Claire Trevett: English's plan to save the children: scrap RMA

Bill English. Photo / Jason Oxenham

The Prime Minister might get to choose who sits where in the Cabinet and on his front bench, but it seems National's caucus has a far more anarchic pecking order - one based on speed and punctuality just once every three years.

There is a rigid tradition in National's caucus that the seat an MP sits in for the first caucus meeting of a parliamentary term is the one they must sit in for the next three years. So on Tuesday there was a great bullrush of MPs sprinting towards the caucus room earlier than the appointed hour.

At first it seemed to be the joys of returning to school after spring break. But no, it was to try to bags favourite seats next to their mates. Paula Bennett was late and ended up sitting right in the front row, where the boss can easily see if she's chewing gum or writing notes.

Craig Foss arrived early but was thwarted by media with questions about his demotion. He gritted his teeth and made it through by describing the process of selecting a Cabinet as similar to a childhood song in which the Little One in the bed says, "Roll over, roll over", until someone falls out. "There's only room for 20 in Cabinet," he explained. "So 20 got in and one fell out."

One MP later revealed that when he had tried to move seats mid-term in the past, he was reprimanded by Tony Ryall, who said such things were not done because it might look arrogant.

Key's team are on an even greater arrogance watch now than in their second term. And things are already slipping a bit now that Arrogance Monitor Ryall has left.

Even the Prime Minister has succumbed - upon the discovery of another faultline in Wellington, he sought to dispel any panic by claiming that now the faultline was known, it could be "managed". Quite how one "manages" a faultline is unclear. Mother Nature does not tend to check whether her actions are permissible under the Resource Management Act (RMA) before doing her thing. But it did result in a mental image of Key as some kind of omnipotent Atlas holding the two sides of the fault together with his bare hands.

The endorphins from the First Caucus Sprint were clearly still rushing through Finance Minister Bill English's blood when he went on to the Treasury's update on the books soon afterwards. Any Finance Minister would normally be chortling with glee at a $2 billion windfall, wherever it came from. Yet English uttered a statement of regret that the value of the Government's state housing stock had increased by $2.1 billion - up to more than $17 billion. He could only blush at such an embarrassment of riches, declaring himself a very "reluctant beneficiary" of rising house prices indeed.

This was very odd behaviour indeed. Any normal investor would be quite stoked at this rate of return. English is now also responsible for the state house portfolio as Minister in charge of Housing NZ. He has signalled that a sell-off of at least some of those state houses is on the cards. So secretly, English is probably quite excited about the chance to liquidate some of that $17 billion asset by hocking it off to social housing providers or to the private sector.

Yet there he was casting about for someone to blame for such cursed wealth. English had found that someone. It was all the fault of local councils.

Their stubborn refusal to flood the market with cheap land was not only responsible for the Government's filthy landholdings, but also for poverty. It was councils and their pesky planning processes which had done more to increase income inequality than anything else because that had resulted in higher rents and higher house prices.

More pressing were his political purposes. National is lining up for its second tilt at getting controversial RMA reforms through Parliament. On its first attempt, it tried to persuade New Zealanders of the need for the reforms to make life easier for first-home buyers. This time round English has upped the spin stakes further. He clearly calculated there was a relatively small pool of first-home buyers, so if he added the children in poverty to those who would benefit from the RMA reforms it would be all the harder for the Opposition to argue against it. English's theory has provoked some reaction - no expert panel so far has listed RMA reforms as a solution for poverty.

What a genius! Just the week earlier the Prime Minister had said child poverty was another area the Government intended to act on. And just like that English delivered him the cure-all, the Government's equivalent of Rawleighs. He could save the children with some RMA reform.