Stuart Nash with Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.
OPINION:
Chris Hipkins clearly doesn’t want to punish Stuart Nash.
He had three chances and took none of them.
Friday’s demotion was a charade. It’s the kind of punishment a PM hands out when they don’t really want to hand out any punishment at all but want to get critics off their back.
Demoting Nash down the Cabinet rankings means nothing. Not to Nash. Not to his colleagues. Not to voters.
Nash still keeps his three remaining ministerial portfolios, his Crown limo, his office, a seat at the Cabinet table and his $296,000 pay packet.
It’s made a mockery of Hipkins’ discipline. The PM has put Nash on a “final warning”. But he was already “on notice” from the day before. The wriggle room for Hipkins is that the notice was for “future serious errors of judgement”, whereas this was historical, but it looks weak. It looks like a leader trying very hard not to exercise discipline.
Nash is an ongoing risk to Labour. He can’t resist the urge to flex. He called the Police Commissioner. The Commissioner is a mate. Nash is tough on crime. He’s tough on judges. He agrees with society, which is sick of gang members causing havoc.
A long time ago, Nash developed a brand aimed at making provincial folk in a seat like Napier feel at ease. It’s a bloke-at-the-pub persona, where he talks like a normal punter and agrees with them about the stuff driving them nuts, like those soft judges.
But playing the ordinary bloke gets Nash in trouble quite regularly, because pub-bloke chat by its very nature means dropping the guard that ministers often need to keep themselves out of trouble.
For five years, he used to appear on the weekly political panel on NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking Breakfast, until he abruptly quit on air last February. He said he was too busy, but few would’ve believed that. It’s unlikely the ninth floor would’ve been upset at his withdrawal from the segment. His pub-bloke persona had got so loose with facts – sometimes mildly, sometimes wildly – that we set up a regular slot on our afternoon show that we called Nash Facts, just to correct the record.
Just in the weeks since the cyclone, Nash has made some weird mistakes. He claimed most of the slash wasn’t from forestry companies. It was. He told authorities off for warning electricity could be out for two weeks. It was.
He’s been under pressure. He doesn’t want to be seen as soft on crime. He may well lose his electorate, given provincial sentiment towards Labour. It seems as if the more pressure he’s under, the more he flexes, the bigger his risk to Labour.
The puzzle is why Hipkins didn’t see this and take any of his three chances just to rid himself of this problem by sacking Nash from all his portfolios, not just Police. If he’d done it on day one, the news stories may well have ended there. We may never have learned that Crown Law considered prosecuting Nash for contempt of court over the 2020 loose talk where he hoped publicly that Constable Matthew Hunt’s killer would have “many years in jail to contemplate what he’s done”.
Perhaps Hipkins felt that he would lose face sacking Nash after the first chance was missed. He might’ve felt it would give the Opposition a win. Doing it on day one would’ve been Hipkins’ call. Doing it on day two or three was giving to the Opposition’s calls.
But a win in March is nothing in October. Saving Nash in March has created a risk every time he talks to the media between now and the election.