But the Prime Minister’s reshuffle on Sunday prompted thoughts about inflation of another sort – the number of ministerial portfolios/titles in our executive government. When the reshuffle comes into effect on Friday there will (still) be 30 members of the executive (Cabinet ministers, ministers outside Cabinet, and parliamentary under-secretaries), 79 portfolios, and 6 distinct “other responsibilities” (and of course lots – 25 in fact – of “Associate Minister of” titles, but I’ll ignore those).
This is how the official ministerial list is laid out these days.
Click to view
In this reshuffle, the Prime Minister didn’t add any new ministers (net), but he did add to the very long list of job titles: Tertiary Education and Skills was split into Universities (Reti) and Vocational Education (Simmonds) – as if (eg) law, accounting, or medical degrees weren’t primarily vocational – and a new “other responsibility” was created in the form of Minister for the South Island (like Minister for Auckland it isn’t a warranted portfolio). The new Minister for Economic Growth title was simply a relabelling of the old, and latterly unimportant (announcing handouts to various “major events” – check Melissa Lee’s press releases) Economic Development portfolio.
Numbers of portfolios (and ministers etc) do fluctuate from time to time. Re portfolios, government re-organisations/reforms matter – eg the Minister of SOEs now has responsibility for a whole bunch of government trading entities that once each had their own minister (and others were sold). But the long-term trend has been solidly upwards.
I went back to the New Zealand Official Yearbooks to get some snapshots each quarter century since 1900. (Here I simply followed the lists and counted “Deputy Prime Minister” and “Minister without Portfolio” as portfolios, a description here which does not distinguish (as NZOYB did not) between warranted and other distinct responsibilities. There were very few associate or deputy positions until the 2000 list)
Click to view
The current Ministerial List structure seems to be available online back to about 2005. So for more recent years I used those lists. For what follows I’ve used Helen Clark’s final list (the numbers from her first list are in the table above), John Key’s first one, Bill English’s last one, Jacinda Ardern’s post-election 2017 and 2020 lists, a late one from Chris Hipkins, and Christopher Luxon’s first and most recent lists. I’ve shown both the number of warranted portfolios and the number of (distinct) “other responsibilities”, partly because over time some roles have gravitated from one column to the other with legislative change (eg responsibility for the SIS and GCSB), and partly because the older lists summarised above didn’t make the distinction).
Click to view
So that is two new records – 81 job titles in his first list a mere 14 months ago and 85 now – set by Luxon, leading the government that had won office on talk of government bloat etc. And if the number of members of the executive isn’t a new record, it is certainly right up there (we’ve had 120 MPs since MMP was introduced in 1996, and as recently as 1999/2000 had “only” 25 members of the executive).
By contrast, in 1949/50 and 1975 – when the government had its hand in so much of the economy – National Party Prime Ministers Holland and Muldoon had governments with many fewer members of the executive and many fewer job titles (In 1991, Bolger had 25 people in the executive and about 70 distinct job titles).
Do these job titles come at vast expense? No doubt, not (a few changes to ministerial letterheads). Most of the “grace and favour” ones seem empty or unnecessary or just a piece of cheap political rhetoric: “we care” about group or sector, x, y, or z. A cynic who I mentioned these numbers to wondered if perhaps Luxon might have a growth target of getting to 100 ministerial titles: Minister for Wellington, Minister for Regional North Island perhaps, or Minister for Catholics, Minister for Protestants, Minister for Other Religions, and Minister for Atheists? Given how much money we throw at the industry it is perhaps a little surprising that no PM has yet set up a “Minister for Film” or Minister for Gaming”. And in a few countries (including in our region) they do split Treasury and Finance into separate portfolios.
It is insubstantial bloat – fault of successive Prime Ministers, although on this one Luxon appears to be the worst – made worse because every new portfolio titles attracts interested parties and pressure to “do something” under the aegis of that portfolio. Cynics suggest, for example, that the Minister for the South Island title was created mainly because there is no capable South Island minister actually in Cabinet, but presumably now the pressure will be on for James Meager to have some announceables (perhaps even some distinct bureaucrats). It just sends all the wrong signals from a government that talks about restraint, fiscal discipline, focusing on essentials etc. Much better to have slimmed the list of titles – and perhaps the list of people. Without more than two minutes effort I found it really easy to eliminate 21 of the job titles (and that is before starting on the associates – Associate Minister for Sport and Recreation anyone (that’s Chris Bishop by the way), and we once had an Associate Minister for the Rugby World Cup).
Not only would ending the title inflation be quite possible here, it can be and is done elsewhere. In the UK, for example, (a much bigger country and Parliament) there are lots of junior ministers but only around 30 distinct portfolio areas/titles. Australia’s federal government appears to have about 50.
Where might one start? Well, consider James Meager (who seems a perfectly able person, so this is not intended as a reflection on him). He has been given 3 distinct portfolios/responsibilities – Minister for Hunting and Fishing, Minister for Youth, and Minister for the South Island – not one of which is actually needed (at least for anything other than political show).
Michael Reddell spent most of his career at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, where he was heavily involved with monetary policy formulation, and in financial markets and financial regulatory policy, serving for a time as Head of Financial Markets. Michael blogs at Croaking Cassandra - where this article was sourced.
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