This doesn’t augur well for future relationship

Sir Bob Jones says this government will be recorded as the worst in the country’s history.

He’s not alone and if we think that this one is bad, how much worse would it be if Labour was propped up by the Green and Māori parties?

Here’s a sign of how rocky the relationship between the parties could be:

Climate Change Minister James Shaw says he had no idea more than $200m in cuts to climate policies would be announced on Monday and hasn’t received advice on the emissions impacts of the move

As part of a $4 billion savings initiative announced on Monday, the Government will cut $236 million from climate policies on agriculture, transport and forestry.

One unusual aspect of the move is that climate funding is supposed to be ring-fenced solely for climate policies, but the savings will instead be returned to the general coffers.

Another unusual aspect is Minister for Climate Change James Shaw wasn’t aware it would be happening. He told Newsroom he knew the Government was doing a savings exercise and evaluated a couple of policies he was responsible for, which didn’t get cut. He was also briefed on a $10m cut to a waste policy.

But he found out about the remaining $226m in climate cuts at the same time the public did.

Ahead of time, the Green Party wasn’t expecting Monday’s announcement would contain anything for it to comment on. Shaw himself was only able to comment on the basis of the press release put out by Finance Minister Grant Robertson, as he had nothing else to inform him about the decisions made by Cabinet.

When asked if he was disappointed to see the Government making these decisions without so much as consulting him, he was resigned.

“Well, it’s a majority Labour Government and I’m not in Cabinet. So that’s really their choice,” he said.

Would he have expected to have been notified about this ahead of time?

“Yeah.”

Was he?

“No.” . . 

Whether or not the cuts were justified, it doesn’t auger well for the future relationship when the Finance Minister doesn’t bother to at least give another minister, and co-leader of a potential collation partner, the courtesy of a heads-up.

And a difference of opinion between the Finance Minister and his leader made the situation worse:

. . . The Prime Minister and Finance Minister are saying two different things when it comes to an awkward “communication breakdown” with the Green Party.

On Monday, Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson announced a $4 billion savings initiative, including spending cuts to existing policies, a direction to agencies to reduce their baseline budgets by 1 to 2 percent and slashing future Budget allowances. As part of this, $236 million for climate policy was culled. . . 

Now, Robertson says he will apologise to Shaw for not notifying him ahead of time, but Hipkins says there’s no issue.

“It appears that there was a communication breakdown around that and so I’ll have a chat with James and apologise. He definitely should have known about that,” Robertson told Newsroom on his way into caucus on Tuesday morning.

However, farther down the hall, at roughly the same time, Hipkins seemed to say there’s nothing to see on this.

“These were savings that were identified by the ministers concerned. If they weren’t in his portfolio, I wouldn’t necessarily expect that [the Greens] would be [informed],” he said. . . 

This isn’t the first difference between these two – they differed on a wealth tax and while Robertson had to swallow a very large and very dead rat over Hipkins’ policy to meddle with GST.

The issue might not be major but the conflicting views of the leader and his Finance Minister are a sign of instability.

Sir Bob isn’t alone in thinking this is the worst government we’ve had. Let’s hope he’s right also in saying:

. . . The issue is not whether Labour can win but rather, can they survive as a political party with the 20 to 25 ragtail MPs they’ll have left after the coming well-deserved thrashing.

A final comment: I can remember every election since 1949 and can adamantly say that none were such fore-gone conclusions as this one. Nor was there such wide-spread anger, notably over their principal legacy of creating a racist society. This will take a long time to repair. . . 

The repair will take a long time, and it will take a National-led government to do it.