All power to Luxon’s elbow in his cleanup
| Published date | 26 April 2024 |
| Author | Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland. |
| Publication title | New Zealand Herald, The (Auckland, New Zealand) |
If he sticks with this political heresy that ministers can be removed so quickly on performance grounds — and especially if it becomes doctrine for future Governments — it could be enough on its own to establish a Luxon legacy. It’s often best to let people fail fast.
How much better off might the previous Government have been — and New Zealand — had Jacinda Ardern applied the same rigour to, say, the problem of Phil Twyford, her first Minister of Housing and also Transport?
As early as March 2018, just months since it too had been sworn in, experts in the property industry were saying that the Ardern Government was going about KiwiBuild all wrong.
That was the moment to sack Twyford. Instead Ardern waited 15 months more before sacking him as Housing Minister. By then, her signature policy lay in ruins, having become a laughing stock.
Ardern then let Twyford struggle on for a further 16 months before sacking him as Transport Minister, but not before he had turned her other signature policy, light rail, into an even worse fiasco.
Yet Ardern still refused to sack him entirely, giving him the consolation job of Minister of Disarmament and Arms Control. I could leave it to Jon Stewart to point out Russia invaded Ukraine soon after, following one of the biggest global military rearmaments since the end of the Cold War.
It wasn’t until Chris Hipkins became Prime Minister that Twyford was finally dispatched to the backbench altogether.
When Hipkins finds out who was responsible for the further dumbing down of the nation’s primary schools since 2017 with an overemphasis on “inquiry learning”, and who failed to order Covid vaccine in time to prevent the 2021 lockdown, hopefully he’ll give them the sack too.
The closest parallel to what Luxon did on Wednesday was when John Key sacked Housing Minister Phil Heatley and Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson in January 2013, but that was in his fifth year as Prime Minister — not his fifth month.
At one measure at least, Luxon is working at 12 times his mentor’s pace.
The 2013 Heatley and Wilkinson sackings was more of a surprise to some journalists than Wednesday’s, since neither was quite so poor at answering their questions as Lee and Simmonds.
But that is just a symptom of our political culture having become so debased by the dominance of the now almost constant two-minute media stand-ups as MPs head in and out of caucus meetings and Parliament.
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