Quite right. Contact the Greens or Labour for advice on achieving gender balance.
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Chris Hipkins stuffed up, simple. It's not a matter of gender or testosterone bias here. He could have added up the numbers and figured out that with a whole bunch of members not in attendance that the vote for Speaker of the House would have been compromised. A simple but profound balls up.
Lets' not shift the blame to simple commentary on this website, or whether we're male, female, Labour, National or anything in between, we have nothing to do with it. Labour screwed up on their first outing, plain and simple. It'll be three years of misery if they can't get the basics right from the outset. This is a poor beginning.
This is a good summary imo ... https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/pol...day-farce-fast
"red-faced-government-needs-to-bury-first-day-farce-fast"
Labour have a long road to hoe ahead.
He only just had time to serve papers on news reporters and an editor to reveal their sources, before he took off How low can the Deputy PM go and we´re only in week one !
It seems fogotten that he cheated out more money from the Government in superannuation payments than he was entitled to. That´s what the news should be about.
So now it is clear Winston held NZ to ransom for 3 weeks or so while "negotiating" in bad faith with National, after having secretly signed papers to sue them ! The only reason for his "negotiations" was to extract as much as possible from the inexperienced Jacinda/Labour in which he was very successful. I think Winston is going totally nuts. I can´t wait to hear more about what Tim Murphy mentions in the link below, about suspicion of some type of deal between Winston and Cameron Slater berfore the elections.
There will be a fair amount of sweat breaking out in Labour´s ranks right now when they realise the real Winston Peters and his never ending agendas and personal vendettas. He is a fraudster who cheated the Government for 7 years !
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/11/0...n-goes-fishing
What would have been even more extraordinary was if the missing National MP had been present in the House and there had been a confidence vote called?
Given the shambles yesterday if one or two of the coalition MPs or a Greens MP hadn’t been in the right place at the appropriate time (for whatever reason), Ms Ardern could have been rolled by a confidence vote on Day 1 of Parliament sitting... rookie errors by Hipkins and he genuinely looked to be panicking, Robertson clearly concerned and competence to run the House was questioned.
The Coalition Whips failed to complete
Job 1 - have enough members in the House and were way too complacent.
Ardern will be asking herself what in hell happened and why her first sitting day in Parliament wasn’t the headline - although Winston’s stunt serving discovery also ensured her first day wasn’t the top story on the news websites.
Her mentor didn’t suffer fools so expect Hipkins and the Whips to be on notice - the capitulation on the select committee numbers will ensure opposition to have ample opportunity to score points. A strong opposition is crucial to hold the executive and government to account, National’s message will be that the coalition can’t manage the process and if legislative programme is slowed then it’s because the coalition is flawed. The flip side is they don’t want to be as negative or ideologically blinkered as Tony Abbott