view … that there are grounds to invoke the procedures for creating a vacancy in the seat in the House.”

And if he is expelled from parliament?

Then we have a byelection in Hamilton West.

Gosh – what a mess! Really looks like there are no winners from a family squabble, right?

Well, there is possibly one winner. Remember a bloke called Sam Uffindell? Thought not.

Follow our politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

Keep going!

Gaurav Sharma and Jacinda Ardern during the 2020 campaign.

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 19, 2022

Jacinda Ardern now has little choice but to grant Gaurav Sharma his wish

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

Gaurav Sharma and Jacinda Ardern during the 2020 campaign.

A squall of fresh allegations from the suspended Labour MP at once invites an expulsion and an investigation.

For 48 hours, Gaurav Sharma said essentially nothing. Beginning Thursday last week, the MP for Hamilton West fired salvos at his own party, in the form of a frustrated, furious, enigmatic op-ed and across several social media posts alleging a pattern of bullying. Late on Tuesday afternoon, Jacinda Ardern told a press conference he had been suspended from the caucus by unanimous vote, for repeated breaches of trust. Not expelled. Suspended. The entreaty, in effect, was this: take a breath, hold your fire, and there may be a way back before Christmas.

The calm that followed was a false one, and the storm broke at 6pm last night. In a 36-minute-long interview with Newshub political editor Jenna Lynch, Sharma doubled, tripled, everythinged down. He accused former Labour whip Kieran McAnulty, albeit without compelling evidence, of “bullying a lot of people”. He accused the prime minister of complicity, of hypocrisy. And he went further, accusing his bosses of schooling MPs in how to dodge the Official Information Act – of preaching transparency while doing the very opposite.

As for the process he’d faced in caucus, it was “a kangaroo court in a banana republic”, he said, in reference to the non-caucus-meeting meeting-of-the-caucus on the eve of the official gathering at which he was disciplined – a meeting which he skipped, he told Newshub, ridiculously, because of other commitments.

To support his claims, he had secretly recorded a conversation with another MP, in which his colleague, by his account, confirmed he was the victim of a stitch-up. “People are scared, people are fearful,” he claimed of his colleagues.

“This latest example of releasing and misrepresenting conversations with his colleagues reinforces that decision [to suspend],” said a spokesperson for the prime minister in response. “We anticipated Gaurav would continue to re-litigate matters in this way. He has still not responded to our communications about entering into mediation, instead using the media to make his points.” The caucus would meet on Tuesday “to consider a motion to expel Gaurav Sharma from the caucus.”

That expulsion seems as inevitable as it is inconceivable caucus and the leadership do nothing till next Tuesday.

At this week’s press conference, Ardern said the facts of the case weren’t in dispute, and it was accordingly more a matter for mediation than investigation. In the National Party, a QC might have been called in to investigate the veracity of claims made about rookie National MP Sam Uffindell’s past, and whether he’d been straight up about it with his leader, but this was different, went the argument: it was a matter of interpretation, of definition, not about whether the events complained about by both Sharma’s staff and by Sharma himself took place.

That position is today hard to sustain. Lynch read aloud to Sharma the Worksafe definition for bullying and he said: yes, that happened. He said the prime minister was complicit. He made very serious, defamatory claims about McAnulty and others. He said, “the highest office in the country has refused for many, many months to listen to genuine concerns.”

In response to the slender olive branch held out to him earlier this week, Sharma struck a match.

It leaves the prime minister with little choice but to give the MP both his wishes: to expel him and to investigate what took place across the last year and a half. The New Zealand Council, Labour’s governing body, may have a role to play in the first part. But not the second.

There is no smoking gun. There is no damning catalogue of evidence. But claims from a member of your own parliamentary party of a cover-up and hypocrisy, of colleagues too terrified to share their concerns, together with grave impeachments of the character of the former whip and the prime minister herself – they can’t be blown off as sour grapes, desperation or bullshit. If not extinguished, they will linger. If you want to clear the air, there’s a big space between dismissed and disproven. QCs, keep your phones on. It’s already long past the point of mediation.