A good guy who took one for the team
When Kris Faafoi stood up to deliver his valedictory speech in Parliament on Thursday, he got a standing ovation before it even began.
A bloke who is regarded with genuine affection by the Labour Party – and by most who have spent a decent amount of time with him – Faafoi gave a genuinely funny speech sprinkled with more serious points about being a parliamentarian and what he has achieved.
The first MP of Tokelauan descent, Faafoi started as a junior in the Press Gallery with TVNZ before becoming a reporter and then shifting to be chief press secretary for Labour MP Phil Goff during the first term of John Key’s government. He was elected to the seat of Mana, which basically covers the greater Porirua area, near Wellington, in 2010.
A popular parliamentarian, he has a big smile and wicked sense of humour, and wears loud suits.
As minister, his tenure was a mixed bag, and in one person almost sums up the contradictions of Ardern’s Labour. In the 2017-20 term he was rightly considered a rising star, a competent minister, prepared to consult, listen and learn.
At the top end of town Faafoi was one Cabinet minister who wasn’t considered reflexively anti-business or another cookie-cutter Labour MP off the student politician-young Labour-political stafferMP conveyor belt.
In his first term, he was in charge of commerce and consumer affairs, civil defence (now called minister of emergency management), and was associate immigration minister.
In commerce he did a couple of big things: the first was to institute Commerce Commission market studies into the various sectors of the economy considered to have an insufficient degree of competition, most recently into supermarkets, and one soon into building supplies.
There are plenty of legitimate questions over whether the commission has done a good job and whether – even if there are clear competition shortcomings – it is really best placed to correct them.
Nevertheless, sunlight is a good disinfectant, and these exercises will most definitely be utilised by future Nationalled governments as well.
But it was Faafoi’s determination to go after loan sharks that, in part, gave birth to the new, problematic Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act changes that have made getting mortgages more difficult.
Now, cracking down on crook pay-day lenders and loan sharks that provide loans they know cannot be repaid, or don’t care either way, is a worthy thing to try to do.
But the fact is, over the centuries, loan sharks have proved remarkably durable precisely because they provide liquidity at the bottom end of the market, where credit is bad and loans can be welshed on. People with no other options use loan sharks because they’ve no other options.
The CCCFA, which ended up coming into force under current minister David Clark, has, instead, tied up a lot of middle class borrowers trying to get credit. Quite why it was ever applied to mainline financial institutions is another matter.
What’s more, Labour was warned about this, but then, when tighter lending happened as a result, there were plenty of ministers who thought the banks were playing political silly buggers – rather than understanding that banks are conservative institutions in which any law-breaking is viewed dimly.
So that hasn’t been a great result and despite some tweaks by Clark earlier this year, it still needs to be fixed.
In immigration, Faafoi’s performance has reflected the sclerotic nature of Labour’s view of it. This has probably been the most anti-immigration government in decades.
Not anti-immigrant, far from it, but sceptical of the central role immigration plays in New Zealand’s economy.
This seems to have been derived from a view that there were too many people arriving for infrastructure to keep up, that it drove wages down, and that many vulnerable migrants were exploited. It became an article of faith for Labour while in opposition.
The much-vaunted immigration reset, headed by Faafoi as immigration minister from late 2020, was signalled when the borders first closed in 2020 and then reflected those suspicions.
However, the end result, which was released in May was a reheating of the old system, with changes to some categories and some important rules around higherthan-minimum wages that need to be paid if bringing in certain workers.
The general thread of Labour’s immigration scepticism, however, has fallen by the wayside as the reality of economic constraints, already emerging before Covid-19, has become apparent. Faafoi’s reforms, in a difficult portfolio, essentially acknowledged this.
Immigration settings, however, do wax and wane over time, and it is most probably as broadcasting minister that he will really leave his mark. He has set the Government on track to merge RNZ and TVNZ, effectively setting up a new commercial, non-profit entity.
Faafoi launched a brief but strong defence of this in his valedictory, making the case that very few people consume a lot of what public broadcasters produce – especially those who need quality information.
The new entity is being nutted out by an establishment board led by former NZ First minister Tracey Martin. But at this point the structure is quite unclear.
In the end it is neither fish nor fowl; instead a partly commercial, partly public broadcaster bringing together two organisations, each with a different ethos. It also doesn’t help the sector much as TVNZ will still be a big competitor for the advertising dollar.
Had Labour really believed in public broadcasting it would have gone the whole hog and simply funded an ABC or BBC-style, multi-platform broadcaster, paid for by the taxpayer. But that never really seems to have been on the cards. Given the current economic climate, funding $300 million-$400m for a new broadcaster might have been a bridge too far.
More than anything, and this will be the case of all ministers in this Government, Faafoi was a minister during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, when the Government basically closed down, and then subsidised, most of the country.
And it did so, initially at least, with massive public support. He then took one for the team and shouldered two very difficult portfolios when he knew he wouldn’t be around for that long.
It was only revealed when his resignation was announced that Faafoi had planned to step down at the last election, but had been convinced by Jacinda Ardern to stay. You could tell. While still diligent and conscientious, he did not seem like someone whose heart was really in it any more. On Thursday, the day after his youngest child turned 5, he gave his last speech and was out of the building.
With Faafoi’s exit the at-timesgrindingly-earnest Labour Party will lose a bit of its fun, some of its colour and one of its better ministers.