Clark slams youth camp sex scandal
Former prime minister Helen Clark has said heads would have rolled had the Labour Party’s youth camp sex scandal occurred under her watch.
Speaking to Stuff after her Q&A session at the Property Council of New Zealand conference in Rotorua yesterday, Clark said she was unsure whether she would have sanctioned the release of the internal report into the party’s youth camp set-up, with Labour instead releasing a number of recommendations.
She was clear on one thing, howver: ‘‘I would have handled it differently from the start.’’
Under her watch, ‘‘people didn’t keep their jobs’’.
During a 45-minute session in front of the 300-strong conference audience, and speaking to Stuff afterwards, Clark touched on a number of subjects.
These included United States President Donald Trump, her time at the United Nations, where New Zealand was succeeding and failing on matters of gender equality, and why current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s approach to the business community was right.
‘‘In my view, she’s [Ardern] doing the right thing. She’s firmly focused on the need to engage with the economic sector, pretty much the same path we trod.’’
Speaking in the wake of Ardern’s attempts to deal with business confidence under the Labour coalition Government, Clark said typically Labour governments didn’t poll well on business confidence measures, irrespective of the state of the economy. ‘‘There’s quite a lot of politics around those indicators.’’ Ardern was right to try and woo business, however, as Clark said they were the country’s wealth generators.
‘‘When you come into Government, you have a lot to do; they’re social issues and they cost money and the business community thinks where do we fit into this.
‘‘But actually the private sector is the growth sector of the economy, part of the solution.’’
On Trump, whom she called a ‘‘disrupter’’, Clark said he got elected ‘‘speaking to a group that’s been left behind’’. It’s something she believed couldn’t happen here, for two reasons.
She felt the Labour-led Government was ‘‘tapping’’ into disenfranchised voters who might otherwise look to a Trump-type politician, and our MMP system acts as a safety valve.
‘‘Those voices are expressed in Parliament. There’s more robustness in the system.’’