November 13, 2017 7:00am by David Farrar

HDPA on lies from Labour

Heather du Plessis-Allan writes:

Labour struck a deal giving in to National because it had ballsed up the vote to get Trevor Mallard into the Speaker’s job.

That was a pretty big embarrassment on the very first day of Parliament. It was maybe predictable and probably forgivable given the massive group of MPs Labour’s whips are trying to corral. But what wasn’t forgivable was then telling us the whole thing went swimmingly and, actually, the deal was struck just to be decent.

Really?

Anyone who has gone through the torture of buying a house, negotiating a pay increase or grudgingly telling the dairy owner he can keep the change knows you never give up more than you have to.

It’s not a surprise Labour tried to paint the schoolboy error in a better light. The alternative is looking unprepared for the basics of government. But what is surprising is that instead of opting for a plausible half truth, they threw themselves headfirst into a story no one would believe. That’s either amateur or arrogant.

Normally Governments get really arrogant in their third term. Labour seems to have managed it in three days.

When announcing paid parental leave would extend from 18 to 22 weeks, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a point of rubbing in how stingy we Kiwis are. When it comes to maternity leave, she told us we have “one of the lowest in the OECD where the average is 48 weeks”.

Wait, what? Forty eight weeks is nearly three times what ours was! How did we get to be such mum-haters?

We’re not. The OECD average is really 17.7 weeks, which means we’re doing okay internationally. Labour had to jump through several statistical hoops and lump all sorts of lesser forms of maternal care into one basket to concoct that unfair comparison.

There is no way at all the average is 48 weeks. So another lie.