It’s amazing what happens in politics. Just two days ago the media and pundits were praising Chris Hipkins for sacking Stuart Nash from the Police portfolio, even though he retained his other portfolios. They all said it showed how tough he was as Prime Minister.
Then yesterday, after more revelations of Nash’s shonky methods of managing his portfolios came out, Hipkins called a press conference and told everyone that Nash was now on his last, last chance and he was demoting his ranking in cabinet to the lowest ranking, while still retaining his portfolios.
Stuart Nash has been demoted to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings and is on his “final warning”, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed this afternoon.
Hipkins said a third situation involving Nash has come to light.
In September last year acting as the MP for Napier he had contacted a senior official at MBIE to ask them to look at an immigration case of a health professional in his electorate, not using the established process.
“This latest instance though does demonstrate a pattern of behaviour which does not reach the standard that I expect from Ministers.”
He will move to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings, at number 20, Hipkins said.
“His actions reflect poor judgement but the specifics of each instance do not warrant dismissal from his ministerial post altogether,” Hipkins said.
He said he had weighed the events up carefully against similar previous cases.
“There have been previous instances of ministers criticising court decisions where the consequence of that is they have received a public reprimand by the prime minister but they have not lost their ministerial warrants as a result.
“There’s certainly the case of Judith Collins where she did it a number of times during her tenure as either minister of justice or as minister of police.”
He said Nash had also raised a few instances when Nash was an opposition MP which would not meet the standards of a Cabinet Minister, but “I suspect that there are many in the parliament, including many of the current opposition, that if you ran that ruler over them they’d never be able to be ministers in the future either. I’m not going to set the bar that low”.
“It’s clear from his pattern of behaviour that Stuart is not acting to achieve personal gain from his actions. The cases in questions represent his desire to get things done in his portfolios and on behalf of his communities.
“Stuart does on occasion speak in a more colloquial manner that reflects the sentiments of many people in the community but he does need to take greater care to ensure that what he says and how he says it uphold the standards of a Cabinet minister.”
Radio NZ
Which is quite pathetic really. Chris Hipkins has now shown us he is a pussy, and lacks the wherewithal to rinse Nash completely.
He should have backed Nash, saying, “I agree with Nashy on gangs but we can’t have him breaking convention even if he was right and the public think he is right.” But he didn’t do that. Instead, he showed us he lacked the stones to stand by his minister, and he lacked the stones to properly discipline him.
It’s almost like they don’t know how to properly run a hit job and rinse a minister completely. Perhaps I should offer up some advice on that?
Why drag it out? It just prolongs the bad press and takes attention away from more pressing matters. He should have sacked him, stitched up the selection in Napier and leaked a whole lot of damaging info to make sure the dog was put down properly.
What is clear is that David Parker does have the stones, and it is him doing the wet work against Nash.
All this dog’s breakfast does is give Nash more time to undermine the Labour team. If you were Nash would you stick around and meddle or say stuff the lot of you, I am going?
Unless there is more to come, and they are going to drip it out over the next few days so there is no possibility of him retaining any semblance of credibility so that he has to be axed.
We shall see. Somehow I don’t think this is over yet.
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