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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Opposition Leader Judith Collins confronted the Parliamentary Press Gallery in parliament ahead of the Labor and National Party caucus meetings this morning.
Ardern spoke about the Whakaari / White Island tragedy and the controversy between China and Australia over an inflammatory post on social media shared from an official Chinese account.
Meanwhile, Collins focused on fixing the crisis, saying he found it “strange” that Ardern was partly blaming the public for it.
The meetings came after WorkSafe, the government’s workplace health safety regulator, announced that it would press charges for the Whakaari / White Island eruption last December, which killed 22 people.
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The prime minister would not dare to know if or when tourists could return to the island’s volcano.
“Look, obviously, while we’re in a situation where we have ongoing prosecutions with WorkSafe, that’s really not the most important thing to anyone and I imagine, particularly the operators.”
Rob Kitchin / Things
Judith Collins and Jacinda Ardern will meet with their party assemblies this morning.
GNS Science and the National Emergency Management Agency (Civil Defense), both government agencies, have publicly announced that they have been charged, but do not know what the charges are. Tour operators Volcanic Air and White Island Tours, owned by Ngāti Awa, also confirmed yesterday that they had been charged.
He said the various ongoing investigations would help provide “a good understanding” of the situation, while an actual commission, which was suggested by the National Party before the elections, “could greatly duplicate the work that was already going on.”
Charges have been brought against ten parties and three people in total. The first hearing date is December 15 at the Auckland District Court.
WorkSafe took nearly a year to file the charges, and top party leaders are expected to speak out on the issue.
THINGS
National party leader Judith Collins confronted the Parliamentary Press Gallery in parliament ahead of the Labor Party and National Party caucus meetings this morning.
Meanwhile, Judith Collins said National will focus on holding the government to account on housing in parliament this week.
In particular, he responded to a TVNZ interview in which Ardern said that “the appetite for some of these policies must also come from the public,” and said the public had not been in favor of fiscal policies that could slow down the housing market. .
“Actually, I thought it was pretty weird,” Collins said.
“Having come to government in 2017 with a big housing agenda, putting the housing in order, KiwiBuild was the answer and all of a sudden after three years of failures in the area, it is apparently the public’s fault,” he said.
Yesterday, the government also announced that it would expand the legal minimum number of sick days from five to 10 by the end of 2021.
This was a Labor electoral compromise of which the National Party was skeptical during the campaign, as it charged additional costs to companies.
