Last week, Greens co-leader and government Minister Marama Davidson spoke out against the government over the pace of its climate change response. Her remarks took some commentators by surprise, both because of their bluntness, but also because as a government Minister she had spoken out like that at all. But the real surprise was that after a quarter of a century of proportional representation and multi-party governing arrangements there were still those expecting Ministers, especially those from government support parties, to always toe the line in a way far more reminiscent of single party government under First Past the Post. 

Ministers from smaller parties seeking to use issues that are of special concern to them to brand their parties differently from the major party of government have been a constant feature of MMP-type governments, whether they have been made up of formal coalitions, confidence and supply agreements, or the type of loose arrangement that exist between Labour and the Greens in the current Parliament. New Zealand First Ministers speaking out against certain aspects of government that they did not like was commonplace during the more formal Coalition Government between 2017 and 2020, although curiously (and in keeping with the inherent paranoia of that party) New Zealand First was far from pleased when Labour Ministers spoke out against New Zealand First! 

“Agree to disagree” provisions have been part of every governing arrangement under MMP, and have been used frequently. As a Minister from a government support party for more years than anyone else, I frequently spoke out and voted against government policies that were not consistent with my own party’s policies, from Labour’s deal with New Zealand First over the foreshore and seabed in 2004, through to National’s efforts to gut the Resource Management Act between 2014 and 2017, and other issues besides. It was an accepted part of the process that government support parties were always free to decide their own positions on matters, like these examples, that were not covered by the formal confidence and supply arrangements. Moreover, no-one in the government of the day nor the media batted much of an eyelid whenever it happened. 

So, there should have been no surprise that Marama Davidson chose to speak out the way she did, especially given that climate change is of the most critical issues for the Greens. In doing so, however, she has highlighted one of the ongoing problems all smaller parties in governing arrangements have had to face over the years: how to get attention for their particular issues and the role they are playing in resolving them. The experience to date has generally been that major parties of government take the credit for policies that turn out well and are popular, while the smaller party is blamed for unpopular policies or those that have turned out not quite the way they were expected to. 

It is not a problem unique to New Zealand. I recall a discussion with Sir Nick Clegg, Britain’s former Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister during the 2010-2015 Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition under David Cameron. He made the point to me that the Conservatives never let the Liberal Democrats get the credit for the things they did that went well, but were more than happy for them to take the blame for the things that went wrong. 

That is where climate change policy is difficult for the Greens. While it was good that James Shaw – as Climate Change Minister – went off to the recent COP26 talks, he did not get there until after all the major political figures had left, somewhat lessening his impact and opportunities. Moreover, given the enormity of the climate change issue, it is always going to be one where the emphasis will be on what goes on between national leaders, rather than worthy Ministers down the chain. And the Prime Minister famously declared some years ago before she took office that climate change was her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”, even though she seems to have forgotten the intensity of that commitment now. 

So, when and if New Zealand makes big decisions on climate change, it will be the Prime Minister who makes the grand headline announcement, with James Shaw left to announce subsequently all the boring details of what it means. Labour, not the Greens, will then take the credit if the announcement is popular, but the Greens will be blamed for being too rigid and uncompromising if it is not. It is the typical no-win situation, one which all those who have been in smaller parties in government can relate to. 

Marama Davidson’s statement was therefore a classic positioning one – setting out the Green’s position long before final government decisions are made, and giving them plenty of room to manoeuvre if things do not turn out as expected. Otherwise, they face the galling prospect, not unknown to small government support parties, of going into the next election campaign watching Labour as the major party of government taking all the credit for what is one of the Greens’ key policy planks. (In a similar vein, I look back on the recently passed fluoridation legislation which National hailed as its own because the legislation was introduced while it was in government. In fact, I introduced that legislation in 2016, having spent months persuading a sceptical National Party that change was necessary.) 

For many years, the Greens seemed destined to be the one small party that would never make it to government. They had been spurned by Labour in 2002 and 2005, and ruled out working with National in 2017, citing a preference instead for Labour. Even then Labour turned to New Zealand First ahead of the Greens who were left as a confidence and supply partner outside the Labour/New Zealand First Coalition. The years 2017-2020 were consequently tough ones, with New Zealand First determined to shut the Greens out wherever it could. When New Zealand First was thrown out of Parliament in 2020, the Greens could not quite reach the moment in the sun they had been hoping for, because Labour won the first outright majority under MMP, leaving the Greens sidelined once more. 

But as the 2023 election looms, and Labour’s support is starting to slide, the Greens sense their moment to finally emerge as the natural coalition partner for Labour they have always considered themselves to be, may at last be upon them. The last thing they want in the meantime, as has been the case in the past, is to be made to look ineffectual or irrelevant by Labour. 

In that context, Marama Davidson’s statement was no surprise but more a clear foretaste of what is to come as the Greens try to manoeuvre themselves into the box coalition seat ahead of the next election.

 

 

New Zealanders generally are very protective of their personal privacy. They do not like officialdom to know any more about them than is absolutely necessary and have traditionally been sceptical of attempts by governments trying to gather more personal information. 

Musings by successive governments from time to time since the 1980s about the practicality and inevitability of some form of individualised standard number or national identity card for everyone have been consistently and soundly rejected by public opinion. Yet, at the same time, there has been an almost seamless uptake of an individualised IRD Number; a National Health Number; specific numbers for Ministry of Social Development and Accident Compensation services. Now, through the Smart Start programme introduced a few years ago it is possible to track a person’s full interactions with all range of government services, literally from the cradle to the grave. 

Although our national wariness of a universal individual number to replace each of these specific numbers remains this is not because we are resistant to the potential advantages in terms of service delivery, but more because we are still fundamentally wary of the information being collected being misused by authorities. And, for good reason – there are still too many instances where personal information collected by government agencies for one specific purpose is being shared inappropriately or misused for some other purpose. The recent case involving Accident Compensation staff is the latest example. 

An important principle underpinning our privacy law has been that information collected by the state can only be used for the purposes for which it was collected, no matter its potential relevance to other agencies. Over the years, successive Privacy Commissioners have been extremely vigilant in defence of this principle, even when governments have attempted to push out the boundaries for well-intentioned reasons. While this has caused annoyance and frustration from time to time and occasional dark mutterings about the need to curb the Privacy Commissioner’s enthusiasm, the principle is a sound one, which has so far stood the test of time. 

It may be about to be tested in a way and on a scale not envisioned at the time when the original Privacy Act was being developed in the early 1990s, through the government’s just introduced vaccine pass. 

The introduction of a vaccine pass has been an inevitability for some time, as a precondition for New Zealand being able to resume a measure of normality as it adjusts to living with Covid19, and for New Zealanders to be able to travel once more. Most other countries have been moving in a similar direction for some time now, meaning New Zealand would have truly become the hermit kingdom had it not done likewise. 

But while inevitable and necessary – at least in the short term while the virus remains rampant – the introduction of the vaccine pass is not without significant issues that need to be carefully considered, to prevent its misuse. 

The Covid19 Minister has described the pass as “official proof of vaccination and a ticket to enjoy the extra freedoms that will come with the COVID-19 Protection Framework”. That is unobjectionable in so far as it goes, but the devil is always in the detail. The more pressing question relates to how the pass will be used, and any threats to personal privacy within that. 

According to the Minister, the pass “will mean people will be able to do the things they love, like going to concerts and music festivals, nights out at bars and restaurants, and going to the gym and sports events”. However, it will not be required for essential services like supermarkets, petrol stations, or pharmacists, although the wider retail sector will have some flexibility about whether to require customers to use the vaccine pass. 

Two main potential problems lie within this approach. The first relates to consistency and enforcement. Given the flexibility implied for the retail sector, it is certain there will be cases of some retailers adopting tougher requirements than others, and much public aggravation as a consequence. Rather than this ambivalent approach to the retail sector, the government would have been better off to either exclude the retail sector altogether or make the presentation of the vaccine pass a mandatory pre-condition of entry to all stores. As there are currently some retailers, including some of the so-called essential services, that are acting as though we are still in Alert Level 4 and imposing tougher restrictions than they need to, there is a real risk of the requirements around the vaccine pass being extremely variable and inconsistent, if left to individual retailers to decide for themselves. That is a recipe for public confusion and frustration, which the government would be unwise to ignore. 

This raises the issue of enforcement. If individual retailers are to be effectively left to make up their own rules about use of the vaccine pass, where does responsibility for enforcement lie? It is not reasonable to ask the Police to be involved, despite what the government says. That leaves enforcement potentially in the hands of individual retailers and their security guards, which is a further recipe for inconsistency and abuse. In other contexts, the government has consistently said it does not believe in leaving the administration of the law in private hands, so it needs to seriously rethink its approach to the retail sector before going too much further. 

The second major potential problem relates to the way in which the information in the vaccine pass will be used. Ideally, the pass is equivalent to a driver’s licence which is a permit to drive a motor vehicle. Likewise, the vaccine pass is a permit to undertake certain activities or enter certain premises. Its scope needs to be restricted to that function. It should not be used for building up client and customer databases about who has and who has not been vaccinated, for example. The role of the pass must be kept purely functional, a ticket to freedom to paraphrase the Minister, and nothing more than that. 

Any future attempt to adapt the vaccine pass to contain wider information about the holder’s other vaccination or general health status that might be of interest to a service provider must also be resisted as totally inappropriate and beyond the comparatively limited scope of the vaccine pass. There is always a tendency to extend the scope and prolong the life of interventions like the vaccine pass long after they have become unnecessary. In that regard, it is good that the pass will have to be renewed every six months and the hope has to be that it can be phased out for domestic use before too long, although obviously it is likely to be a long-term requirement for international travel as that resumes. 

The vaccine pass is an important part of life returning to a degree of normality, a necessary evil if you like. The rules around its use therefore need to be simple, but circumscribed. That we are prepared to accept it at all shows how far New Zealanders’ attitudes have shifted during the pandemic. But it would be unwise for the government to assume that means our traditional determination to protect our personal privacy has softened and no longer matters.

 

 As political proclamations go, it was neither the boldest nor the most inspiring, but, in the circumstances, probably one of the more realistic of recent times. Judith Collins’ assertion that she would be still leader of the National Party next year is probably true as far as it goes, but it also acknowledges implicitly that she is likely to face a challenge at that time. 

Since she took the leadership in mid-2020 because she was the only candidate still standing after the disastrous Todd Muller interlude, she has effectively been on borrowed time. After all, no-one expected National to come within a bull’s roar of winning Labour’s 2020 Covid19 election. The absolute best Collins could have hoped for was to staunch the gaping wound and limit National’s losses. In the event she could not do so – although to be fair she tried her best (besting the Prime Minister in at least two of the three television debates) but she was not helped by the various scandals that emerged at the time about other National MPs – and ended up as the leader who led National to one of its most ignominious defeats. 

But even if she had succeeded and done better, her survival as leader was unlikely. National has always been more ruthless in dealing with leaders who lose elections than Labour. Walter Nash, Norman Kirk, and Bill Rowling lost more elections for Labour than they ever won, and Mike Moore was given another chance after Labour’s 1990 annihilation – but Jim Bolger is the only National leader since the days of Holyoake to be given a second chance immediately after losing an election. So, the prospect of Judith Collins retaining the National Party leadership on a long-term basis has always seemed fanciful. 

Much has been made of National’s woeful performance in Opposition as a reason for getting rid of Collins, although that is probably overstated. National has certainly bungled many opportunities since the election to score heavily against Labour, but in the end that may not count for all that much. There would have been few Oppositions as weak or inept as Labour between 2008 and 2017, yet it was still able to claim power, albeit in unusual circumstances, after the 2017 election. The old maxim, “Oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them” remains relevant. 

For these reasons, only two questions remain about the National Party leadership – when will the coup occur, and who the next leader will be. The first question is probably harder to answer than the second.

At this point, the first quarter of next year seems the most likely time. Within that, the usual Caucus retreat in early February would be the obvious moment. That would enable the Party to begin the new Parliamentary year with the new leadership in place and give the new leader time to both define their style and build the team around them. It would also allow about 20 months before the 2023 election to put together the policy platform and select the best candidates to put National in the strongest position it could be to contest that election. 

If no move is made in February, the Party cannot afford to let things drift on much beyond Easter next year, for practical reasons. They are less to do with voter appeal than they are with candidate selection and fundraising. Good prospective candidates are unlikely to come forward if there are still doubts about the leadership and National looks set for another drubbing. The same applies to potential donors who will be unwilling to make significant donations to another campaign like that of 2020. 

The question of who the new leader will be is less unclear. Simon Bridges is the obvious choice. He is untainted by having led National to an election defeat – he was deposed several months before the last election – and more importantly, has assiduously reinvented himself as a kinder, gentler figure. In so doing, he has followed the tried-and-true path of political comeback. First, came the cultivation of a more laid-back and relaxed public image – in his case, slightly longer and more unruly hair, more casual clothing to suggest a more carefree image. Then there was the gentle self-mocking on television chat and game shows, carefully showing a softer and more humorous side than the brash politician he came across as previously. There was also the mandatory book, so overtly not about politics, yet covertly setting out the new Bridges’ message. And all the while, accompanied by the constant denials of ever wanting or intending to seek the party leadership again. 

While Bridges’ return would be unusual in the context of New Zealand politics, it is not without precedent – Sir Bill English came back to the National Party leadership in 2016, thirteen years after being deposed, although the circumstances were vastly different. A more interesting parallel comes from across the Tasman. John Howard was an abrasive and brash Treasurer under Malcolm Fraser. Howard subsequently became leader of the Liberal Party but was dropped in 1989 because he was seen as no match for then Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Once Hawke had departed the scene (and the Liberal Party had been through three more leaders and two additional election defeats) a more mellow Howard was restored as party leader, going on to win four consecutive elections and become Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister since the dominance of Sir Robert Menzies from the 1940s to the 1960s. 

There is still a mighty long way to go before National can even dare to dream of such a heady future. It cannot happen until National closes the door on its last two disastrous years. Changing the leader is but the first step. More important, will be the development of a coherent policy programme and message to the electorate at large, which still seems as far away as ever. Yet that will be the difference between National looking like a genuine contender at the next election and just another also-ran the way it does at present. 

Changing the leader will not of itself change that – but it will put the party in a position where it can look forward once more. Simon Bridges will therefore need to show he really has risen above the failings of his previous leadership by setting out clearly and persuasively National’s plan for the country’s future.  He will not get a third chance.      

 

As the world’s great and good descend on Glasgow for the COP26 Conference there has been criticism of Climate Change Minister James Shaw’s decision to attend on behalf of New Zealand. Some have highlighted what they see as the hypocrisy of calling for the need to reduce individual carbon footprints on the one hand while travelling halfway round the world to do so on the other. Others have argued that it is insensitive to be leaving New Zealand at this time to attend an international conference, when Covid19 restrictions are making it near impossible for so many others with pressing family matters to come and go from the country. 

Both streams of criticism miss the point, in my view. My concern is not of the Minister’s attendance, rather that he will not be arriving until after all the other political leaders have left. The whole value of such conferences is the opportunity to interact directly with political counterparts from other countries, to share experiences, and learn directly from them. 

For many years when I was a Minister I attended the annual meeting of the United Nations Convention on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna. While the meeting proceedings were formulaic (despite my attempt when chairing one of the plenary sessions to make the discussion more focused and purposeful, rather than just the customary statement of national positions), the opportunities outside of those more formal situations to establish links with Ministers and senior officials from other countries, or international non-government agencies was extremely valuable. 

I was able to establish close personal connections with not only many of my counterparts of the time, but also agencies like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and its agencies, and the Obama White House. Over time, these contacts became extremely valuable, both as sources of information on developing trends from their perspectives, and new policy initiatives that may or may not have been applicable to New Zealand. There were similar opportunities to share New Zealand’s experiences with others facing similar situations. 

One example was learning from UN Drug Testing Laboratory officials of the then comparatively new Swedish approach of testing wastewater for narcotic drug residues to ascertain the prevalence of drugs like methamphetamine in local communities. That technique has now become commonplace today, including using wastewater testing to determine the presence of Covid19 in a community. 

The COP26 meeting has a much greater significance and overall importance to the world than the Convention on Narcotic Drugs, but the experiences I am reporting will be just as relevant in a different context. For the future of both New Zealand’s international positioning and our domestic response, it is important that New Zealand have a Minister visible at the table for these discussions. 

Other countries rate the significance countries place on an issue by whether they are represented at these international gatherings by politicians, or just leave their participation to officials, or diplomats. The presence of a Minister heading a country’s national delegation is generally interpreted as meaning a country is taking the issue seriously and has a point to make, and moreover, is worth listening to. In a very hierarchical international order, this is important for a small, isolated country like New Zealand. It opens doors that might otherwise have remained closed. 

The decisions reached at COP26 will have an important impact on new Zealand’s future. While we are still finessing our own policy response, consistent with our national interest, and the work to date of bodies like the Climate Commission, we will be very influenced by what happens over the next week in Glasgow. Having a Minister present to set out New Zealand’s position and potential concerns will have an impact beyond just having officials putting forward our view, no matter how well-intentioned and competent they might be. 

For these reasons, I do not criticise James Shaw for deciding to go to Glasgow. As I say, it is a great pity he will not be arriving there until after most of the political heavyweights have left, which will diminish his attendance somewhat. But hopefully he will still have sufficient opportunity to make good connections, that both reinforce New Zealand’s concerns from a national and wider Pacific perspective and press home to others the urgent political as well as environmental consequences rising sea levels will have in our part of the world. 

Climate change should not be a partisan political issue, no matter how tempting it might be from time to time to play politics over some of the positions being advocated. Therefore, the overwhelming thrust of the government’s approach needs to be on securing a durable national consensus on which to base New Zealand’s own ongoing policy approach. 

The Minister’s attendance at COP26 is not an opportunity for political sniping, but rather a further step in building up the sound policy base we will need to secure our national climate change policy response. To that end, he should have the full support of Parliament and should be required to report back fully to Parliament as a whole, not just the government, when he returns. 

After all, climate change is simply too important an issue to be capriciously up for change whenever there is a change of government.