One matter of import lingered in the aftermath of the Ministry of Health’s calamitous Covid-19 testing bungle: why hadn’t the Prime Minister done what she should have done much earlier in the political life-cycle of the coronavirus and sacked David Clark from the Health portfolio?
It took the best part of three days for that puzzle to be supplied with an answer. That rates as a “fail” in political management terms. A basic rule of politics has it that disciplining a Cabinet minister or an MP is best done with speed.
As insistent and incessant as will be its cry for heads to roll following a blunder committed by the party in power at the time, the Opposition is rarely in a hurry to be delivered what it is so vociferously demanding.
Its preference is to drag things out for as long as possible — or at least until the public tires of the rival camps bitching with one another.
National MPs will accordingly have been pinching themselves that the happenings of the past week actually did happen — and that it all was not some fleeting dream.
From National’s point of view, the week’s events could not have been better scripted.
Following the shock news that two women infected with the virus had been released from managed isolation without first being tested for Covid-19 as explicitly required under procedures drawn up by the Ministry of Health, Todd Muller zeroed in on Jacinda Ardern during Wednesday’s question-time in Parliament.
National’s new leader repeatedly challenged the Prime Minister to justify why she continued to express confidence in her Minister of Health when Clark had patently failed to meet his obligation of maintaining strict oversight of the ministry and thereby ensuring it was performing to the standard it had set for itself.
For Muller, it was akin to shooting fish in a barrel. The breach was so serious that Ardern could have no confidence that things would not go so awry again.
It is the ritual of parliamentary politics that you concede nothing to your opponents during such exchanges in the House. Ardern was thus obliged to mount a defence of Clark’s track record.
She acknowledged that there had been an unacceptable “failure of the system”. Clark was “working hard” to fix it. She noted that with Clark as Minister of Health, it had been 47 days since the last recorded case of unknown transmission of the virus.
This was obfuscation typical of Ardern. The transmission of the virus was not the crux of the issue. It was the pathogen’s penetration of New Zealand’s border which was the matter at stake.
The war against the virus is being fought at the border. That puts the onus on whichever minister has responsibility for checking whether arrivals from overseas are Covid-free or not and then funnelling them into managed isolation or strict quarantine.
The key question is whether there are safeguards built into the system and that the ministry is cognisant of Sod’s Law that if something can go wrong then it will go wrong.
The only conclusion to be drawn from the case of the two women who subsequently tested positive for Covid-19 is that the safeguards failed presuming there were any in the first place.
No-one should be fooled by the line of argument adopted by the Prime Minister in order to protect her hapless Health Minister. Ardern for one clearly wasn’t.
The man was pulled from a transfer flight at the last minute. (Source: Other)
With Parliament having risen for the week, she executed a 180 degree turn via a Friday afternoon announcement that Megan “Fix It” Woods had been handed ministerial responsibility for Managed Isolation and Quarantine.
Currently No 6 in Cabinet ranking, Woods is now the one exercising ministerial oversight in ensuring that not only are the procedures put in place to block the virus from penetrating New Zealand’s border are adequate for the task, but that they are enforced with rigour.
Ardern had already gone over Clark’s head earlier in the week by bringing in the Defence Force to provide on-the-ground vigilance to guarantee procedures would be followed to the letter from hereon.
Friday’s announcement effectively placed Clark under quarantine, at least in a political context. He is still the Minister of Health — but in name only.
He has been quarantined from oversight of the managing of what without question is the absolute priority in the Health portfolio right now.
The Government had said people would have to return a negative test before being let out. (Source: Other)
The Beehive spin machine had it that the shift in responsibilities from Clark to Woods does not amount to a downgrading in the former’s status.
Supposedly That was because ministerial responsibility for Managed Isolation and Quarantine was a newly-created role, rather than an already-existing one that been taken out of Clark’s hands.
If you believe that kind of kafkaesque-sounding nonsense, then you will believe anything.
All prime ministers need a “Fix-It” minister. Woods is to Ardern what Steven Joyce was to John Key, Michael Cullen was to Helen Clark and what Bill Birch was to Jim Bolger.
Woods was handed the task of managing the KiwiBuild “reset” following Phil Twyford’s spectacular failure as Housing minister to build any houses.
Rather than resuscitating the latter’s Grand Plan, she seems to have opted to put the scheme out of its misery and good as killed it off, thereby stopping the embarrassment from causing more misery for Ardern and Labour.
Some might award the Prime Minister political points for conducting what could be argued is quite a neat piece of political surgery. The operation offers the hapless Clark a fig leaf of dignity.
At least he can pretend he is still Minister of Health even if everyone else knows that is now as about as far from the truth that is possible to get.
Clark’s political future does not matter, however. That is because he no longer has one. If Labour retains power after the September 19 general election, he will no longer be Health Minister.
That inevitability was flagged pretty clearly by Ardern following his inexplicable, unacceptable and inexcusable breaches of lockdown restrictions at Alert
Level 4 some two months or so ago.
Ardern should have ditched Clark at that point. She was instead lenient punishment-wise. She demoted him by turfing him off Labour’s front bench in Parliament and relegating him to the bottom slot in the rankings held by Labour Party ministers in the coalition Cabinet.
But she refused to sack him on the grounds that dumping him from the Health portfolio would cause “massive disruption” to her Government’s efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19.
Keeping him in that post was a mistake. It was a mistake then. It is an even bigger one now. It quite possibly ranks as the biggest mistake of Ardern’s tenure as prime minister.
Clark’s lax oversight of the ministry for which he holds responsibility has turned out to be disruptive in itself. Whether it has been massively so hangs in the balance.
The extent of the lapse regarding the two women — along with a growing number of anecdotal accounts of similarly haphazard adherence to testing protocols — has raised the very serious question of whether there are other cases which have fallen through the gaps and, if so, how many.
Much has been written on the subject of ministerial accountability and when and where the buck stops when things go wrong; that a minister can be responsible for the failings of the Government department which operates under the bailiwick of his or her portfolio, but should be allowed to stay in their post rather than being sacked because he or she is not to blame; that ministerial accountability is about fixing things, not firing people.
Sometimes, however, it is necessary for a prime minister to slash through this Gordian Knot; sometimes it is necessary to cut through what is a tangled constitutional web and sack a minister from the Cabinet if only to clear the air and restore public confidence and trust in the way a particular portfolio is being managed.
In Clark’s case, that time is long past. He should be long gone.
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