PoliticsJune 26, 2018

Fact check: Has there been more striking in 9 months of Labour than 9 years of National?

Staff Writer

It’s a bold claim from Simon Bridges, but has his office pulled a bit of a swifty on the numbers? Alex Braae checks the maths.

Here’s the claim: National Party leader Simon Bridges says in the nine months of the Labour government, there has been more industrial action than under nine years of the National government. Is it true?

Here’s Bridges’ exact wording, just so we can be clear on what we’re talking about. In the press release, he said: “After less than nine months of this government 32,000 workers have been involved in industrial action, or signalled their intention to be – compared to just over 27,000 that undertook strike action in the entire nine years of the previous government.”

Acting PM Winston Peters told Morning Report this morning that such a claim was “demonstrably nonsense” and in true Winstonian fashion, he said that all of he, Guyon Espiner, and the listeners, knew it to be so. Peters made the point that among the major workforces currently planning strike action – for example, 27,000 nurses, or 4000 MBIE and IRD staffers, none of them had actually stepped off the job.

But such a response is comparing apples and fish – Bridges quite clearly says “intention to” strike, which means it doesn’t matter if they have gone on strike or not. And here’s where we get into a bit of difficulty – let’s line up the two tables provided by the National Party office. This is the table they gave for 2018:

Pity the poor bottled water workers, who have had their dispute overlooked in favour of more high profile strikes.

Overall, these numbers basically stack up under the definition given. I know for a fact that it’s even slightly higher than the table shows, because I’ve personally reported on a supermarket workers strike that was called, and then called off. Alas that it didn’t make the cut.

Now let’s have a look at the rather more lo-fi table provided by National to outline strikes over the last 30 or so years:

It’s a bit tricky to read, but just so you know, the top line is “number of employees involved in strike action”. The problem is this: The stats are both wrong, and also bullshit.

There’s a subtle difference between the two categories. Say you were going to take these figures to mean exactly the same thing – well, you’d have to decide whether to take nurses and PSA workers out of Labour’s column, or include other workers who have decided on strike action, then changed their mind. The best year to illustrate this is 2016, which has a suspiciously low number of “employees involved in strike action” – 430.

The stats are bullshit, because if you were to compare the two figures, you’d completely wipe the tally just with aviation security workers. They very, very nearly went on strike in the middle of 2016, then called it off at the absolute last moment. I asked the PSA about it and they told me that out of 900 unionised workers overall, 700 were set to strike – some of the workers were represented by the union E Tū. So if the categories are the same and the comparison was being made in good faith, it’s not credible to say the numbers are correct. This is especially the case when you consider that Auckland bus drivers also went on strike in 2016.

But not only that, the stats are also flat out wrong. Because in 2016, 3000 junior doctors went on strike!!! 3000! Three thousand! Here’s some links to stories. Now in fairness, it’s easy to see why this one might have been forgotten. The guy who was health minister at the time, Dr Jonathan Coleman, didn’t exactly depart in a blaze of popularity, so his former colleagues may have collectively wiped their memories of his tenure.

So what does that mean for the rest of the figures? I have no idea, and absolutely no intention of using the rest of the week checking them in detail. But it does go to the heart of the credibility of such a claim – if one year is out by so much, then it’s difficult to have much confidence in them.The PSA’s media spokesperson also kindly suggested I might further frisk the claims by looking into a short strike of thousands of allied health workers in 2015, which I won’t be doing for reasons of time. To be fair to National, they do provide their sources, so one could argue that they put out the numbers in good faith, and it just turns out they were incorrect at the point of source.

Of course, the exact numbers themselves don’t really matter. Making claims like this is a way to attach a news hook to something that feels truthy – that there has been a wave of strikes or strike threats since the new government took office. And that is a completely fair claim to make, because there absolutely has been. Partly it has been Labour’s bad luck that they’ve been holding the bag when collective contracts have come up for renewal and renegotiation. But there is certainly something in the claim that workers will have a better shot at a good deal under this government compared to the last one – acting PM Winston Peters admitted as much on Radio NZ earlier this morning.

One final thing to note: wage growth has been pretty mediocre over the last decade. If this wave of strikes is successful, then at least Labour will be able to say that they’ve presided over some gains for workers there, even if it had to be forced out of them.

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Simon Bridges inhales the life spirit of John Key. Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

PoliticsJune 26, 2018

Please join me in the exorcism of Simon Bridges

Hayden Donnell

Contributing writer

Simon Bridges inhales the life spirit of John Key. Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

The leader of the National Party has been heavily criticised for delivering a tone-deaf interview on the prime ministerial baby on Friday. Hayden Donnell resolved to help him beat his demons and redefine his personal brand.

The worst thing was he thought it was going well. Simon Bridges was revelling in the grim nihilism of his appearance on Jeremy Wells and Matt Heath’s Radio Hauraki show on Friday. He was smiling into the abyss, and the abyss was smiling back. Every word he uttered would be swallowed up by the maw of Jacinda Ardern’s baby. Nothing mattered. It was invigorating. “You know why I’m saying these things right now,” he said. “Because I know that nothing I’m saying is going to make the news in the next, like, seven days.”

The media questions started coming soon after the interview ended. First a trickle. Then a steady stream. Somehow, despite the arrival of the New Zealand’s most newsworthy baby since scientists cloned a rare cow, Bridges has now spent 72 hours batting away questions about why he tried to publicly own a two-day-old child.

The quotes don’t look great written down. “Look, I don’t think [the baby’s] going to do a lot to help my poll ratings, let’s put it that way, but you know I don’t hate [the baby]!” he told Heath and Wells. “Hate is a strong word, I should say, I wish her all the best.” Bridges said the baby would be “going to school like in boy’s clothes right?”, in what was either a transphobic jab at the left, incomprehensible gibberish, or a policy announcement in favour of setting up baby schools.

How did it descend into this? “Under fire for insulting an infant” is one of the easiest political scandals to avoid. Why was Bridges suddenly having to do damage control for publicly taunting someone literally not strong enough to hold up the weight of her own head?

The answer lies inside the darkest recesses of opposition leader’s soul. Bridges is haunted. As he lays down to sleep, a presence smiles vacantly from the farthest reaches of his spirit and whispers, “At the end of the day, I’m relaxed about it.” As he rises again, it says “To be perfectly honest, I’m ambitious for New Zealand.”

Simon Bridges is possessed by John Key.

You could see it happening as far back as 2013. Bridges appeared on Campbell Live, worked up and spitting over Campbell impugning the good name of deep sea oil drillers. As he lost control, a phrase started popping up.

“The fact of the matter is look at the context of this. We have drilled 1000 wells throughout New Zealand’s history,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is they have to go through a permit with MBIE.”

“The fact of the matter is John, you do not have a single positive statement about oil and gas development or exploration New Zealand.”

“The fact of the matter is this. Let me also say this. A hole about 1500 metres from memory.”

His attempts to summarise the issue in a single line were unmistakably similar to his then-boss. But Bridges wasn’t as effective. Whatever was possessing him was a budget knockoff of the real thing. Campbell upbraided him like a disappointed dad. “I feel like you’ve come here and just spouted a load of nonsense,” he said.

The Homebrand haunting has only became more acute. Bridges talks like Key. He power sits in parliament like Key. And on Friday, he joked around on commercial radio like Key did, mainly successfully, year after year. The difference between his version and Key’s was that the former prime minister’s alarm bells probably would’ve started going off before he got to calling a newborn child a pinko. Not Bridges. He chased a vision of his departed boss straight into hell.

He needs to cast off the spectral presence haunting him to move forward. I sought out someone who could help. Haunted Auckland investigator Mark Wallbank said burning sage and just telling the entity to leave is the standard and time tested procedure. “Then again; if we’re talking politicians, perhaps an exorcism would be the order of the day. Hope that helps,” he said.

But even if sage and a strong order to leave can break the curse, what will Bridges do next? Without emulating John Key, he doesn’t have a strong identity of his own to draw on.

I asked personal brand adviser and former Paul Henry internet correspondent Verity Johnson for help. “The core principle of finding your personal brand is to ask yourself, ‘what do you want to be known for?’ Or more specifically, ‘how do I want people to talk about me?’” she said.

“The best way to start this is to think about all the people you admire and ask yourself why they appeal to you… You might want to have John Key’s daggy middle-aged dad charm, but to do that you have to be a daggy, middle aged dad at heart.”

The key part of everything was authenticity, Johnson said. It was paramount. Without authenticity, no-one would buy what you’re selling. Without authenticity, you were adrift. Your public presence was a weird, off-putting void. She closed with some advice for Bridges. “Choose to embody traits that are a real reflection of your real personality,” she said. “Otherwise people will see right through you.”

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