John Armstrong: Lapses of judgment costly

While it is not uncommon for the Prime Minister to lecture her ministers about lax discipline, the sermons are normally reserved for the first Cabinet meeting of the year, not one held at the tail-end.

David Benson-Pope's shocking lapses of judgment alone justified Helen Clark cracking the whip, but she would have had other reasons to conduct a lesson in political house-keeping before her Labour colleagues go on holiday.

Clark's cherished third term in power has got off to a bad start. She will not want the mistakes and lingering problems of the past two months persisting in the New Year, when they will start to corrode Labour's standing.

Things got off on the wrong foot with Winston Peters facing widespread criticism for accepting the post of Foreign Minister, then displaying acute discomfort in adjusting to the role.

Civil war broke out at TVNZ, with ministers accused of meddling. Labour had to bow to the inevitability of a select committee inquiry before one was forced on it.

The Treasury tried to be purist, but ended up being political in calling for tax cuts, kneecapping Michael Cullen in the process.

The Reserve Bank's frantic, but so far unsuccessful attempts to prick the property market bubble could now mean "crash landing", not "soft landing" for the economy next year.

To cap things off, Benson-Pope has put Machiavelli to shame in trying to massage public opinion. He has attacked the police. He brazenly tried to weaken the meaning of prima facie.

He secretly leaked the police report on the investigation into allegations that he assaulted students, yet he was publicly saying the timing of the release was for the police to decide.

He told his press secretary to leak the report - and then left him in the lurch.

What will really annoy Clark is that Benson-Pope has displayed the kind of arrogance that people come to expect from a Government in its third term.

She spring-cleaned the Cabinet by giving all her ministers, apart from herself and Michael Cullen, new jobs to ward off arrogance and complacency, the twin dangers of a lengthy tenure in the Beehive.

Benson-Pope's political judgment is all the more wanting for failing to recognise the additional pressures bearing down on the new Clark ministry.

A slowing economy will remove the latitude for mistakes. In boom times, voters are willing to ignore faults. When the economy turns, the mood can sour rapidly. Suddenly everything the Government does is wrong.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary four-party arrangement which gives Clark the numbers to govern remains unproven in terms of whether it will work satisfactorily.

There is bound to be friction at some point between the partners and unforeseen difficulties in applying the convention of ministerial responsibility to some things Peters and Peter Dunne do as ministers, but not others.

The capacity for things to go wrong has increased markedly - even ignoring the Peters factor. That puts the onus on ministers to keep things even tidier in their own neck of the woods.

The unnerving aspect of the Benson-Pope case for Labour is that he actually kept the Prime Minister's office in the loop.

The trouble was he and his staff painted too rosy a picture of the contents of the police report into the alleged incidents of assault when he was teaching at Dunedin's Bayfield High School in 1982.

He had some grounds for doing that. The police's establishment of a prima facie case for prosecution over the claim that he struck a student at a school camp is highly debatable.

But the report's finding on the sticky tape and tennis-ball-in-the-mouth incident was far less favourable to him.

And in neither case was he vindicated, as he claimed in a statement last Sunday.

Benson-Pope forgot Clark's maxim: always under-promise and then over-deliver.

The exposure of his attempt to manipulate public opinion by surreptitiously pre-releasing parts of the report then selectively highlighting elements that backed his denial earned him the wrath of newspaper editorial writers, the scorn of colleagues, and allowed the Opposition to set the agenda in Parliament all week.

For all that, his resignation has never seemed a prospect. Benson-Pope is widely disliked, but Clark sees things in him which others do not. She decided early that he would not lose his job. The reason? Public opinion has not swung against him - at least, not yet.

Sacking him would serve little political benefit. Most people would assume the minister was being punished for his past behaviour as a teacher, not his present machinations as a politician.

Working in Benson-Pope's favour is that he is not a "face" of Labour. As Social Development Minister, his job is to implement the agenda of his predecessor in the portfolio, Steve Maharey.

That includes the single core benefit - a potential administrative nightmare. He must also blunt National's continuing efforts to make welfare reform an election issue.

Benson-Pope's job is to keep the portfolio - and himself - out of the news.

He was further saved by Clark needing to convince a doubting public that her unconventional Government is stable. A ministerial resignation so early would not have helped to foster such an impression.

There was an additional reason not to serve up a ministerial scalp - a resurgent National.

Benson-Pope became a pawn in the battle between Labour and National to get the upper hand psychologically in the new Parliament.

Working in tandem, National's Judith Collins and Act's Rodney Hide asked all the right questions.

It was a classic example of the Opposition mounting a strong case that the public would latch on to and bring huge pressure on Clark to dump her hapless minister.

But the public seem to have decided to give Benson-Pope the benefit of the doubt on the initial issue of whether he assaulted the two students, and are unmoved by his subsequent behaviour.

Yet something was missing from National's grilling of Clark and Benson-Pope - the party's leader mixing mongrel with heavy sarcasm.

National is never going to get that from Don Brash.

In Parliament - and Parliament mattered this time - he sounds like an academic lawyer trying to prove some arcane point of law when he should be Dracula sizing up Clark's jugular.

Brash will never get a better opportunity to lord it over Clark than he did this week. That he did not will hasten the arrival of someone who will.