Claire Trevett: PM Chris Hipkins should be ropeable about Michael Wood - and not just with Wood

OPINION:

After being told the time had come for him to resign as a minister, Labour’s Michael Wood has been given some time to sit at home and either stew or reflect on his plight.

The risk is he will do the former. Stewing tends to end in one of two ways: either the person decides they’ve had enough and throws it all in, or they return as a stick of dynamite, seething with resentment and prone to detonation.

Wood should choose to do the reflecting instead of the sulking. He has not been treated unfairly. He has well and truly been the artist of his own demise – and he painted a Jackson Pollock-esque demise for himself.

He was at the least guilty of a cavalier disregard to his own paperwork. The list of occasions on which the Cabinet Office asked him if he’d sold his shares and he replied that he was about to do it is a tragi-comedy.

Wood has done exactly what Hipkins said he had done: let down himself and the Government. He has also let down Hipkins.

The big question is not whether this has damaged Wood – it has – but whether it has also damaged Hipkins, and therefore Labour.

In the normal course of events, throwing aside a misbehaving minister does not reflect badly on a prime minister. It can even help to show you have gumption and standards.

Former Prime Ministers Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern all had to deal with a range of ministers’ sins – from going rogue with the credit card, to sleeping with people they oughtn’t, to conflicts of interest, to being an obnoxious idiot – and it did not impact on them in the polls.

If a minister has been a spectacular egg and is punished for it, voters tend to think they’ve got their just desserts and move on.

But that is a lot easier when a PM is in a dominant position in the polls.

Illustration / Guy Body

As things stand now, things are very close in the polls and Hipkins is still a relatively new Prime Minister.

Bad ministers don’t necessarily change votes, but an accumulation of them does not help to win them either.

Hipkins himself has handled it as well as he could. He has seen this stuff before: a minister does something wrong, a prime minister only tells as much of the story as they think they need to to make it go away, then more comes out. Drip, drip, drip.

So he front-footed it as much as possible. He was upfront in setting out the extent of Wood’s wrongdoing and moved to make the final blow very quickly after learning of the new shareholdings in Wood’s family trust. He did not make excuses for Wood and admitted he found it frustrating and inexplicable.

He also moved to tighten up the ship to require more diligent management of conflicts of interest both by the Cabinet Office and by the PM’s office.

He has proposed looking at introducing a ban on ministers holding any shares at all.

It is the same technique Key used when ministers were getting into trouble for their perks and credit card use: he let in sunlight by requiring quarterly releases of MPs’ spending and ministers’ credit card receipts. He revamped the accommodation and travel allowances to cut out genuine perks and stop MPs doing tricky things to maximise their allowances. There have been precious few spending scandals since then.

This week Hipkins did not perform badly. However, he was let down very badly not only by Wood - a minister who was supposed to be one of his safe pairs of hands - but also by former PM Jacinda Ardern and perhaps the Cabinet Office.

Former Minister Michael Wood and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins before the saga over Wood's shares. Photo / Michael Craig

It’s a fair bet Hipkins did not expect to have to throw two ministers onto his bonfire of unnecessary distractions when he was deciding what should stay and go from Ardern’s policy slate.

The sins of those ministers did not happen under Hipkins’ watch. They simply got dealt with under his watch because they were not dealt with properly when they first popped up, which was under Ardern’s watch.

Ardern’s office had known both about Nash’s emails to his donors and that Wood had shares in Auckland Airport which he had been told to sell. Ardern was apparently told at one point that Wood had sold them. It remains unclear whether she was ever subsequently told he had not.

However, neither was dealt with promptly or fully at the time. And so it was left to Hipkins to deal with them at the worst possible time: as a new Prime Minister trying to win the public over four months before an election.

He must be wondering what or who will blow up in his face next.

Hipkins should be ropeable about it – because if it costs him the election, it is his name that election loss will go down under.

So while Hipkins waits to see what the fallout will be, Wood has entered the annals of the cautionary tales of politics, having failed to learn from earlier cautionary tales about conflicts of interest.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon did learn from earlier cautionary tales (notably, his mentor Sir John Key getting into trouble when Labour sprung him on his Tranzrail shares just before the 2008 election): Luxon got rid of his shares when he became an MP. No shares, no problems.

But Luxon does stand accused of failing to learn from other cautionary tales this week, on a less serious scale to Wood.

He has hopefully learned from the saga around his Tesla that when a mini-controversy arises it is best to deal with it like a Band-Aid: rip the whole thing off straight away for a sharp but short-lived period of pain.

As it is, stories about his Tesla (sorry, his wife’s Tesla) popped up again this week because of his refusal last week to say whether he claimed the clean car discount when buying it. Instead, he repeatedly said it was his wife’s Tesla and even that it was nobody’s business.

When you want to be PM, pretty much everything is somebody’s business – especially if it makes you look like a hypocrite.

So Newshub looked it up and discovered the old Tesla was recently traded in for a newer model, and, yes, the rebate was applied for.

So what should have been a half-day titter in the news cycle is now in its second week, all because Luxon decided not to simply say when first asked that they had recently traded in their old Tesla and, yes, had gone for the clean car discount.

It won’t matter much in the long term - but people tend to remember the quirkier stories, and the Tesla is one of them.

The reason he didn’t was presumably because he didn’t want to look like a hypocrite. If he didn’t want to look like a hypocrite, he should not have applied for the discount to start with. $8000 is a small price to pay to be able to maintain the moral high ground.

Just as selling shares when you’re told to is a small price to pay to maintain your political career.

Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.