Vernon Small: Strange decisions made in cabinet reshuffle

Last week was a tale of two opportunities for Chris Hipkins to fix past miscues.

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.

Point of Order: Covid is still with us, so don’t expect gang violence and ram raids to be eradicated now that Hipkins has the Police portfolio

On the Beehive website, news of Kris Faafoi resigning from Parliament preceded news of the PM reshuffling her cabinet. Indeed, Faafoi’s resignation – along with news of Trevor Mallard stepping down as Speaker of the House – provided the rationale for the PM’ reshuffle.

The timing in our email in-tray was different. First (at 3.14pm), we learned of the Cabinet reshuffle and then (at 3.16pm) we were advised of Faafoi’s resignation.

No matter. The PM’s press statement said she has made changes to her Cabinet line-up following the decision of senior Minister Kris Faafoi to resign from Parliament and Speaker Trevor Mallard’s nomination to a European diplomatic posting.

Michael Bassett: Shuffling de-faced cards: Jacinda’s “new” cabinet

With so many of her Labour caucus looking as if they’ll lose their seats at the next election, I expected Jacinda’s recent Cabinet changes to promote lots of new faces from the backbenches with the intention of giving her ministry a new look. Maybe she’d give a few of her caucus more experience of government. But then I reviewed the people on offer and realized that she had little choice. Lots of low-level lawyers, educationalists, health workers and student politicians with little experience except working for trade unions. No commercial experience. No stars. Thus, Jacinda had little alternative to re-shuffling her current de-faced set of cards. She passed over re-promoting Phil Twyford, and she ignored Aupito William Sio, Rino Tirikatene and Deborah Russell, bringing into Cabinet only Priyanca Radhakrishnan. Kieran McAnulty got a junior ministerial role outside Cabinet. There’ll be a new Speaker with the ever-so-undiplomatic Trevor Mallard setting off on a diplomatic career. He’s better than the egregiously undiplomatic Louisa Wall who was recently bumped from Parliament to what has been billed as a diplomatic post in the Pacific, much to the horror of the Foreign Ministry. I realise that is scarcely high praise for Trevor.