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.
OPINION
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Welcome to the Politics Briefing, a week in which NZ First played the first ‘agree to disagree’ card of the coalition Government, and cancer drugs and law and order became the focus.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the Government’s first quarterly action plan, for which the deadline is this Sunday.
Our senior politics reporter Derek Cheng has done a stocktake on the progress here and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said a second plan will be delivered any day now.
It was a big week for law and order – starting with the announcement of more police on the beat in Auckland’s CBD and details of the pilot for young offenders’ boot camps, and the three strikes legislation getting to Parliament. Yesterday, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith set out moves to limit how much judges could discount sentences.
That flurry of announcements was perhaps partly to pre-empt the Crime and Victims Survey, which is released at noon today – although Derek Cheng got an advance peek at the police section this morning.
The results are based on an in-depth survey which was taken up until October 2023.
That provides a handy marker between the last Labour Government and National’s coalition Government, which has made a big deal out of its law and order credentials.
As a result, it’s fair to say next year’s survey is one of the ways Police Minister Mark Mitchell’s promise to make people feel safer will be judged. It may also prove to be one of the mechanisms Mitchell uses to judge whether Police Commissioner Andrew Coster is performing to his expectations.
It showed high levels of trust and confidence in the police have dropped from 74% in 2021 – the year after Coster’s appointment as Commissioner – to 67% last year.
Perceptions of how well police dealt with serious crime had also dropped markedly, although other factors – including whether police acted professionally and responded well – were more stable.
We quietly note a 67% trust rating is still quite a lot better than the usual trust ratings given to politicians (yes, and the media).
There was a brief flurry of excitement when Winston Peters issued a statement saying NZ First was invoking the ‘agree to disagree’ mechanism over Cabinet’s decisions on the future of the Covid-19 inquiry, or at least part of it.
There were the expected descriptions of this as a crack or fissure in the coalition, although it does not reach that threshold.
NZ First was only disagreeing with the decision not to scrap the current Covid-19 Royal Commission before it was done.
The clause is not novel or unique to this coalition Government.
It was a mechanism developed under MMP to contend with issues on which coalition or government partners cannot quite reach agreement.
It is in the Cabinet Manual as well the coalition agreements National has with Act and NZ First.
It works as a pressure valve: A way for a party to put on the record its disagreement with a Cabinet decision on something (or elements of it) – even if that party ends up having to vote for it. It’s the middle ground between consensus and irreconcilable difference.
The Cabinet Manual stipulates that once the final outcome of any ‘agree to disagree’ issue has been reached, all ministers have to abide by it, including voting for it, regardless of their position.
In some ways it is a handy way for a party which did not get its way to admit defeat, but to also let its supporters know it did at least fight for its corner.
Act and National did not want to pull the pin on the Royal Commission of Inquiry because it would be a bad precedent. Such inquiries are supposed to be the gold standard and non-political – although by the the time it was set up, everything about Covid was political, so that was difficult in this case.
Even Labour leader Chris Hipkins didn’t bother playing it up as a crack in the coalition. Instead he took aim at Peters, saying he was “courting the cooker voter” and would probably rather have anti-vaccination campaigner Liz Gunn chairing such an inquiry.
Act’s Brooke van Velden devised what she proclaimed to be an “elegant solution”: the Covid-19 inquiry relay. That will see the current inquiry complete its business by November, at which point a new commission will be set up to take on the baton.
That second inquiry will probe all the issues that National, Act and NZ First thought should have been in the first inquiry and had accused Labour of leaving out so that they didn’t cop blame.
The full terms of reference won’t come until August, but Van Velden summarised them as “vaccine efficacy and safety, the extended lockdowns in Auckland and Northland, and the extent of disruption to New Zealanders’ health, education, and business”.
It was not the only elegant solution of the week: on Monday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon put an end to the flak the Government was copping for not including National’s promise of 13 new cancer drugs in the Budget. The $603 million funding injection for Pharmac is expected to deliver 26 new cancer drugs and a raft of other medicines on top.
As cancer advocate Malcolm Mulholland put it, “out of the chaos has come good”.
Luxon understandably wanted the attention to be on the destination rather than the journey – or what it took to pay for it.
It has come at a price: Just 23 days after the Budget, the Government has had to take out an advance on next year’s Budget and dip into its kitty of contingency funding; money kept on hand for unexpected events.
There is an element of hypocrisy in that. National criticised Labour in the past for taking out advances from future Budgets. Willis will argue that the difference is that Labour subsequently blew its operating allowances.
However, all governments have the right to make choices about what they spend money on and when. Luxon will be happy with this choice.
“It’s legislation that’s obviously a little bit complex for us because we were part of bringing into play this piece of legislation that’s being repealed ... But the solution that has come to pass, that we’re repealing now, has proved to be relatively ineffective as far as we’ve been able to ascertain, in regard that it’s actually costing more than we’re able to recover from it” - NZ First MP Mark Patterson takes the egg on the face for Shane Jones as the Government repeals forestry legislation Jones had passed in a former life during the 2017-2020 Labour-NZ First Government.
Luxon was not the only one putting money into cancer this week. National’s Andrew Bayly also chipped in. Bayly, a former paratrooper, raised $31,000 by jumping out of a plane as part of the Cancer Society’s ‘Toss Your Boss’ campaign. (He also has a very persistent press secretary, who was very keen for him to get a mention for his deed.) Good on you, Bayly.
Blackball Workingmen’s Club created a new cocktail in honour of Resources Minister Shane Jones after he visited Blackball for a speech on mining. The gin cocktail comes in pink and blue and is called a Unicorn’s Kiss. It marks Jones’ dismissal of Green MP Chloe Swarbrick’s energy policy as powered by “unicorn kisses”.
Sentences III: Longer sentences await those who target the corner dairy as the Government moves to make such circumstances an aggravating factor in sentencing.
Youth crime: Labour and the Greens have slammed the coalition Government’s youth sentencing overhaul and proposed boot camps.
For more political news and views, listen to On the Tiles, the Herald’s politics podcast.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.