New powers for delivery minister

The Government’s new ‘‘implementation unit’’ is easily portrayed as farcical. To be embedded in the potent Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the unit will ‘‘monitor and support’’ the progress of key initiatives.

All of which makes it an interventionist tool and a target for reproach and mockery. Not just a small bull’s-eye target, but a veritable dartboard of them.

Naturally the central focus for the dartthrowers is that it looks a lot like an abject admission of the truth behind the frequent charges that the Government too often has failed to deliver on its policies, as evidenced by the failures of KiwiBuild and light rail initiatives.

All together now . . . why should this new outfit be needed if Cabinet ministers and upper-level bureaucrats are doing their jobs in an incisive, co-ordinated way?

As one small voice among the swift rash of online commentaries asked: Isn’t the Government itself meant to be an implementation unit?

The key policies to receive this extra level of attention are mental health, infrastructure, housing and climate change.

Each is unassailably important, although this hardly seems a point that needs to be reinforced to civil servants, some of whom might retort that a policy’s achievability isn’t always up to them.

And that the ‘‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’’ approach isn’t necessarily the case, particularly within the timeframes formulated during election debates.

The question even arises whether projects outside the cited priorities might now have an unacknowledged status of being, to some extent, unmonitored and unsupported? Able to muddle along with less exposure to interventions?

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, who will establish the unit and receive its reports, emphasises that its attention will be particularly focused where multiple agencies are involved in the work.

Presumably, then, this is intended to be a coordinated improvement to ensure that each department is addressing its appointed tasks, but also that there are no unrecognised or unallocated challenges that need to be addressed.

Even then the howl arises that these should be being picked up anyway.

Another scenario is that the unit is less about achieving sweet harmony than pure disciplinarianism, cracking the whip to ensure these agencies actually do as they’re told, in ways that they haven’t been previously.

In which case, Robertson really does assume the informal title of Minister of Delivery, in circumstances that don’t reflect all that well on more than a few of his Cabinet colleagues, some of whom may feel the sting of mistrust in their own abilities.

Certainly Robertson, already Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s right hand, is extending his reach beyond not just that of his deputy PM role but finance minister as well.

In any case, here’s the thing. What really matters is whether the new unit actually works. Whether it ought to be necessary, the wisdom behind the unit’s creation will be tested by how well it achieves its goals.

There’s international precedent for going down this route. Ardern herself had close involvement in something similar when she was working for Tony Blair in the UK.

You could even suggest that there’s a further precedent, of a sort, within New Zealand’s political history. Wasn’t it the case that Helen Clark’s government had its own implementation unit? It was called Heather Simpson.