John Armstrong: Let the party games begin

Even the briefest mention of the dreaded phrase "ministerial cover-up" is enough to send a shiver racing up a government's spine.

So it is no surprise Trevor Mallard is feeling the icy blast of prime ministerial displeasure.

Helen Clark must be shaking her head in despair after a week that began with her moving decisively to stem the fallout from the Qualifications Authority's bungling of last year's secondary school scholarship exams and ended with the whole thing exploding in the Government's face.

Following three weeks of Parliament, which got worse for Labour the longer it went on, some timely kicking of ministerial butt will be on Clark's agenda for the recess.

The Opposition will delight in the frequently smart-alec Mallard falling flat on his face over a press statement that hid the problem with the scholarship exam results and left the education minister lamely fending off charges he tried to cover up the debacle.

We are not talking Watergate, however. The Opposition might also note this episode has revealed the lengths to which the Prime Minister will go to bulldoze aside anything threatening Labour's occupation of the Government benches.

That has been overlooked in the clamour for Mallard's resignation.

On the scale of political crises, the problems at the Qualifications Authority (NZQA) must be at the lowest end. But even that was too high for Clark.

Suddenly the Prime Minister was saying the mess was all the fault of officials. Ministers had been kept in the dark. There would be inquiries. And she left the firm impression heads would roll.

The Beehive spin continued relentlessly, seeking to both defuse and confuse. Bill English did not understand the NCEA. Bill English was playing politics with the future of the country's brightest. National should take some blame for the scholarship fiasco because the whole idea had been Wyatt Creech's when he was education minister seven years ago.

If the Government seemed almost to be over-reacting, it is easy to understand why.

The fast-approaching election is now bearing down like an express train on every party in Parliament, including Labour's allies. And it is showing. Take the insults thrown at Labour by the Greens last weekend as proof of that.

Those parties are aware they must disturb the long-run pattern of the opinion polls in the opening months of the year otherwise Labour's dominance will once more become entrenched.

They are going for broke, exploiting any Government slip-up, no matter how minor, to the point of exhaustion.

Caught in this vortex, Labour cannot nail down every problem across every portfolio.

In a proportional electoral system, however, every percentage point of the party vote matters. The margin between Labour returning to power as an effective minority party Government and one completely hamstrung by other parties is not large. Labour may not be vulnerable to big shifts in voter sentiment. However, it is still vulnerable to attrition.

While the scholarship foul-up penalised only a few hundred students, it has disturbed middle-class parents who expect the system to be fair and to deliver if their children measure up.

The botch-up is potentially more damaging in lifting the lid on general disgruntlement with the whole NCEA structure, however.

This is where Bill English has struck a nerve.

Alerted to the potential shortfall in scholarship awards a month ago, the Prime Minister felt Mallard and his associate, David Benson-Pope, were too close to the bureaucracy and too blase about how the public was reacting to NZQA's blunder.

That was cue for one of her typically caustic verbal offensives.

Clark's preference for shooting first and leaving the follow-up State Services Commission inquiry to ask the questions later saw officials getting it in the neck.

Unlike her predecessors, Clark has far fewer qualms about blaming officials when things go wrong in their organisations - just as she shows little hesitation in sacking ministers when they are personally culpable. But Clark also knows public service ethics forbid officials from answering back.

As the NZQA management's stonewalling responses to Opposition questions at Wednesday's select committee hearing demonstrated, this is a one-way conversation, in which the Prime Minister does the talking.

In the NZQA's case, Clark was blunt because she had to convince the public the Government was not responsible for what had gone wrong, but was responsible for ensuring it was fixed.

The later announcement of various Government-ordered inquiries was designed to reinforce public confidence the latter will happen, while ensuring awkward questions about ministerial responsibility are postponed until a time when opponents' attention is focused elsewhere.

Clark's heavily loaded language also amounted to an unspoken demand that the authority's chief executive, Karen Van Rooyen, resign.

But Van Rooyen is responsible to the NZQA's board - not the Government. That begged the question of why Clark did not fire her bullets at the board. Its stack of Labour appointees provides the answer.

The Beehive's line remained that Van Rooyen might soon step aside - even though any forced departure before the findings of the State Services Commission inquiry would be a denial of natural justice and leave the Government facing a potentially embarrassing Employment Court claim for unjustified dismissal.

However, keeping alive the possibility she will go is in the Government's self-interest as it gives the impression it is really "doing something" this time in a way it did not when confronted with Judy Bailey's pay hike last year.

In that example, the Government was also embarrassed by a state-run entity, but punished those responsible on the TVNZ board by slapping them with wet bus tickets.

Labour has drawn a lesson from the Bailey case - one that Clark will no doubt once more hammer into her underlings.

No matter how minor and trivial some issues must now seem to her ministers - hardened to controversy after five years in the job - how Labour handles those issues could be the difference between still being a real Government after the election or merely an apology for one.