The Prime Minister says he has confidence in Education Minister Jan Tinetti, but won't be commenting further while her case is before the Privileges Committee.
Video / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Matthew Hooton
Matthew Hooton has more than 30 years’ experience in political and corporate strategy, including the National and Act parties.
Until now, it has been assumed that for sheer, unadulterated incompetence, no Government could ever beat Jacinda Ardern’s ministry for KiwiBuild.
Full credit, then, to Chris Hipkins’ Beehive for proving everyone wrong. It turns out that the centrepiece of its election-year Budget - giving 2-year-olds 20 hoursof free early-childhood education (ECE) - will more likely force centres to close.
Combined with the Government’s own ECE regulations, the new policy seems to require ECE workers to be paid below the minimum wage, something you’d have expected at least one minister to have been able to work out on a napkin.
Ultimately responsible is Education Minister Jan Tinetti, who also has her primary and secondary teachers on strike, her universities and polytechnics going broke, and who has become the first MP to be referred to Parliament’s privileges committee for contempt of Parliament since Winston Peters after 2008′s secret-donations scandal.
Extraordinarily, the Prime Minister says he still has confidence in Tinetti, while her poor associate, Jo Luxton, tries to sort out the mess, despite being lowest ranked in the Government, without even a seat in Cabinet, and having become a minister less than a month ago, after all Budget decisions had been signed off.
The case against Tinetti seems strong. After all, she has admitted to misleading Parliament and clearly failed to fix the record immediately as convention demands.
The Prime Minister would surely prefer to sack her now. But he has already lost two ministers in the past 67 days — Economic Development Minister Stuart Nash for emailing Cabinet secrets to major donors, and Customs Minister Meka Whaitiri, who jumped ship to the resurgent Te Pāti Māori.
Worse, a sacked Tinetti would have less incentive to keep her mouth shut about what role Hipkins’ own office played in the decision-making and public statements that have landed her in similar hot water to Peters 15 years ago.
Centralisation of ministers’ communications tightened under Helen Clark, became more oppressive under John Key and revealed the platonic form under Ardern.
It would suggest something hitherto unknown about Hipkins’ management style if it turns out that his office is not in complete control of all presentational decisions.
Tinetti can surely relax. The Labour-Green majority on the privileges committee will presumably acquit. And the Prime Minister sacking her so soon after the Budget would be to concede that his Government, despite having been so successfully rebranded with sausage rolls, is the same Chez Fawlty Towers that brought us — or didn’t — KiwiBuild, the billion trees, Auckland light rail, the war against child poverty and inequality, $1.9 billion for mental health, Covid vaccines from the front of the queue and a “nuclear-free moment” on climate change.
The earlier fiascos can perhaps be somewhat forgiven, having been developed during Labour’s most shambolic years in opposition, with no real intention they would be implemented. But the excuse doesn’t hold for those developed in government, let alone for a policy chosen to be the flagship of Grant Robertson’s latest “wellbeing” Budget.
Despite the explosion in the central Wellington bureaucracy — or perhaps because of it, with hundreds of new policy analysts tripping over one another — the Achilles’ heel of the Ardern-Hipkins Government has always been its inability to match its product to its brand.
For nine years, Labour did no serious work to prepare for government. Nor did they expect they would be sitting around the Cabinet table in 2017, until Ardern’s personality took her party from the mid-20s to the 37 per cent it won on election night.
Yet even had Labour developed some kind of agenda — hidden or otherwise — it couldn’t have delivered. The untalented party hacks that Labour’s selection processes mostly produced through the Key years meant too many who found themselves in charge of billion-dollar-plus ministries in 2017 had no idea how to lead, manage and instruct senior officials, or even their own staff.
Their only lens was political presentation, so they really thought issuing a press statement saying 100,000 houses would be built was the same as building them.
Not much has changed, with Labour still believing that announcing 2-year-olds will have 20 hours of free ECE is all that is involved in making it happen.
There’s no evidence ministers hold meetings with senior bureaucrats in which the elected politician sets the agenda, leads the conservation and knows how to achieve accountability from the unelected officials, rather than the other way around.
The attitude of first the Key Government, but more radically the Ardern-Hipkins Government, is that it is satisfying enough — and sufficient to justify the impact on their families and mental health — for ministers to be mere celebrities and spokespeople for the laziest and most unimaginative defenders of Wellington’s preferred status quo.
It’s not much better on the other side, meaning the pattern risks repeating itself.
Christopher Luxon has so far been unable to explain why he wants to be Prime Minister or provide evidence of an agenda, secret or revealed. It seems he accepts he is unable to progress his strong socially conservative ideas and is happy, generally, to preside over economic and social mediocrity, in the best traditions of New Zealand governments this century.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon. Photo / Alex Burton
Luxon was, after all, happy to serve as Ardern’s top business adviser. More immediately, as a first-term MP thrust into the leadership, he lacks the agility to get the focus onto issues like the ECE debacle and off his plans to reimpose the $5 prescription charge, perhaps with means-testing.
Somehow, two weeks after the Budget, Luxon found himself talking about whether he would make women pay the $5 prescription charge on oral contraceptives. He said it would be means-tested. The Beehive says that revenue from the fee on oral contraceptives is no more than $4 million a year.
With his stocks already low with many women voters over abortion, it’s bold to risk inflaming them further over less than $4m a year.
If Luxon’s performance is not to make us concerned about the quality of New Zealand business management, there may be another explanation for his and Hipkins’ apparent desire to lose the election.
