The prime minister didn’t take full advantage of either. The minor reshuffle that promoted Rachel Brooking into the executive and Willow-Jean Prime into Cabinet was forced on him by Stuart Nash emptying his six-gun into his own foot.
It gave Hipkins a chance to right some wrongs that went almost without comment in his first reshuffle - was it really only 10 weeks ago?
But it only went some of the way.
When he installed his new team back at the start of February, Hipkins may have been distracted by the wild weather that was doing so much damage. In his haste to put a post-Ardern team in place, strange decisions were made.
On the positive side of the ledger, promoting Jan Tinetti and Ayesha Verrall to prominent front-bench slots - though risky given their relative inexperience - was absolutely the right call. You can’t put a fresh face on your team without fresh faces.
Promoting Nash ahead of far safer pairs of hands was clearly a mistake, which Nash quickly auto-corrected. Presumably Hipkins wanted to push forward the police minister to counter National’s “soft on crime” attacks. If that was the motivation, it has somewhat back-fired, with Ginny Andersen now holding the role at number 18 in Cabinet.
(Cabinet ratings might seem like something for politico-nerds, not voters, but inside the Beehive they do matter. Being further up the greasy pole gives you greater influence, pulling power for the best staff and a louder voice. And in the arcane world of the Beehiverachy, if you are higher ranked, then other ministers come to your office for meetings. Very Old School.)
By far Hipkins’ greatest misstep, however, was ranking his “outward-facing” ministers so lowly and, to a lesser extent, his conservation and environment portfolios.
Putting his foreign minister in the form of Nanaia Mahuta at 16, defence in the shape of Andrew Little at 13 and - less concerning - trade and export growth minister Damien O’Connor at 12 may have passed without much comment domestically. (Most focused on how Mahuta was being demoted for stuffing up the sales job on Three Waters. That was the second opportunity missed this week, if the Government thinks the changes there will silence the critics.)
As one former Beehive insider put it, countries have armies of diplomats interpreting such things as ministerial rankings and promotion/relegations. As do our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade officials, when ministers are about to interact with their counterparts.
Entrail-readers in overseas capitals would have seen those ranking as a downgrading of how seriously New Zealand took foreign affairs and security issues.
In the treatment of Mahuta, they would have seen a foreign minister with less influence and on the way out. Not someone with real grunt in the Cabinet room. (Under John Key, Foreign Minister Murray McCully also had a low-ish ranking but no one ever doubted his reach.)
Similarly they may have interpreted Little’s position as an expression of the reduced weight NZ puts on defence and security issues at a time when the western world is exercised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If you need further evidence, look at our traditional allies. It is rare to see a foreign minister or equivalent - such as the Secretary of State in the US - ranked lower than third of fourth in the executive line-up.
Furthermore, though our PM is usually a super-foreign minister, Hipkins is yet to achieve the status of an Ardern, Key or Clark in that regard.
If the outward-facing portfolios languished, then the environment and conservation roles were downgraded - in the case of conservation, banished outside Cabinet.
The exception was Nash’s relatively high ranking as oceans and fisheries minister - and we know how that ended.
Even then, Nash was hardly seen as a conservationist among the environmental lobby groups and green-tinged allies of Labour. They saw in him someone who would put the concerns of fishers over oceans.
There was, according to one insider, shock and even tears at the Department of Conservation (DOC) when they realised their new minister, Willow-Jean Prime, would not be sitting around the Cabinet table.
That DOC-shock will have lessened to some extent with Prime’s promotion this week, though she remains low-ranked. The environmentally well-qualified Brooking’s appointment to the oceans and fisheries job will have stilled some concerns, albeit she is a minister outside Cabinet.
As he rightly shifted his emphasis on to bread-and-butter issues, Hipkins clearly did not think through how best to treat foreign policy and enviro-conservation roles.
Neither was causing any loss of Labour’s support to the centre-right, and could have been given due prominence.
Maybe it is a cleverly-calibrated judgement that, in the case of conservation, the Greens will reap the harvest of Labour’s snub, so no harm is done to the wider left.......The full article is published HERE
Vernon Small is a former journalist and advisor to the Attorney General. He now writes a weekly column for the Sunday Star-Times.
On the positive side of the ledger, promoting Jan Tinetti and Ayesha Verrall to prominent front-bench slots - though risky given their relative inexperience - was absolutely the right call. You can’t put a fresh face on your team without fresh faces.
Promoting Nash ahead of far safer pairs of hands was clearly a mistake, which Nash quickly auto-corrected. Presumably Hipkins wanted to push forward the police minister to counter National’s “soft on crime” attacks. If that was the motivation, it has somewhat back-fired, with Ginny Andersen now holding the role at number 18 in Cabinet.
(Cabinet ratings might seem like something for politico-nerds, not voters, but inside the Beehive they do matter. Being further up the greasy pole gives you greater influence, pulling power for the best staff and a louder voice. And in the arcane world of the Beehiverachy, if you are higher ranked, then other ministers come to your office for meetings. Very Old School.)
By far Hipkins’ greatest misstep, however, was ranking his “outward-facing” ministers so lowly and, to a lesser extent, his conservation and environment portfolios.
Putting his foreign minister in the form of Nanaia Mahuta at 16, defence in the shape of Andrew Little at 13 and - less concerning - trade and export growth minister Damien O’Connor at 12 may have passed without much comment domestically. (Most focused on how Mahuta was being demoted for stuffing up the sales job on Three Waters. That was the second opportunity missed this week, if the Government thinks the changes there will silence the critics.)
As one former Beehive insider put it, countries have armies of diplomats interpreting such things as ministerial rankings and promotion/relegations. As do our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade officials, when ministers are about to interact with their counterparts.
Entrail-readers in overseas capitals would have seen those ranking as a downgrading of how seriously New Zealand took foreign affairs and security issues.
In the treatment of Mahuta, they would have seen a foreign minister with less influence and on the way out. Not someone with real grunt in the Cabinet room. (Under John Key, Foreign Minister Murray McCully also had a low-ish ranking but no one ever doubted his reach.)
Similarly they may have interpreted Little’s position as an expression of the reduced weight NZ puts on defence and security issues at a time when the western world is exercised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If you need further evidence, look at our traditional allies. It is rare to see a foreign minister or equivalent - such as the Secretary of State in the US - ranked lower than third of fourth in the executive line-up.
Furthermore, though our PM is usually a super-foreign minister, Hipkins is yet to achieve the status of an Ardern, Key or Clark in that regard.
If the outward-facing portfolios languished, then the environment and conservation roles were downgraded - in the case of conservation, banished outside Cabinet.
The exception was Nash’s relatively high ranking as oceans and fisheries minister - and we know how that ended.
Even then, Nash was hardly seen as a conservationist among the environmental lobby groups and green-tinged allies of Labour. They saw in him someone who would put the concerns of fishers over oceans.
There was, according to one insider, shock and even tears at the Department of Conservation (DOC) when they realised their new minister, Willow-Jean Prime, would not be sitting around the Cabinet table.
That DOC-shock will have lessened to some extent with Prime’s promotion this week, though she remains low-ranked. The environmentally well-qualified Brooking’s appointment to the oceans and fisheries job will have stilled some concerns, albeit she is a minister outside Cabinet.
As he rightly shifted his emphasis on to bread-and-butter issues, Hipkins clearly did not think through how best to treat foreign policy and enviro-conservation roles.
Neither was causing any loss of Labour’s support to the centre-right, and could have been given due prominence.
Maybe it is a cleverly-calibrated judgement that, in the case of conservation, the Greens will reap the harvest of Labour’s snub, so no harm is done to the wider left.......The full article is published HERE
Vernon Small is a former journalist and advisor to the Attorney General. He now writes a weekly column for the Sunday Star-Times.
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