Media paid attention to Labour’s intern scheme yesterday and eked out some more details from Andrew Little. There are still a number of gaps in information and credibility.
The key issues are where was the money, if there was any, who was responsible, and how this happened under Andrew Little’s nose. And did it also happen without deputy leader Jacinda Ardern being aware?
She is Labour’s most prominent Labour M with a special interest in young people and getting them out to vote, exactly what the scheme was designed to do.
Newshub: McCarten may have left Labour in debt after intern scheme
Labour leader Andrew Little says Matt McCarten’s botched student scheme may have left a debt for the party.
Mr Little admitted today that Mr McCarten, one the scheme’s organisers, might not have the funding he had claimed and that the party would have to pick up the bills.
Internal documents obtained by Newshub show that Mr McCarten claimed to have over $100,000 funding from unions.
The unions named have all denied this, raising questions about where Mr McCarten got his money from.
There has been talk of a substantial private donor but no amount has been revealed. If it was over $30,000 then Labour have a responsibility to identify the donor. That could be awkward, especially if the aim was to finance things on the sly to try to sneak around electoral law.
While it sounds like debts have stacked up some money must have already been required.Was this handled through Little’s Auckland office? Or through the Labour Party Auckland branch?
Following McCarten being thrown under a bus – Cosgrove bus follows Labour over McCarten – the Auckland Representative on Labour’s NZ Council, Paul Chalmers has “stepped down”:
He said a senior Labour council member, Paul Chalmers, stepped down over the weekend because of his connection to the scheme and there would be an internal investigation.
Chalmers has a union background (like McCarten) and has also been campaign manager for Jacinda Ardern.
He featured in this from February 2016: Revealed: Speaker’s Warning to Labour Over Parliamentary Funds
Some weeks ago Labour sent an email in the name of Paul Chalmers, the Project Manager at Labour House, to Labour’s Auckland supporters detailing how Andrew Little had opened a Auckland office that will be “the centre of the Labour and progressive movement in Auckland and the place to co-ordinate the local government and General Election campaigns.”
The email also called on “like-minded partners” to share office space and other facility resources.
So Chalmers was already on notice, as was Little and the Labour Party.
Andrew Little was aware of the idea of the intern scheme in January but says he told McCarten then that it had to be a party campaign thing. He then says he found out about the unauthorised scheme in May and said “this is not the party thing”.
Little would have us believe even though his Auckland organiser McCarten was operating a scheme in Labour’s name purportedly without Little’s knowledge, and in breach of Parliamentary staffing rules, did nothing about it until some students complained about their accommodation last week.
And where does Jacinda Ardern stand in all of this? She has been a strong promoter of young people vote.
Just last week in The Spinoff: Chlöe and Jacinda go back to school
Arden flattered them. “You’re the most powerful voters,” she said. “The 18-24-year-old age group, it’s the most powerful because it votes the least. Did you know there were 125,000 young people registered to vote last time, who didn’t show up. If you all vote this time, the impact will be enormous. You change the government on your own.”
So it’s hard to believe that a student get out the vote campaign being organised by Ardern’s campaign manager and Auckland’s representative on Labour’s NZ Council would not at least have said something about the scheme to Ardern. Other Auckland MPs and candidates were involved with the scheme.
And back to Little’s claims of knowing nothing about what McCarten and Chalmers and the interns were up to.
RNZ: Labour’s intern programme wasn’t authorised by party
The Labour leader says he wasn’t aware an internship programme to help with the election campaign had gone ahead as it wasn’t authorised by the party.
The party’s leader, Andrew Little, told Morning Report he had been left in the dark.
“This isn’t something that has been sanctioned or approved or authorised in any way by the party organisation.
“I think what we all discovered last week when the party got the complaints, [and] the rest of us got involved trying to sort it out, is there’s a whole heap of details we’re just trying to work out,” Mr Little said.
How could he not have known something about it? He has admitted knowing an unauthorised scheme was operating in May so his claim defies belief.
Suzy Ferguson: Are you saying you don’t know where this money’s coming from?
Little: I don’t know any details about the organisation of it apart from what we now know, I think 85 young people here staying on a marae, and helping out in various parts of the Auckland campaign. Beyond that I don’t know, I’m not sure if the party knows or knew at the time, and we’re in the process now of getting the detail about the organisation behind it.
Suzy Ferguson: …are you saying you don’t know where the thick end of two hundred grand has come from?
Little: Well, um, no one in the party is responsible for what Matt and others, and let’s be fair, it wasn’t Matt alone, there were at least four people involved in driving this, three on the party side…
Little wouldn’t say, but McCarten, Chalmers and one other presumably.
Suzy Ferguson: …while this was being done Matt McCarten was in the pay of the Labour Party wasn’t he.
Little: Um, he was the, he was my, he was the director of the Auckland office, um, which is funded out of the Leader’s office, my office, um he was working for me (a) to open and run the office and (b) to run my Auckland programme, outreach programme.
Suzy Ferguson: Ok, so he’s working for you, but you’re saying you didn’t know what he was doing, you didn’t know about this?
Little: I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know the extent to which he was organising stuff. I mean he doesn’t work for me 24 hours a day. He he has a job to manage, put together my programme when I’m up there every week, and arrange the visits that I do, um he does that.
Suzy Ferguson: But is it his job to put this kind of thing together though, when he’s working for you?
Little: No.
Suzy Ferguson:When he’s being paid for by taxpayer money?
Little: No he’s not. When he first floated the idea to me at the beginning of the year of an internship programme I said to him then that’s a party issue, that’s a campaign issue, that has to be dealt with by the party. Um, I was not aware that he was involved in ah dealing with this.
McCarten floated the idea to little at the start of the year, was effectively told he couldn’t do it but went ahead anyway without saying any more about it to Little?
Little: Um now he can deal with this stuff in his own time, as I say he doesn’t work for me 24 hours a day…
Moonlighting on a Labour labelled scheme alongside Labour people seems remarkable for someone in McCarten’s position.
Suzy Ferguson: But is it clear he did do this in his own time, or was he doing this while he was being paid by the tax payer?
Little: Well I certainly wasn’t aware of him being involved in this in the times that I was in the Auckland office and he was with me as I was going about my sort of Auckland visits and programmes.
Suzy Ferguson: Why do you think this was kept from you by someone who’s essentially your Chief of Staff in Auckland?
Little: well, um, I go back to the fact that this this wasn’t anything, this programme or project wasn’t authorised by the party at all. It wasn’t part of any formal party organisation.
Suzy Ferguson: Would you not expect that he would talk to you about this kind of thing though, because otherwise it ends up coming out in a pretty surprising sort of fashion, I mean in terms of a no surprises thing wouldn’t you expect ‘oh by the way, you know in my own time, in the evenings whatever I’m doing this?
If it was as Little stated it was a remarkable situation for his main man in Auckland not to speak to him about a significant campaign project.
Little: Um yes I don’t keep a track of everything he’s doing in his own time. I think the fact that this was, if that document was to be believed about anything at all, he was clearly considering involving unions in all this, it wasn’t just a party thing…
“Wasn’t just a party thing” – but it was in part a party thing?
…so he, it looks to me like he, and whoever else was involved with him, was embarking on a project that that wasn’t just a party thing, so he was going beyond that.
So he doesn’t tell me absolutely everything he does, I’m not sure I want to know…
Sounds a bit like plausible deniability.
…I certainly wasn’t aware um this project was being organised in the way that it was, and was as advanced as far as it was before we got notified of the problems with it.
Little let a few things slip especially towards the end of the interview.
“I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know the extent to which he was organising stuff”.
He didn’t know at all, or not to the extent it was organised?
“So he doesn’t tell me absolutely everything he does, I’m not sure I want to know”.
This sounds like a nudge nudge, wink wink sort of arrangement. Little obviously knew if McCarten worked on Labour’s campaign it would breach Parliamentary rules. Did he turn a blind eye deliberately>
And it got out of control, with the unions and McCarten overreaching when they tried to push Labour policy left as well as run the intern scheme?
Little almost certainly is being frugal with the truth here.