None on their own are terminal, but collectively they paint a picture of sloppiness.
The most public has been the revelation that the University of Waikato vice chancellor Professor Neil Quigley spoke extensively to the National Party about its policy to build a new medical school at the university. This says more about the university than it does about National, but the party and its health spokesman Shane Reti should nonetheless have managed the relationship better.
The second is the apparent proximity of casino group SkyCity to National’s policy to regulate and tax online gambling, a key tenet of the party’s tax policy. SkyCity has been lobbying the Beehive hard for changes to online gambling rules, arguing the current rules put them at a competitive disadvantage.
The third story is the party struggling with how much it should say about the Winton subdivision in South Auckland, and the legal action Winton is taking against Kāinga Ora for refusing to fast-track the project.
Each case shows National operating well within the rules, but skating close to the line in terms of the way the party manages its relationships with supporters, donors and - that dreaded word - “stakeholders”.
They are a wake-up call to leader Christopher Luxon to sharpen up some of the party’s processes, lest National begin to be seen as the political wing of the country’s vested interests. Read more >
It was unfortunate that Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ first real test was one in which his predecessor excelled: crisis management.
All the many and varied assessments of the Ardern government published this last week have been united on Jacinda Ardern’s ability in that area.
Hipkins had big shoes to fill and twice during his visit to Auckland on Saturday, after devastating floods in the city, he did not quite manage to fill them. In one of these areas, the most minor, the problem rests with Hipkins, in the other, it very much does not.
Ardern did not have the bad luck of a political adversary ruling our most populous city. For nearly her entire term, she was blessed with Phil Goff, a mayor who knew when to have a scrap (Three Waters) and when to cooperate (the pandemic).
Wayne Brown appears only to know how to scrap. This has its merits in terms of extracting concessions from Wellington on policy, but it comes up seriously short in a crisis.
His adversarial relationship with central government may have delayed the decision to declare a state of local emergency, and could frustrate further efforts to respond to the crisis if there is more rain.
Nothing could disguise the rift with the Beehive during a chaotic joint press conference with Brown, Hipkins and a shifting blancmange of emergency management staff yesterday. Read more >
The Stuart Nash scandal took a disturbing turn on Thursday when further revelations about the email that got Nash sacked were published by the Prime Minister’s Office.
Now reduced to its atomic level, the scandal can be distilled to that most fundamental of political questions: cock up or, as the National Party alleges, “conspiracy”?
Unless further evidence emerges - and that isn’t likely - it will be difficult to prove one way or the other. But at first blush it’s very hard to believe that not one of the multiple staff who saw and handled the damning email on multiple occasions ever once understood that it needed to be released, and that it contained a breach of the Cabinet Manual so flagrant it would get Nash sacked.
Either explanation leaves the Government facing unsettling questions about probity: how many information requests have seen information withheld that should have been released? And worse still: whether this was by accident or whether the Government has a broader culture problem around the release of official information. Read more >
Over the 2021-22 summer break, National Party leader Christopher Luxon, barely a month into the job, invited his “kitchen cabinet” to his Onetangi holiday home for a strategy session. Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop were there, as was newly appointed chief of staff Cam Burrows. Simon Bridges, who was brought into the tent as part of a deal with Luxon to not formally contest the leadership race, was invited but didn’t come (he was in Queenstown).
The newly formed shadow kitchen cabinet set out the year and how they might make a dent in Labour’s commanding poll lead of 10 or so points.
It worked. By March, it was clear the “transitory” inflation warned of at the end of 2021 was not so transitory. Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s record $6 billion operating allowance, announced in December 2021 as a downpayment on health reform, began to look like a reckless gamble with the CPI.
The polling climbed precipitously until about February of that year. People switched on to National in a way they had not done since the pandemic.
But National hit a wall exactly a year ago, when it touched 38 per cent in the February 2022 Taxpayers Union-Curia poll. There it has roughly stayed, duking it out with Labour in the margin-of-error zone to maintain a slight lead in the high thirties.
Luxon wisely stayed quiet over the last summer, when New Zealanders prefer to get their politics from the chardonnay-fuelled rantings of their families than from actual politicians.
He might have regained the agenda in mid-January at his caucus retreat, had Jacinda Ardern not resigned hours after his now-forgotten reshuffle.
His next opportunity to bend the all-important “narrative” to his will should have been his State of the Nation speech, which is usually when Opposition leaders try set the scene, particularly for an election year. Alas for National, this was unhelpfully scheduled for the weekend Cyclone Gabrielle hit, and it had to be cancelled. Read more >
As soon as the ministers of the National-Act-(maybe)-New Zealand First Government settle into their Beehive offices, they’ll embark on a PR exercise to convince the public it made the right choice at the election.
Every government naturally accumulates some skeletons in its closets - you would too if you were in government for six or nine years. It’s the perk of an incoming administration to air those skeletons, giving it a tailwind as ministers get their feet under the desk.
The outgoing Labour administration commissioned research into the infrastructure deficit of our health system, arguing hospitals had been left to decay after “nine long years of neglect”.
The Prime Minister’s chief science advisor looked into the moral panic over methamphetamine contamination in rental properties, which had led to wrongful evictions of people in social housing.
Then there was the review of vehicle testing standards by Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, which found it had not been adequately enforcing its regulatory function, particularly the way it enforced Warrant of Fitness standards.
The National-led Government before that used Treasury forecasts to argue it had inherited a “decade of deficits” thanks to the previous Labour-led Government.
The incoming National-led Government will no doubt try to do the same. Here are three places it’s likely to start. Read more >
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
