Quiet Questions, thanks to master of the dead bat
Hipkins given a surprisingly easy ride in his first appearance as Police Minister
It was the first Question Time since Labour’s reshuffle, and new Police Minister Chris Hipkins was clearly expecting his feet to be held to the flames by the National Party.
Alas, it appeared that law and order was suddenly yesterday’s news for the Opposition. The new blacks were gib board and health as the flu filled the hospitals.
If Labour had hoped the switch from Poto Williams to Hipkins as Police Minister would be an instant fix-it for its crime headache, it may have taken heart when it discovered that National’s Mark Mitchell was not asking a single question of Hipkins.
Hipkins instead resorted to having Labour MP Ginny Andersen ask him a question instead.
Williams could only glare as her nemesis on the other side — Mitchell — sat there in silence after peppering her with questions day after day.
The only reactions Hipkins got out of Mitchell was a sarcastic clap when Hipkins conceded gang tensions had risen. Another came when Hipkins declared “I am interested in what works, not empty slogans.” It was clearly a jab at Mitchell’s “soft on crime” broken record and there was a splutter of noise from Mitchell’s direction, but his mask muffled his words.
At the end of Andersen’s less than rigorous interrogation, a disappointed Hipkins sat down and said “Come on, Mark!” in the tone of a rider geeing up a horse.
Hipkins’ art in the Covid-19 portfolio was in playing a dead bat.
He does not play offensively or defensively — he simply kills the ball.
He would take even the most politically-barbed questions as legitimate attempts to get information and give it accordingly, thereby killing the politics. Mitchell had spent weeks trying to get Williams to admit gang tensions were rising and she had resisted. Hipkins had clearly anticipated the same, so he dead-batted ahead of time.
Asked earlier in the day what he hoped to achieve, he said “clearly there’s been an escalation in gangrelated violence and gang-related tension — that’s not acceptable, so we do need to get that back under control.”
The only minister in a new portfolio who got a question from National was Justice Minister Kiri Allan.
She began well enough when Paul Goldsmith asked what her priorities were — setting out electoral reform, and putting victims at the centre of the justice system.
Then Goldsmith asked whether she would be advocating against anything that infringed on the principle of one-person, one vote. It
The only reactions Hipkins got out of Mitchell was a sarcastic clap when Hipkins conceded that gang tensions had risen. Another came when Hipkins declared “I am interested in what works, not empty slogans.”
was obvious that his question related to the Canterbury Regional Council (Nga¯ i Tahu Representation) Bill, which will give mana whenua two entrenched seats on Environment Canterbury.
It is a bill Goldsmith has frequently criticised. Allan either missed it or deliberately misunderstood and instead talked about electoral law reform.
Goldsmith followed up with a specific question about the bill. Allan began by saying that bill was put up by a local council so it was not in her area of responsibility. Alas, she did not stop there.
She went on and on about the bill, and by the time she ended she may as well have painted a big target on herself for future questions.
Time for Hipkins to take her off to the nets for a coaching clinic on the dead bat.
Otherwise, it was left to Labour to use its healthy allocation of patsy questions as warm-ups for the other newly minted ministers. In an apparent bid to get the firsttime nerves out of the way, Labour had its own MPS ask patsy questions to Hipkins, to Ayesha Verrall on Covid-19, to Jan Tinetti in her expanded role as associate education minister, and even to the seasoned Megan Woods in the Building and Construction portfolio.
Woods made a start in that portfolio by announcing a taskforce into the shortage of gib. The announcement of that earned her sarcastic applause from the Opposition.
Whether he was still groggy from his recent surgery, or dreaming of his new life beyond the walls of Parliament, Speaker Trevor Mallard was in a remarkably tolerant mood for long answers, ensuring Question Time ran 20 minutes overtime.
But when Woods tried to strut her stuff with her new-found technical knowledge of 101 uses for plasterboard, even Mallard had had enough and pulled her up. —