Committee meeting madness: MPs go rogue
Forget about Netflix: Select committees are usually dry, boring affairs but the spats between MPs over the past fortnight have been top viewing.
It is that time of year where ministers get hauled in to explain how they plan to spend the money in their portfolio area on the back of last month’s Budget, and it has proved to be compelling viewing.
Think Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones turning up in a bright orange hi-vis jacket for apparently no reason at all; State Services Minister Chris Hipkins swigging from a can of Coke throughout his appearance; and National MP Chris Bishop struggling to keep his frustration under control as he asked the police minister if he was simply in the business of throwing official advice in the rubbish bin.
Much of what was presented in the flurry of meetings political reporters have been bouncing between was not particularly newsworthy but the bizarre – and at times offensive – exchanges, the props and an inability to keep things under control by some chairs has made for some notable headlines.
Rewind to the Tuesday before last and Hipkins kicked things off with his education hat on. He and former minister Nikki Kaye are well-known for their heated exchanges in the House, and his estimates hearing did not disappoint.
There might have been 13 people around that table but this was a Kaye v Hipkins showdown.
If Kaye’s National Party colleagues thought they had a hope in hell of getting more than one question in during the almost twohour hearing then they were sadly mistaken.
Next out of the blocks was selfprofessed ‘‘provincial champion’’ Jones and his considerable entourage on Thursday.
Nobody missed him coming as he plonked himself down dressed like a gigantic orange, leaving some in the room searching through their bags for a pair of sunglasses.
Jones had a long list of cliches with him and was intent on getting every single one of them out of his system – there was ‘‘the spoils go to the victor’’, ‘‘to the winner goes the booty’’ and ‘‘first up, best dressed’’, just to name a few.
But it was a last-minute decision to pop in to Tourism Minister Kelvin Davis’ appearance later the same day that really set a new bar for select committees gone mad.
There was Davis calling National MP Jacqui Dean ‘‘hysterical’’ (something he subsequently apologised to both Dean and his boss for); there was the ‘‘don’t talk to me like that’’ thrown at chair Jonathan Young; and a general refusal to answer many of the questions posed.
The real cringe moments came when Davis decided questions did not even require a response and he simply stared down the MP, shrugged his shoulders or muttered something inaudible.
Surely things would improve this week? With Winston Peters set to appear, you’d be joking.
First, though, it was Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor’s turn on Tuesday – at least MPs had turned up by this time; earlier on, when Stuart Nash presented, he asked whether nobody cared about fisheries given only about 30 per cent of the committee members showed up.
O’Connor had a huge two-hour block to cover off all his delegations, but his biggest test was whether he could get an answer in before former minister Nathan Guy did it for him. At one point, after Guy had answered at least two of his colleague Stuart Smith’s questions, he turned and apologised to Smith who was growing increasingly frustrated at the stream of consciousness directed in his right ear.
Fast-forward to Thursday and it was showtime for Employment Minister Willie Jackson – he wasn’t actually fronting a select committee, he was simply a member of one.
Defence Minister Ron Mark rocked in alongside outgoing Chief of Defence Tim Keating and former minister Mark Mitchell was ready to make Mark squirm on why he is yet to take anything to Cabinet around procurement.
Mitchell might have made a better point on several occasions if he had not prefaced every question with a five-minute ramble about his time in the job.
Jackson, never one to sit quietly in the background, had quite possibly broken into Hipkins’ soft drink supply before turning up as he went from zero to 100 in about three seconds, demanding he be allowed a supplementary question.
The chair, a much quieter and more restrained Simon O’Connor, didn’t quite know what to do other than to continuously point out that he was in charge and that Jackson hadn’t been there for long.
Well that set Jackson, who is no newbie to Parliament, right off as he scrapped with O’Connor over his experience while yelling at the top of his lungs: ‘‘I want a sup’’.
‘‘It’s not the world according to you lot,’’ he shouted in the direction of Mitchell who, among the shambles unfolding, was attempting to carry on his line of questioning.
Mark, completely confused about what to do, ended up breaking into fits of laughter (along with the rest of the packed public gallery).
The only ones keeping a straight face were the dozen or so men and women in Defence Force uniform who looked like they were in a state of shock.
Wrapping up the week was Peters – never one to disappoint on the quick-witted sledging front – with his foreign affairs hat on.
Peters set the tone early when he loftily explained to his opponents he used to charge $500 an hour for the sort of advice he was now offering them for free, even if it was advice they did not want.
But there is nothing Peters loves more than a young whippersnapper (in his mind) taking him on, and this week it was rookie National MP Chris Penk, who thought he could actually win.
Penk was trying to bait Peters over his failure to condemn a proHizbollah demonstration in Auckland, on which he was quickly advised: ‘‘don’t get in a crap fight you can’t win, son’’.
Parliament announced this week it was set to embark on a trial of live-streaming meetings to make them more accessible for the public.
If the past two weeks is the new normal, select committees might just be the new prime-time viewing – popcorn is recommended.
Labour doesn’t have years of popular support and a strong record in government to hold it up.
It wasn’t the baby send-off Jacinda Ardern wanted. The week hurtled from the threestrikes shambles on Monday, to a Green Party implosion on Wednesday, and a NZ First explosion over Fonterra.
Somehow the sight of the heavily pregnant prime minister, striding around Hamilton Fieldays in her gumboots, trailed by a gaggle of national and international media, managed to seem like the most normal thing in the world compared with what was happening back in Wellington.
Even some of the more staid select committee hearings had started to gain a slightly hysterical edge.
By yesterday morning, Labour’s grimly determined team of party strategists and spin doctors had reached deep into their bag of tricks and dragged out a pile of speeches and announcements to bury another untidy week – a tourist levy, a living wage for core public servants, and proposed new border control measures, all before lunchtime.
It’s the age-old strategy for digging yourself out of a hole – wrest back the political agenda, get busy, show people you’re getting on with running the country.
In reality, however, it’s Ardern who makes it all right for Labour when things go wrong. Like John Key and Helen Clark before him, Ardern’s Government leans heavily on the Teflon coating that comes with her being a popular prime minister in her first term.
But Fieldays was Ardern’s last official engagement for the next six weeks or so. The prime minister has left the building and Labour is in uncharted territory.
Unlike National, when John Key left the building for good, it doesn’t have years of popular support and a strong record in government to hold it up.
It hasn’t even ticked off its first year yet.
The rest of Ardern’s ministers are largely unknowns and, for better or worse, the ‘‘face of the Government’’ for the next six weeks will be the only one most people know – NZ First leader and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters.
There will be a flurry of good news and political goodwill when baby Ardern-Gayford is born. But then Ardern’s ministers will be on their own.
What shape will her government be in when she returns? Here are three potential fault-lines.
Relationship issues
Someone is going to have to buddy up to Winston Peters now that Ardern is gone and it won’t be Andrew Little.
Little might be one of Ardern’s most senior ministers but he made a rookie MMP mistake of getting too far ahead of Peters and the Cabinet by announcing plans to repeal the three-strikes law before getting signoff from either.
Little might have thought he had a deal with Peters but Parliament is littered with the political corpses of those who thought they could second guess the mercurial NZ First leader.
Peters wasted no sentimentality on his Labour colleague before pulling the rug out from under the proposal. Little should have seen it coming. NZ First is not going to let itself to be out-toughed by National on law and order.
If Little is looking for sympathy from Team Labour, however, he won’t find much. He is being blamed for the stuff-up.
Relationship management with Peters – and the Greens, of course – is a huge part of Ardern’s day-today job. She makes it look easy, but Little’s blunder reminds her colleagues that, in Peters, Labour has got a tiger by the tail.
Ardern’s deputy Kelvin Davis, Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Labour’s chief of staff, Mike Munro, will have a fulltime job managing the relationship in her absence. Because history tells us that if things go bad with Peters, they will go very bad.
The Shane Jones factor
Jones’ one-man crusade to lift NZ First support in the regions might be as much about his own ambitions for the leadership as it is about raising the party’s profile.
And like his attack on Air New Zealand, which he lambasted for pulling out of the regions, his attack on dairy giant Fonterra is a case of picking his targets carefully.
Ardern slapped Jones down when he called on the Air NZ board to stand down, but danced on the head of a pin over his Fonterra blasting, when she suggested he was talking in a personal capacity, not his ministerial one.
Given that Jones gave flight to his Fonterra fury when stopped by media on his way into Parliament, that’s a stretch.
As in the case of Air NZ, however, Labour won’t lose too much sleep that public sympathy is on Fonterra’s side. If anything, regional New Zealand is probably cheering Jones on.
Ardern can always argue, meanwhile, that Jones is Peters’ problem, not hers. In the case of Fonterra, Peters backed Jones to the hilt.
But it would have been a very different story if Peters had been in Ardern’s seat already.
Peters’ priority over the next six weeks will be to maintain a sense of Government stability.
Another firecracker-like attack from Jones could undermine that if Peters as prime minister refuses to rein him in.
A Green Party revolt
The Greens are at a crossroads after Land Information Minister and party MP Eugenie Sage gave approval to a Chinese waterbottling giant to buy a Bay of Plenty spring and export more than a billion litres of drinking water each year.
The approval is anathema to everything it campaigned on.
Former Green MP Sue Bradford has labelled the parliamentary wing of the party clueless and warns the party’s survival is in mortal danger from the backlash, She is not the only one.
Sage should have pushed back against officials who were advising her that the Government’s hands were tied.
Even if the application had been approved with strings that were so onerous that the case ended up in court, that might not have been the worst thing to happen, even if it is the stuff of nightmares for officials.
Sage and the other Green ministers – including Greens coleader James Shaw – have been model coalition ministers. But the grass roots will revolt unless they start rocking some boats.
Having NZ First’s jack-booted antics rubbed in their nose won’t help.