PM, parents not told of camp sexual assaults
Labour’s general secretary has defended not telling the police or parents about complaints teenagers were sexually assaulted at a summer camp last month.
A Young Labour supporter has been barred from future events after allegations a 20-year-old man sexually assaulted four 16-yearolds, including putting his hands down the pants of at least three of them.
Andrew Kirton, the Labour Party’s general secretary, said he stood by the way the party had handled the situation, which he said was done with a ‘‘victim-led’’ focus on the back of advice from a sexual violence charity.
He said he wasn’t aware of any of the victims taking their complaint to the police, although both he and Labour president Nigel Haworth had offered their support to the victims if they chose to do so.
Parents of the victims hadn’t been told about the incident because ‘‘we wanted to deal with the young people in the first instance’’, Kirton said.
‘‘We didn’t want to assume the young people involved had told their parents.’’
The Prime Minister was also kept out of the loop because Kirton said the advice he received was that it could cause more damage to the victims if they were ‘‘under the impression or feeling or knowledge that a widening circle of people were being told’’.
‘‘We took the decision to deal with it as a party issue and keep it between myself and the president and keep it tight in terms of the people who knew.’’
He said he wouldn’t change the way the party had handled the situation, but in future would tell Ardern if that was what she wanted.
‘‘If she says that she wants a higher level of information about what’s happening in the party, then of course that’s appropriate but that’s a decision we took and we stick by that.’’
Labour came under fire last year after it had to help pay for flights home for some of the 85 overseas interns who came to New Zealand to help with campaigning.
The interns arrived to cramped dormitories, no pay, broken facilities and no lecture from former Labour prime minister Helen Clark, as had been promised.
Kirton said the two incidents were not connected and didn’t reflect how the Labour Party operated at a grassroots level.
He would have preferred last month’s incident had never been made public ‘‘for the sake of the people involved’’.
Asked whether he’d put Ardern in a difficult position at her weekly media conference by keeping the information from her, Kirton said, ‘‘that’s the decision we took and we’re not the ones who put it to her in that public forum’’.
Ardern opened the summer camp on the afternoon of the first day, on February 9, and said she would investigate allegations of sexual assault and underage drinking.
‘‘Certainly none of that was apparent when I was there. This is the first I’ve heard of any such allegations but now that you’ve made them I’ll happily investigate, because that is not the behaviour I would expect of any Labour function,’’ she said at her post-Cabinet press conference yesterday.
Newsroom reported the man accused of sexual misconduct was intoxicated and put his hand down the pants of at least three of the four young people.
Kirton said the Labour Party would review the way these sorts of events were run and in particular alcohol being permitted.