Mike Hosking: Cabinet reshuffle shows how short of talent the Government really is

OPINION:

For Nanaia Mahuta to remain untouched in a Cabinet reshuffle gives you an indication of 1, how spectacularly useless Poto Williams actually is, and 2, just how short of talent the Government really is.

As always, Monday's reshuffle was dressed up as something it wasn't: minor.

Obviously the less said about Trevor Mallard the better, he is a walking advert for all that is wrong with politics and yet another insight into just how out of touch with regular ordinary New Zealanders the Prime Minister is.

To even begin to pretend to defend Mallard and his various actions and antics of the past couple of years, far less argue he deserves to stay in the job, is to insult us all.

Then, having defended it, you also hand out the retirement package as funded by us, to a far-flung part of the world where he gets to spend his twilight years basking in his own self-importance.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta. Photo / Mark Mitchell

In the world I live, reward comes from hard work, determination and success, not hanging around being a pest and an inept one at that.

But back to Williams.

Another insight into just how unspectacular you can be and still be in a Labour Cabinet, she will now busy herself with Conservation and Disability, matters, that without wanting to cause an uproar, don't appear to me to constitute a full-time job without the traditional supplementation of something else a little weightier.

In a way I feel sorry for Williams, because essentially it was the Prime Minister's call to give her Police in the first place. I'm told she wasn't keen.

The same way it was the Prime Minister's call to give Andrew Coster the Commissioner's job.

It was her way of bringing her special kumbaya to crime in general. The soft approach that would lead to a kinder world, except of course that all blew up in her face.

Former Police Minister Poto Williams. Photo / Mark Mitchell

You appoint a couple of people who don't really believe that criminals should be dealt with like criminals, assisted by Kelvin Davis in Corrections who revels in letting them out early and using famously funny lines like "that's the price you pay for doing things differently" when the prison muster falls but the cost goes up.

So having invented the problem, Ardern was now faced with trying to solve it, fortunately she had Chris Hipkins standing by doing virtually nothing, apart from his role in a global pandemic and Education.

Although Hipkins will be better than Williams, that's not actually saying anything, but does expose the astonishing lack of talent that Ardern has at her disposal.

Say what you want about the Covid response (and I have), what's been tragically forgotten for far too long these past couple of years, is this country's shocking education performance in things like literacy, maths, science and actually having kids turn up to school.

The uptake on the latest PISA tests is so low we may not actually even get to take part.

The very tests that tell us how badly backwards we have slipped won't tell us that anymore, because we may not even show up to be tested.

So the bloke who has overseen that gets Police because he has got so much spare time on his hands.

I have failed to mention Kris Faafoi, the main reason this smoke and mirrors exercise was sparked.

He quit, and he quit because he was over it. He was over it before the last election but in another stroke of recruiting genius the Prime Minister convinced him to stay, and the record of that mistake speaks for itself.

A minister who from 2017 to 2020 looked like a go-getter (admittedly among a collection of Twyfords, Lees Galloways and Currans) but post-2020 looked like a guy who regretted being strong-armed by a clearly desperate Prime Minister.

Which leaves us with Mahuta, a women who, you guessed it, was another of the PM's "special selections" who turned out to hate planes and travel and yet was given Foreign Affairs.

A decision that surprised most and confounded the rest, and has proven to be yet another headache a beleaguered government doesn't need.

But having shuffled enough deadwood for one week, Mahuta's future can wait apparently until the new year, when we will get another episode of "shuffle the incompetent".

I can't wait.