Guest Post: Conflicts of Interest

A guest post by a reader on Kiwiblog:

This opinion is expressed without intimate knowledge of Cabinet rules or the rules around conflicts pertaining to electoral donations if such exist. It is a “pub-test” analysis which goes looking for and finds what the average bloke might consider hypocrisy and bias.

The Opposition (by which I mean the Media) and the parliamentary parties not in government (Labour and the Greens) have been agitated much about conflicts of interest they perceive in the current Government. Many stirring words have been written about:

Michael Reddell: Wholly inappropriate

It didn’t used to be terribly controversial that powerful independent government bodies and powerful statutory officeholders should “stay in their lane” or “stick to their knitting”. Those entities/individuals typically have a pretty narrow set of official statutory responsibilities and if they are exercising power independently of the naturally-partisan governments of the day, they should focus their energies on those official responsibilities and keep quiet about, and keep out of, other stuff.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 22/6/23

Was that the last post? Michael Wood took steps to deal with the skills shortage – and then he emigrated to the back benches

The last item we recorded, after monitoring the government’s official website yesterday, dealt with changes to the Skilled Migrant Category to help businesses attract workers to fill skill shortages

The statement (Simplified path to residency for skilled workers) was released in the name of the Minister of Immigration, a fellow by name of Michael Wood.

Graham Adams: Hipkins’ government descends into farce

Conflicts of interest make ministers disappear.

It was always amusing when officials in the Soviet Union explained the absence of a prominent figure on account of a cold. In October 1983, after the nation’s leader, Yuri Andropov, had been absent from public duties for months, the Tass news agency released a letter attributed to Andropov that said, yes, he had a cold.

He didn’t appear atop the Lenin Mausoleum for the annual Revolution Day military parade in Red Square in November and it wasn’t long before the “cold” would prove fatal to the former KGB chief. He died in February 1984, of kidney failure.