Q+A: Anthony Wilson and Andrew Little
Q+A: Anthony Wilson interviewed by Jessica Mutch | Andrew Little also interviewed by Jessica Mutch
Marae speaks out over Labour accommodation scandal
The head of the Auckland marae at
the centre of a Labour party scandal involving disgruntled
foreign interns says the people of the marae feel maligned
by the accusations of substandard accommodation.
Speaking
on TVNZ 1’s Q+A this morning, Awataha Marae head Anthony
Wilson told Jessica Mutch the North Shore marae facilities
were as good as any other marae.
“We’ve heard
statements saying we’ve got slum conditions and second
rate. As a people, we take that really seriously,” he
said, adding that the first the marae had heard about the
complaints were through the media.
“We’ve had tens of
thousands of people use our facilities over the years, and
we’ve never had a complaint of this sort of nature
before.”
He said some stories of positive feedback had
begun emerging and the marae was still hosting around 60 of
the interns who were happy to stay.
“The people that
work at the marae, many of them are elders. They are
hardworking people. They’re community-based people, and
they don’t deserve to be maligned like this,” he
said.
Labour leader Andrew Little told Jessica Mutch
the marae had not deserved the criticism.
“That is a
good marae. It is well set up. It’s got good facilities.
It’s got fantastic leadership,” Mr Little said.
He
said he had not spoken to former Labour Auckland head Matt
McCarten, who organised the scheme, since the controversy
erupted.
Please find
attached the full transcript of the interview and here’s
the Links: Anthony Wilson & Andrew Little
Q+A, 9-10am
Sundays on TVNZ 1 and one hour later on TVNZ 1 +
1.
Repeated Sunday evening at around 11:35pm. Streamed
live at www.tvnz.co.nz
Thanks to the
support from NZ On Air.
Q +
A
Episode
16
ANDREW
LITTLE
Interviewed by Jessica
Mutch
JESSICA Joining me now is
Labour leader Andrew Little. Thank you for your time this
morning. What’s your response to Bill English’s
interview there? Do you think he’s been honest with the
public over
this?
ANDREW No,
he hasn’t, and you go back to the interview he gave in
March this year when he has asked if he had any contact with
anybody involved in that issue, and he said he had no direct
contact. We can go back over all the events of 2016. It’s
what he’s done this year as prime minister that I think is
telling. When he had the opportunity to tell it how it was
first thing Tuesday morning, he again dissembled,
divaricated, delayed, and even after all that came out later
that day, in Parliament this week he made the statement that
he approached the police, when the opposite was true. This
was a total failure of leadership on his part, and it goes
to his integrity and his credibility, and he’s been found
wanting.
JESSICA It
sounds like you’re calling for his resignation
there.
ANDREW I
didn’t say he should have resigned. I think, just, people
should know that the guy who set himself up as the straight
shooter isn’t a straight shooter. It’s one thing to try
to avoid embarrassment to other people; it’s one thing to
try to avoid embarrassment for yourself which every
politician does. But when you say something is not true that
demonstrably is or, say, something that is true that
isn’t, that is a completely different kettle of fish. He
had nothing to lose in March this year by being honest, by
saying he had contact with the people involved. Nothing to
lose at all. He had nothing to lose on Tuesday morning,
saying he had been told by Todd Barclay that he had made a
recording. Nothing to lose at all, but he chose not to do
that.
JESSICA Are
there times, though, in politics, where politicians,
including yourself, have to be economical with the truth and
sometimes get caught
out?
ANDREW I
think it’s not at all unusual for politicians in answering
questions on certain things to try to preserve the dignity
and reputation of others. I think you do try to do that.
Sometimes you are caught by a sense of your own
embarrassment, and you know you might not say absolutely
everything that there is to be said. Eventually you
ought—you’ve got to front up, because if you don’t,
you will be caught out. And what has happened here is that
an issue that’s been festering for 18 months is people
have been caught out. And look, it goes back beyond just
what has happened this year, but it goes back a long way. In
the end, leadership isn’t about arse covering; it’s
about what you do faced with difficult circumstances, and
the real challenge of leadership is when you’re dealing
with colleagues, including close colleagues or comrades, and
sometimes you have to front up and say, ‘That’s wrong.
It’s got to
change.’
JESSICA Should
the prime minister and other senior members of the National
party have handled Todd Barclay better? He had a lot of very
senior mentors in that party. He worked for a lot of MPs.
Did they fail
him?
ANDREW It
looks to me from the outside like that he didn’t have the
support and mentoring that he should have had. Look,
employment relationships do break down. Let’s remember
this whole thing isn’t about an employment relationship
breaking down. It was about alleged illegal conduct in terms
of recording a staff member. It’s about a police
investigation, where originally Todd Barclay said he would
cooperate, then he didn’t, and that only came out earlier
this year, so he should have had people around him saying,
‘Todd, that’s not the way you do things,’ and when, at
the end of last year, Todd Barclay was going around saying,
‘There was no recording;’ he didn’t make any
recordings knowing that to be completely untrue. And Bill
English of all people knew that to be untrue, because he’d
made statements to the police that were the opposite to
that. He should have called him
out.
JESSICA What
would you have done if you were in that position and one of
your MPs had come to you with
that?
ANDREW If I
was aware that an MP in my caucus was the subject of a
police investigation, I would say, ‘You are obliged to
cooperate.’ I don’t get the thing about ‘I’ve got a
legal right to stay silent’. You’re an MP. You’re an
elected official. Public trust and confidence in you is
absolutely vital. You are not like every other citizen. You
have privilege, and you must be required to cooperate with
the police, because that’s what our kind of system of
confidence in our democratic institutions
requires.
JESSICA Watching
this play out, what did you personally learn from
this?
ANDREW That I think
it’s—You do have to step up and take responsibility
straight away. I mean, that’s what I was confronted with
– a situation that I was frankly horrified with in our
party earlier this week. When I heard about the complaints
of those students about the way they were being treated,
found out that they were here because people closely
associated with the Labour party had got them here and made
promises to them, I said to the party, ‘We must take moral
responsibility. We step in and we clean it up.’ We
didn’t wait until the media story broke to respond. We
responded straightaway. The story came out, but leadership
is about taking responsibility and doing the right
thing.
JESSICA But
in this case, was that the right thing to do? Because as
we’ve seen this play out over the last few days, students
have come out sticking up for the conditions in the marae,
saying that they’ve enjoyed the programme, do you feel
like maybe if you’d taken a bit of time, stepped back,
perhaps gone to the marae and assessed it for yourself, you
may have been able to handle this another way instead of
saying, ‘Look, we did this wrong.’ Was that the right
approach in this circumstance?
ANDREW The right
approach was once we got notification of complaints, or as
the party did and I was told about it, I said, ‘We get up
there straight away.’ The general secretary Andrew Kirton
and his team did an outstanding job. He was there on Monday,
talked to the students, started getting things sorted out.
The reality is some did want to have different arrangements.
Many of them, the vast majority, have said look they want to
stay, they’re excited by the programme and they want to
carry on doing
it.
JESSICA How
many are
staying?
ANDREW I
don’t know what the final number is. As of yesterday, it
was about 60 of the 85. I think they’re still working
through some of the final ones. So many of them. It goes
back to the story about confronted with something that you
might find personally uncomfortable or embarrassing, your
personal feelings aren’t the issue. It’s when you’ve
got people’s livelihoods at stake and their welfare at
stake, you step in and do the right thing. If you’re the
head of an organisation, it’s not about you, it’s about
the organisation. And if you’re the Prime Minister of a
country, it’s about the country, its values and its
standards. That’s what you’ve got to stick up for.
That’s what the Prime Minister’s role is
about.
JESSICA Let’s
talk about that, then. How did it get out of control? Was it
a lack of organisation on the part of
Labour?
ANDREW No.
This started out as an idea at the beginning of the year. I
certainly became aware of it. When it was raised with me,
I’ve said it’s a campaign issue, a party issue, you’ve
got to deal with
it—
JESSICA But
it had Labour’s name on it,
though.
ANDREW And
it did.
JESSICA It
was called the 2017 Labour Campaign
Fellowship.
ANDREW Yeah,
because people closely associated with the Labour Party were
involved. Without approval, authority or any mandate, they
went ahead and did stuff. The next I became aware was about
May this year, when the party was getting messages from
students within days of arriving. The party then stepped in
straight away to people who are associated with it, said,
‘What is going on? There is no approval for this. This is
not the party thing.’ The party was given assurances,
‘We’ve got funding. We’ve got a programme sorted out.
Nothing to worry about.’
JESSICA But there
was something to worry about, wasn’t
there?
ANDREW There
was, yeah. And we got the complaints this week. And the
minute that happened, because we were aware that the Labour
Party name was associated with it, it’s not about legal
technicalities – I take a very dim view of those who hide
behind legalities – and say it is moral responsibility
that is the most important thing. We take
responsibility.
JESSICA But
Matt McCarten has been a bit of a fall guy for you guys this
week. He’s been mentioned a lot taking responsibility for
this. Have you talked to him about that in the last few
days?
ANDREW I
haven’t personally spoken to him about it. And, yeah, he
has been. He’s been involved in
it.
JESSICA Is he
the fall
guy?
ANDREW I
don’t know what you mean about ‘fall
guy’.
JESSICA Has he taken
responsibility for how this played
out?
ANDREW I
haven’t spoken to him. I’m sure others have. I haven’t
spoken to him. The priority – and I said to the party
right from the outset once we got those complaints last
weekend – the priority is the wellbeing of those young
people. That’s what we focus on now. That’s what this
week has been about. Next week and the weeks that follow,
there are still questions to be answered. We’ll get on top
of all
that.
JESSICA Why
not use New Zealanders for this kind of
work?
ANDREW We
have thousands of New Zealanders in our campaign. We’ve
got the most campaign activists signed up to our
campaign.
JESSICA But
why do we need those foreign students coming in or interns
coming
in?
ANDREW We’ve
been part of – and actually the National Party will have
been too – part of international political internship
programmes for donkey’s years. We’ve had people – very
small numbers – involved in our campaigns in the past. We
send young Labour people, National Party sends young
National people, off to the United States, to Australia, to
the UK, to participate in internship programmes that means
they get to see a campaign, get to know about another
country and its political systems. That happens worldwide.
That’s what this was a part of. It got way beyond
people’s ability to control. We’ve stepped in to take
over.
JESSICA The marae has had some
really bad PR over this. Has that been
fair?
ANDREW No.
Totally unfair. That is a good marae. It is well set up.
It’s got good facilities. It’s got fantastic
leadership.
JESSICA So
how did this happen, then? Why are the students
complaining?
ANDREW The
students did complain. That’s just a fact. You get the
complaints, you deal with it. And I’m not one of those
people who goes around quibbling about, ‘Oh, it’s only
one person or two people or three people.’ There is a
complaint, you get stuck in, you get involved, you find out,
you deal with the people, you know those who are saying
there are things wrong. You’ve got to deal with it.
That’s what taking responsibility is about. And even if it
is embarrassing, as it was for us, you’ve got to step in
and do the right thing at the right time, and that’s what
we did.
JESSICA Thank you very much for your time this morning. Really appreciate it.
Q
+ A
Episode
16
ANTHONY
WILSON
Interviewed by Jessica
Mutch
JESSICA Anthony Wilson is
head of the marae in question – Awataha Marae on
Auckland’s North Shore – and he joins me now. Thank you
very much for being with us this
morning.
ANTHONY Kia
ora.
JESSICA Can
you tell me about the conditions that these students stayed
in, in your
marae?
ANTHONY Yeah.
First off, I’d like to say that the people of the marae
feel a little bit maligned by all the accusations. We’ve
heard statements saying we’ve got slum conditions and
second rate. As a people, we take that really seriously.
We’ve had tens of thousands of people use our facilities
over the years, and we’ve never had a complaint of this
sort of nature before. I can tell you now we’re not a
five-star hotel. Definitely not. We never have said that we
are. But in terms of facilities for marae, I think we’re
at least on par with other marae that are round there. I saw
some of those photos that were out there – the broken
shower.
JESSICA Are
those
accurate?
ANTHONY What
was not being told was we’ve got eight showers. It’s not
like that we only had one shower. And the other thing –
the broken cabinet. We get broken things all the time when
we have groups of this sort of size and nature using our
facilities all the time. So we kind of resent the
implications of disgruntled students trying to make a point
out of this. I believe it’s quite good now that some of
those stories have been outed. I’ve seen a few articles
just recently now where the students have actually come out
and defended the marae and saying that they had a wonderful
time and also the facilities were adequate for what they
required.
JESSICA How
many students are still with you and how many have gone
home?
ANTHONY Last
count there was 60 people for dinner the other night.
That’s how we work out how many students are here, because
it’s a bit of a rolling number. And last count was about
60 still at the
marae.
JESSICA And
how many complaints did you get over the last few days or
few
weeks?
ANTHONY We
got no complaints. The only complaints that we saw were in
the media. So we had to question what is the legitimacy of
those complaints. Was this you know, trying to cause harm to
us or was it trying to cause harm to the programme? And
subsequently now we realise a lot of those complaints were
from disgruntled people who were on the
programme.
JESSICA Do
you feel frustrated at the way that Labour’s put you in
this
position?
ANTHONY If
you’re asking me whether we’d do it again, the answer is
yes, because we are open to anyone using our facilities. The
fact that it’s turned into a bit of a political football
at the moment, I mean, that’s none of our doing. The
people that work at the marae, many of them are elders. They
are hardworking people. They come and cook the breakfast in
the morning. They’re there to make the lunches every day.
And they make the dinners. These are hardworking people.
They’re community-based people, and they don’t deserve
to be maligned like
this.
JESSICA Labour’s
said that the programme ballooned. Basically more people
came in than they expected. How many people were you
expecting at the beginning? What did they tell you about
that?
ANTHONY I
think when they first booked, around 80 people. But we ended
up with a few more than that.
JESSICA How
many more? Do you
know?
ANTHONY I
think up to about 90 by the time that everything started to
go pear-shaped. And we brought in extra accommodation to
accommodate for the overflow. And what was not said about
the facilities was that we’d arranged for them to
go—there’s a one-minute walk to another gym, an AUT gym
right next to us, so they were able to use other facilities
as
well.
JESSICA Thank
you very much for your time this morning. We really
appreciate you coming in. Thanks
again.
ANTHONY Kia
ora.