John Armstrong: Hawkins unlikely to face the chop - yet

Don't hold your breath waiting for the Prime Minister to shunt George Hawkins out of the police portfolio.

Bad as things look, they would have to keep getting worse before she seriously contemplated shifting him.

Given Helen Clark's reluctance to confront Hawkins' unwillingness to relinquish the portfolio - last December's Cabinet reshuffle must now rate as a missed opportunity - he is likely to get the chop only if public pressure snowballs. Then the Prime Minister could shrug her shoulders and say to Hawkins' coterie of supporters in the Labour caucus that there was simply no other option.

That point is still some way off. And it is likely to remain so unless Opposition parties can sustain their onslaught and the Police Minister also fails to make the necessary and lasting change in attitude.

One sloppy, unconvincing performance during Parliament's question-time does not a sacking make.

But some might see Tuesday's debacle in the House - coming after a long, if intermittent, series of such displays - as the straw that broke the camel's back.

Hawkins has enough nous to know he has to smarten up his act - and quick.

His doing so will reinforce the wider Beehive view that "the trouble with George" can be "managed" by day-to-day oversight during the little more than seven months until the election, without requiring the ultimate sacrifice - something that would create more difficulties inside the factionalised Labour caucus than it would solve outside.

Apart from giving the Opposition the satisfaction of claiming a ministerial scalp - the last thing Clark wants - shifting him out of his beloved portfolio before September's election might provoke a backlash.

Having largely recovered from a stroke in the early 1990s, Hawkins was staunch through Labour's lean times and so enjoys considerable sympathy from colleagues, and not just those in the party's right faction.

He can also justifiably claim major success in terms of declining crime rates and lowering the road toll during his five-year tenure as Police Minister.

Furthermore, when it comes to the furore over the police's botched responses to 111 calls, accountability also rests as much, if not more, with police Commissioner Rob Robinson - someone who was recently given Cabinet's blessing with his term being extended by two years.

That does not get Hawkins off the hook. The political buck stops at his door.

And that leaves Labour with a major headache. The erosion of public confidence in the 111 line goes to the very heart of issues of personal security. But the minister tasked with convincing people he can fix the problem is now suffering a credibility crisis as a result of his own botched responses in Parliament.

It doesn't help that the Government's hands are tied until the independent panel that is reviewing the police's three communications centres following the Iraena Asher case has finished its work and reports back.

In the meantime, Opposition parties are having a field-day as they daily raise fresh examples of mishandled calls.

The most damaging allegation was made by New Zealand First's Ron Mark, who obtained internal police emails suggesting police on traffic duties were blithely ignoring emergency calls where there was a threat to life and limb.

Mark's triumph was the interweaving of two previously separate strands of public disquiet - the worry about the 111 call system and the suspicion that police emphasis on road safety comes at the expense of fighting real crime.

This combination made for a politically potent brew - one highly toxic to Robinson, who mounted a bizarre defence of police resource deployment, saying road safety was a priority because people were more worried about being hurt in a traffic accident than being attacked, robbed or sexually assaulted.

Hawkins's big mistake was to try to back Robinson up when the commissioner's assertion predictably came under Opposition fire in Parliament on Tuesday.

He would have been wiser to have placed some distance between himself and the commissioner's ruminations. Instead, Hawkins went to the House typically underprepared and overconfident - a fatal combination that saw him get walloped.

The next day a far more subdued minister stuck to his well-prepared script and said nothing that might inflame matters further.

Hawkins is now under the watchful eye of the Prime Minister's office, which is understood to be sitting in on his preparation for question-time. He also continues to get advice from senior colleagues, such as benchmate Paul Swain.

It is a fair bet, too, that the Prime Minister will take the precaution of ensuring Hawkins is more closely shadowed by Justice Minister Phil Goff, who on Thursday tellingly described himself as the "senior minister" in the crime and justice area.

For his part, Hawkins knows he must lift his game. That necessarily entails putting more heat on Robinson to avoid embarrassing operational foul-ups boiling over into the political arena.

This is a delicate matter, as the Police Minister is constitutionally barred from interfering in police operations and so is constrained in issuing instructions to the commissioner.

But Hawkins was not slow in reminding police this week that they must deal with emergencies as a priority. And he was upfront in the media when a fresh allegation of 111 failure arose.

Most notable was his press statement the previous week suggesting it would be "helpful" if police issued a statement outlining progress in the investigation into the alleged firearms offences by Tuhoe activist Tame Iti.

In that case, Hawkins was stepping close to the line in terms of ministerial interference. However, it showed that he was not going to allow himself to become squeezed between an angry public and slow-to-react bureaucrats at police headquarters.

With a likely Budget spend-up to come, Hawkins will also get the cash he needs to pour into police communications centres to fix the 111 problem. Or, at least, be seen to be doing so.

All this will keep him in his job this side of the election. What money cannot fix is the firming view in the Labour caucus that he be consigned to the backbenches afterwards.