Where will the political sackings and scandals end?
Rarely have people been subjected to such a tsunami of indignities coming from Parliament as various MPs come a cropper to their own peccadilloes and misdeeds.
The soap opera of Parliament took another twist yesterday with the sacking of Iain LeesGalloway for an extra-marital affair with a staff member.
It will certainly result in a few nervous Nellies around Parliament.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision to sack LeesGalloway could well be taken as setting a new threshold: That a consensual affair is a sackable offence.
Ardern was clearly well aware that could be a low threshold, and went to some lengths to try to justify the sacking as not being about a simple “moral judgment”.
She argued it was not the mere fact of the affair itself, but the circumstances around it.
In particular, Ardern considered that it conflicted with Lees-Galloway’s role as Workplace Relations Minister — the minister charged with measures to protect staff at work.
There was the issue of the power imbalance between a minister and a public servant.
It was clearly also very bad judgment by Lees-Galloway.
Although there is no sign the relationship was non-consensual, it was against the backdrop of a drive at Parliament to tidy up after concerns about bullying and sexual harassment.
In the future, political leaders will face having to justify how any MPs’ indiscretions are different to those of Lees-Galloway. It also raises fears it will spark open season on MPs’ personal lives as politicians head into an election campaign.
The past three years have been more dramatic than most in that regard. The Jami-Lee Ross debacle sparked it, a seemingly never-ending maul of allegations and affairs. Where will it end? As National Party MP Mark Mitchell said, it is no wonder the public would be disgusted with what they saw at Parliament — and it would taint them all.
There has long been a general rule around publicly revealing politicians’ affairs. The first rule is, of course, proof.
The second rule is public interest. That second rule tends to be met if the politician in question is either portraying themselves to the public as a “family” person, or standing on a platform of moral probity.
In short, if they are hypocrites.
Lees-Galloway’s plight did not meet the first test until his confession to the Prime Minister, and does not meet the second test.
Ardern was criticised for not intervening quickly or firmly enough over allegations of inappropriate behaviour at both a Young Labour summer camp, and against a Labour staffer working in Parliament.
It raises the question as to whether Ardern over-compensated by moving quickly — and very firmly — against Lees-Galloway. In some ways Ardern was also forced into a corner by the circumstances on the other side of politics: The National Party.
National’s Judith Collins had just deservedly sacked Andrew Falloon for sending inappropriate images to women.
The ramifications of all of this are greater for National than Labour. For National, the sacking of Falloon will have a compounding effect. It was simply the latest in a series of young male MPs being sanctioned for bad behaviour: Jami-Lee Ross, Hamish Walker for leaking Covid-19 patient details, and Falloon. Combined with instability from the leadership ructions, it is harder and harder for National to dismiss these as isolated incidents.
For Labour, the high degree of trust in Ardern means most voters will dismiss the Lees-Galloway incident as isolated. Ardern has built up a reservoir of trust that means voters give her the benefit of the doubt, much as they had with Sir John Key before her. It makes it a lot easier to ride through “scandals”.
Collins is yet to earn that trust: It builds over time. She had done a good job of dealing with Falloon.
But despite telling her caucus she did not want them peddling in the private or family lives of other MPs, it was Collins who first made it public that she had received allegations about a Labour minister.
Collins told media yesterday that she had forwarded an issue about “fairly inappropriate behaviour” to the Prime Minister on Tuesday.
There seems no reason Collins would have gone public other than to seed a “plague on both their houses” perception to detract attention from her own woes.
When Ardern passed the Falloon complaint over to Collins, Ardern gave Collins the benefit of time to deal with it and did not speak publicly about it.
Collins — like Ardern — did the right thing in passing the information she had on to Ardern’s office. But Collins did not do the right thing by publicly revealing she had done that, rather than waiting for Ardern to make her own decisions and act.
The challenge for all leaders is to clean up their own house — not to point at the neighbour’s and say it was just as filthy. At the moment, all the voters see of Parliament is a pigsty.