The problem wasn’t us, it was everyone else!

Stuff reports:

The Labour Party have appointed long-time staffer Rob Salmond as the party’s new general-secretary.

Salmond has worked for the Labour Party in a variety of roles for many years but is best-known for his role in the Chinese-sounding names controversy.

A sensible appointment for Labour. Rob’s skills align well with what the party organisation needs.

He was working for the party’s research unit in 2015 when it attracted huge controversy by analysing the names of home-buyers in Auckland and tallying up those that “sounded” Chinese. At that time Labour was attempting to prove that overseas buyers were helping to heat up the housing market.

This caused a huge outcry at the time, and has followed around Labour MP Phil Twyford and Salmond ever since.

Salmond told Stuff that he regretted the incident and apologised to the Chinese community, albeit with some qualification.

“The important part that I regret is in helping put that together I didn’t appreciate the way that some people who didn’t share our values might interpret what we did and use it to harm members of the Chinese community,” Salmond said.

Oh that is rather precious. We did nothing wrong in blaming house prices on people with Chinese sounding surnames. The problem was other people blamed them also!