September 8, 2016 2:00pm by David Farrar

Hosking on Labour staffing

Rob Hosking writes:

Perhaps Labour Party leader Andrew Little is one of those employers who can’t get locals to do the hard work for him.

They won’t do the difficult jobs, they want too much money, and they take drugs.

How else to explain the Labour Party’s inability to attract good staff?

I suggested in Twitter Labour could ask for Labour press secretaries to be eligible for work visas!

Hosking continued:

The most important point of all is not that people are leaving. That does happen a year or so out from an election in most political parties as people decide that – often for their own reasons – they don’t want to be part of the intense chaos of another election.

The most telling thing is the inability to fill these positions when they become vacant. The empty chief press secretary desk is like a tolling bell of disaster for the Labour Party.

Ambitious and bright people would be falling over themselves to fill that position if they believed there was a chance of being chief press secretary to a prime minister in a year’s time.

It is well-nigh incredible that this has not happened.

What makes their inability to find someone to do the job even more incredible is that half the press gallery staff in the print media teams face redundancy in the near future once the Fairfax/NZME merger is approved. You’d think there would be hoards of applicants just from the gallery, but it seems a 50/50 chance of redundancy is a better bet than a 100% chance of working for Labour.