Will a Cabinet Reshuffle Help?

Richard Prebble, writing in the Herald yesterday, pondered that Labour will be trying to find a way to create an electoral crisis in order to call a snap election. Could Jacinda Ardern’s pending cabinet reshuffle deliver that crisis?

By October it will be clear whether inflation is falling. Even if it has, people will notice the loss of $27 a week just before Christmas.

If inflation is still elevated, then removing the income support will be one of the most unpopular decisions by any government. Overseas, people riot for less. It will be electoral suicide.

But deciding to continue the income support, having just 18 per cent of the population supporting the other 82 per cent, will shred whatever economic credibility Labour has.

The only way to avoid having to cancel or extend the income support package would be for Labour to find an excuse to call a snap election.

NZ Herald

There is just one flaw in the last paragraph of Prebble’s piece, Labour don’t need just an excuse; all Ardern has to be able to say to the Governor General is that she no longer commands a majority in the house.

That is the only way a snap election could be contrived, but it is very problematic when you have an outright majority, and are supported by the Green Party.

So, Prebble is just hinting at some sort of contrived crisis in confidence that Labour would have to manufacture, that enables them to call an early election, but also doesn’t damage their credibility that despite an outright majority shows they are unfit to govern.

There has been increased chatter and static surrounding this possibility. So much so that I can no longer discount the reshuffle happening. It is going to happen and very soon.

There is also great concern within Labour’s wider caucus that incompetent ministers are now being exposed with regular occurrence coupled with an annoyance at how stroppy the Maori caucus has become with Nanaia Mahuta and Willie Jackson pushing hard to ram through their racist and divisive agenda. The caucus knows that the pro co-governance rhetoric coming from stroppy Maori is actually electoral poison.

Rumours have been persistently floating around the traps that Jacinda Ardern has realised that co-governance is likely to see a great many of Labour’s regional MPs unemployed in short order if they keep it up, and has signalled that they are going to walk back from the policy. This in turn has prompted Willie Jackson to confront Ardern, telling her if she does that the Maori caucus will walk, and bring down the Labour Government with it.

Which brings us to the pending reshuffle. Could Ardern use the reshuffle to clip some wings and to alleviate the level of disgruntled back benchers by promoting some more, shall we say, biddable MPs to the ministry? At the same time could this reshuffle then cause the electoral crisis Labour needs to call a snap election?

Perhaps we will see an end to Labour’s affirmative action for the incompetent. Until now Labour have believed in true diversity, where they give equal rights to the competency challenged. The real problem is this: if the current ministers are their best and brightest, it doesn’t say much for the rest of them.

Labour’s caucus knows there is trouble brewing for them, and every time they slide away further in the polls they make new calculations on their survivability. Right now a great many back bench MPs are realising that hitching their wagon to Ardern is looking like a poor long term strategy.

Which brings about Labour’s next problem. If not Ardern, then who? To be perfectly frank, they have stuff all choices if, God forbid, Ardern gets hit by a bus while visiting a play centre, which seems to be her only choice of places to visit where she isn’t met by torrents of abuse.

This is the sort of amateur hour strategy that a desperate Labour would think was as complex as organising the D-Day landings and might just give them the resounding success such planning gave Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Labour strategists are wrong, and they sure as hell aren’t an Eisenhower, or a Patton or even a Montgomery. They are more like Comical Ali, denying American troops are on the outskirts of Baghdad despite the view of American tanks rolling through the televised back drop.

Ardern needs to break the prevailing narrative that she is out of touch, doctrinaire and condescending, while addressing voters concerns about the parlous state of the New Zealand economy, while also acknowledging her role in creating the rampant inflation that is robbing Kiwi battlers every single day as a result of their policy which dumped $50 billion of extra printed cash into the economy.

She needs a crisis, and maybe just maybe her reshuffle is designed to create that crisis.

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