OPINION
On a Thursday afternoon last year, a committee of senior MPs from across Parliament filed into a room for a two-hour session in which they agreed about almost everything.
Even, most surprisingly, on the importance of disagreement, an issue that’s bubbled to the surface again as Labour’s Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Revenue Minister David Parker openly said they don’t agree with the decision of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins to scotch a wealth tax under his leadership.
This was the Standing Orders Committee, which meets each term to discuss how Parliament’s rules, the Standing Orders, should be updated for the next term of Government.
Former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer was submitting on what should change for the next Parliament, but the conversation slowly drifted into a more general comparison of Parliamentary life now and in Palmer’s day.
Then just the Leader of the House, Chris Hipkins asked Palmer for an “observation” on whether New Zealand had a problem with not allowing MPs to express viewpoints that diverged from their party line.
“Disagreement is increasingly seen as disunity,” Hipkins said.
He added it was a “cultural issue that affects the New Zealand Parliament more than the UK parliament or say the US Congress - and I think it has gotten worse in the last 20 or 30 years at least since the introduction of MMP”.
“When I look at New Zealand’s history, when I look at the UK Parliament people more freely disagree with one another and that’s not seen as a bad thing,” Hipkins said.
“In New Zealand, disagreement, within parties or within governments, is seen as disunity, dysfunction, when actually it can be perfectly healthy,” he said.
Palmer, who owed his premiership to the most famous Cabinet bust-up in recent history, told Hipkins: “There’s something in that.
“We come from a small country. We don’t have the range of political opinion in this country that exists in many others,” Palmer said, noting that the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once joked to him the entire spectrum of political opinion in Australia and New Zealand would fit inside the US Democratic Party.
MPs on the committee nodded, with National’s Chris Bishop saying, “that’s right”.
Both Hipkins and Bishop have had well-known disagreements with their parties. In Hipkins’ case, he’s spoken since becoming Prime Minister of his belief that the Ardern Government kept Auckland in lockdown for too long.
Bishop and the then-disempowered National liberal caucus fell out with the leadership after a Molotov-Ribbentropping between then-leader Judith Collins and then-Justice spokesman Simon Bridges saw National’s caucus whipped into voting against the conversion therapy ban at first reading.
Hipkins joked that the fractious UK Conservatives might be “testing the limits” of how much disagreement could be stomached by an electorate, however he noted that some of the best criticisms of a British prime minister often came from their own party.
“In the New Zealand context, an MP who did that wouldn’t be an MP for much longer,” Hipkins said.
Bishop nodded: “You’re completely right - PMQs in the UK, Conservative MPs don’t ask patsy questions, they ask stern questions. If you did that here you’d be ex-communicated”.
The Greens’ Jan Logie disagreed with that: “Marama [Davidson, Green co-leader] said I asked the toughest questions in her estimates hearing”.
Bishop said, “Good on you - and good on Marama, but let’s be fair, in the major parties, it’s political death”.
Bishop is only a fairweather supporter of intra-party disagreement (the same, of course, could be said of Hipkins). National’s campaign chair, Bishop issued a press release on Tuesday dubbing the Government the “Cabinet of Chaos”.
National’s Chris Penk said the size of the Parliament was a problem: everyone wanted to be a minister and had a conceivable pathway into Cabinet one day or another.
Palmer said that one of the problems with New Zealand was that everyone wanted to be a minister at the expense of having a career as a parliamentarian.
Hipkins as Prime Minister appears to be walking the talk, allowing disagreement not of a scale that brought down the Fourth Labour Government, but something more collegial.
Robertson and Parker have both made use of this.
There are obvious problems. The first is that disagreements cannot breach caucus confidentiality - MPs cannot blab about internecine spats during a caucus meeting. This is easily resolved by openly taking a policy disagreement, but not divulging how things play out in caucus.
The more difficult one is Cabinet collective responsibility, the principle that ministers in Cabinet agree to collectively hold to the decision of Cabinet.
Overseas, this tends to be sidestepped by conventions of reporting. Ministers leak their respective positions on issues to the press. Disagreements play out in the SW2-ese of “it’s understood”, “people close to … said”, impenetrable to anyone who isn’t part of the club.
This type of disagreement both undesirable and unattainable in New Zealand. Cabinet ministers are so media-facing, they’d confidentially brief their positions one day, and be forced to take the collective responsibility line on the record hours later.
New Zealand has an innovation here that could help, which is the “agree to disagree” clause of the Cabinet Manual, which is commonly used when coalition partners can’t reach agreement on something.
Its use means the partners disagree on a particular issue, but not enough to pull the government down.
This is almost what’s happened to Robertson and Parker, two deeply-Labour ministers who feel strongly about the wealth tax, but whose support for the Labour Party exceeds any disagreement over a single policy.
A united ministry is usually best, but no government can be united on every issue. It’s ridiculous and unrealistic. On this particular issue, Hipkins could hardly have expected Parker, whose views on wealth taxes are well-known, nor Robertson, whose fingerprints were all over the wealth tax proposal, to have swung in behind its rule-out without being honest about their own positions.
Whether the so-far civil disagreement between Labour ministers will engender a broader shift in New Zealand’s political culture, away from seeing such disagreements as “disunity” remains to be seen. One instance does not a culture-shift make.
As Penk and Palmer said last year, there is a broader structural problem to contend with, in that New Zealand’s Parliament simply isn’t big enough to allow disagreement.
Should a minister - and Parker seems the most likely in the current moment - decide to quit the government over an issue and join the backbenches, New Zealand’s small, tightly-whipped Parliament does not allow that ex-minister the opportunity to develop a career as a conscientious backbencher.
It’s hard to develop a reputation in New Zealand as a great committee chair, as one can in the US or UK. Here, such roles are simply seen as being another step on the ladder to the executive.
That’s a problem that could only really be solved by the addition of more MPs, fattening our 120-member Parliament’s razor-thin majorities, and loosening whips’ control of their parties.
The chances of that? Maybe even worse than those of a wealth tax.
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.
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