A big job ahead – is Clark the man to do it?
After months on ice, the Government is finally set to release its huge Health and Disability System Review. Yesterday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the health sector was about to go through a period of ‘‘much-needed’’ reform, and indicated Health Minister David Clark would be leading the charge.
But is he really the right person to lead such an overhaul?
The Heather Simpson review is reported to include recommendations that will see the number of DHBs slashed and much tighter centralised control. It is going to require public support, and Clark doesn’t exactly inspire public confidence.
He refused to receive the report when it was completed near the end of March, so the Government was not obliged to consider it. He said he did not want resources diverted from the Covid-19 response. But he created quite a diversion himself when he broke the lockdown rules.
This saw him swiftly demoted – only just holding on to this ministerial position, with Ardern saying she would have fired him had the country not been in the middle of a pandemic.
Yesterday Labour released its party list for the election, with Clark at No 17, the lowest of any Cabinet minister.
Ardern has never said she lost confidence in Clark, and said yesterday that he would remain as minister, thanks to the success in beating Covid-19. She gave him some credit for this, saying he had made ‘‘a lot of very good decisions’’ and was the right person to lead the review response.
But as most people will be aware, the person leading the charge against Covid19 was not Clark. While health directorgeneral Ashley Bloomfield fielded daily questions, where was the minister?
Giving Clark the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he was making these ‘‘very good decisions’’ in the background. If so, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind, as far as the public were concerned.
But Clark’s weakness was not just over lockdown. He often manages to mar what should be strong stories for the Government. On Sunday it announced
$92.6 million of funding into testing labs, pharmacies, midwives, hospices and call centres to further strengthen readiness for any future crisis.
Clark, who was late arriving, took a tour of the SCL Covid-testing lab at Wellington Hospital for the announcement. He did ask some (simple) questions but looked uninterested.
Perhaps he did not want to be there. It is understood he initially planned to remain in Dunedin and send out a press release instead. Some members of the media were even told he would do embargoed interviews on the previous Friday.
But then came the word from the powers above that he had to make a show in Wellington. When it finally came to his moment in the limelight, he read from a script and did a poor job of going off-script to answer questions. Incompetence was shining through.
He was unable to answer questions in much detail, when he should have been across the issues.
The Government dished out $10m for DHBs to buy ventilators and respiratory equipment, but he had no idea how many were being bought or how much they cost – shifting one of the questions to a hospital staffer.
Another $5.48m was going to midwives, with a one-off lump sum of $2500 each in recognition of the additional costs they incurred as they continued to provide essential care. When pushed about more information on help for midwives, he fobbed the detail off to associate minister Julie Anne Genter – who incidentally seems to have been sidelined from her public health portfolio.
The Government was ‘‘working hard’’ to ensure midwives saw a path ahead was all he managed to say on that topic.
When Stuff asked if the funding was a little too late for some, he said money had already been available for people in difficult situations. No sorry, no explanation.
To top it all off, he managed to misquote the Budget allocation from which the funds were coming. He confidently declared it had come from the $20 billion unallocated in the Budget – only to be quietly corrected afterwards by his staffer, who told media that Finance Minister Grant Robertson wanted to make it clear this was not the case.
Clark did not carry himself like a minister on Sunday. He came across as a first-term MP out of his depth.
The only thing he seemed to be interested in was the Highlanders’ win, the first thing he referred to at the start of what should have been an important Government message.
After this poor performance, can the public have confidence in Clark to undertake such an enormous task as reforming the health system? But who knows, maybe it will redeem him.