Health Minister David Clark has been horrifically exposed by National leader Simon Bridges. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Health Minister David Clark has been horrifically exposed by National leader Simon Bridges. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Ardern can't quite bring herself to pull the trigger on anything serious.
They said before the recent Government reshuffle that one of the names under a level of scrutiny was Health Minister David Clark.
Of course apart from Phil "the builder" Twyford, no one was really under scrutiny. In factgiven Twyford got given another major portfolio even he wasn't under scrutiny.
There would appear no crime too large as to warrant the wrath of Jacinda Ardern.
Ardern can't quite bring herself to pull the trigger on anything serious.
Big decision making isn't her forte, or even perhaps in her skill set — or consciousness.
But perhaps the speculation around Clark was based on his lack of activity.
Early on I held out hope when he seemed to go along with the broad-based thinking of most of us, that the District Health Board system as we know it might well be the biggest bureaucratic shambles we have seen in many a long year.
There was the obligatory review, and to be fair I was disappointed that it seemed to be set down for three years. It's yet another of the weaknesses of this Government, they feel they need to consult on everything. Even if the thing is so obviously broken and even if the people only reiterate what you already know.
So in the ensuing period, Clark has sacked a board, appointed some commissioners, wagged his finger at the level of debt, and promised a national cancer service.
And it's with that last one he has been so horrifically exposed by National leader Simon Bridges.
Simon Bridges got the holy grail. Photo / Mark Mitchell
What you are looking for at an annual conference, especially if you are one of those leaders who doesn't poll well and spends their life telling the waiting, baiting media that everyone is behind you, what you need is a king hit.
And he got it.
Cancer. Who can argue with cancer, who would dare suggest that a national service to replace the shambles we currently have is a bad idea?
Who would argue that the funding of drugs — which should have been funded as of right — is a bad idea?
Who would argue that providing the sort of care around the country's biggest killer isn't something you want to support?
And what made it so spectacularly effective is not that he has to deliver it — because he won't — but because he still had the clear air to announce it. Because the Government, which had made such a big deal of a similar thought, hadn't.
Two years in office. Two years of noise, sympathy, consultation — not to mention the nine years of preparation for government — and Clark had the rug spectacularly pulled out from under him.
And all he could do was flail around telling us it was light on detail. A national service and $200 million at $50m a year, doesn't sound too light to me. It sounds like more than what he had announced, which was nothing.
Labour in the year of delivery had once again failed to deliver.
What made it even worse is that it was Bridges that took the 150,000-signature petition from Blair Vining, a hero of a man who is dying of cancer and felt it necessary to use his remaining energy doing what Clark should have been doing in the first place. Getting on with it.
How, as minister, you can watch a bloke riddled with illness present you with the feelings of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and still at the end of it say nothing more than "an announcement is coming" is beyond me.
Just what is it Clark has been doing?
How hard is a national service, why is it so unimportant you can be scooped the way he has been?
Under normal circumstances Bridges would have been left with a tweak to a programme, a centre-right approach to a social issue, a rejection of a Labour policy.
But, due to the ineptness of this Government, he got the holy grail, a policy Labour should have owned and run with — and yet astonishingly left on the political porch to be nabbed and used to humiliate them with. I bet he couldn't believe his luck.
