Jami-Lee Matenga Ross is a New Zealand politician. He was the Member of Parliament for the Botany electorate from 2011 until 2020. Ross resigned from the party’s caucus on 16 October 2018 after he accused National leader Simon Bridges of corruption. He has been accused of harassment and bullying behaviour toward staff. Ross announced the establishment of a new political party, Advance New Zealand, in 2020.
About Jami-Lee Ross in brief
Jami-Lee Matenga Ross is a New Zealand politician. He was the Member of Parliament for the Botany electorate from 2011 until 2020. Ross was previously a local government politician on the Auckland Council and, before that, was on the Manukau City Council from the age of 18. Ross resigned from the party’s caucus on 16 October 2018 after he accused National leader Simon Bridges of corruption. He has been accused of harassment and bullying behaviour toward staff. Ross announced the establishment of a new political party, Advance New Zealand, in 2020. At the 2020 election, none of theParty’s candidates won an electorate seat and the party received less than 1% of the party vote, meaning Ross lost his seat in Parliament. Ross has never met his father, who descends from the Māori iwi of Ngāti Porou. He attended Dilworth School, a boarding school for pupils from difficult backgrounds, then Pakuranga College, but left without formal qualifications. He holds a commercial pilot’s licence from April 2012, having trained at Ardmore Flying School. He is married to Lucy Schwaner, a former member of the Howick Local Board. Ross joined the National Party in 2003, and was elected to the City Council in 2004, aged 18. He stood for a place on the new Auckland Council in the 2010 Auckland local elections, winning a seat for the howick ward.
In March 2011, he won the election with a majority of 3,972. Upon his swearing into Parliament Ross became the youngest MP, taking the title of Baby of the House from Gareth Hughes, a Green Party MP. In 2013, he supported and voted for the Marriage Amendment Bill, which legalised same-sex marriage in New Zealand. In May 2017, he was elected as Senior Whip after the incumbent Tim Macindoe was appointed as Minister of Customs in May 2017. Ross contested theBotany seat during the 2017 election and was re-elected again. On 2 October 2018, Ross issued a statement that he was standing down from his portfolios and from the front bench of the Opposition due to personal health issues. Ross also publicly denied allegations that he had sexually harassed several female staff, claiming that he and Deputy Leader Paula Bennett were trying to smear him and had pressed him into going away on medical leave. On 16 October, Ross alleged during a live press conference that Bridges was a corrupt politician who had violated electoral law several times, including accepting an illegal NZ$100,000 donation from Chinese businessman Zhang Yikun. Ross denied the accusations and issued a series of tweets prior to the press conference alleging that Bridges had attempted to silence him for speaking out against his leadership decisions.
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This page is based on the article Jami-Lee Ross published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.