In order for Jacinda Ardern to work out precisely who in her team of MPs would be best qualified to replace the hapless David Clark when she finally does what she should already have done and axes him from the Health portfolio, she need only look in the nearest available mirror.
Was she to do just that, she would find the country’s next Minister of Health staring right back at her.
Not that she need bother to conduct such an exercise. As things stand, she is the one calling the shots in what was once Clark’s fiefdom — if only with respect to the things which currently really matter and (she will be hoping) only temporarily.
For all intents and purposes, the Prime Minister has doubled as the de facto Health minister since the potential scale and severity of the Covid-19 crisis became apparent in such obvious and ugly fashion.
Rather than staying in Auckland, Ardern has set up home full-time in Premier House, the official prime ministerial residence which is barely 500 metres from the Beehive.
It is in the latter complex that her office on the building’s ninth floor has become her Wellington war room and the ground floor theaterette the platform for the announcement of the many measures that now comprise the all-out offensive to stop the coronavirus running rampant in New Zealand and reeking absolute havoc.
In very stark contrast, Clark either decided — or it was decided for him — that he would stay at his home in Dunedin for the duration of the four-week lockdown. That decision effectively rendered the holder of what is currently the most crucial portfolio, other than Finance, virtually invisible.
But not invisible enough it turned out after he was rumbled for ignoring the very rules he had shared responsibility in setting by going mountain biking at a location some distance from his home.
His subsequent admitting to two similar transgressions of the “stay at home” edict can only have one outcome.
The Prime Minister must strip Clark of the Health portfolio and dump him from her Cabinet altogether.
If Ardern is not willing to wield the axe and replace him right now then it best ought happen in the very near future.
True, there are valid arguments which explain why Ardern effectively ripped up Clark’s letter in which he proffered his resignation from her ministry and which he dispatched to her office some time on Monday evening or early on Tuesday morning.
The Prime Minister would normally sack Clark for his lockdown breaches, but won’t amid a global pandemic.
The principle reason cited by the Prime Minister for her declining not to oust him from Health is that replacing him with another MP would cause “massive disruption” in the health sector at precisely the very moment that the system could least afford that to happen.
She insists that “under normal conditions” she would have sacked Clark. She insists he has anyway been on the receiving end of punitive action administered by her in the form of removing him from the post of Associate Finance Minister — the sole other position Clark has held in the current Labour-led Administration — along with her demoting him to the bottom ranking in her 20-strong Cabinet.
He broke the rules. He needed to pay a price for that. He has paid a price for that. Or so Ardern further insists.
But matters of punishment lag a very long way behind other questions in terms of other priorities — most notably the public’s confidence in Clark’s competence and judgement.
That confidence would currently rate at less than zero. Such is the inevitability that his performance and approval measures would have plummeted to scraping bottom-of-the barrel levels that he can no longer credibly front for the Government.
No-one is going to listen to him. Should anyone bother to take the trouble to do so, they will likely struggle to take him seriously.
Also now very much in question is Clark’s integrity. Lacking that commodity, a minister finds himself or herself competing for burial space on the scrapheap of politics.
On that score, why did it take Clark such an inordinately long time to fess up to other quite distant journeys away from his abode that he has undertaken during the lockdown?
Had he failed to reveal those misdeeds and had they instead come to light during Tuesday’s meeting of Parliament’s epidemic recovery committee, then Clark would have been at distinct risk of misleading the Prime Minister or misleading Parliament— or both entities.
Subsequent conviction by Parliament’s all-powerful privileges committee on such charges is a fast ticket to political oblivion. Likewise misleading the leader of your party
There is a much less obvious, but ultimately crucial scenario now operative — one all but guaranteed to oblige Ardern to relieve Clark of the Health portfolio before much more water has passed under the proverbial bridge.
It is a job of such obvious and critical importance to any Administration that the portfolio is always awarded to someone of the highest managerial calibre and competence; someone who has proven to be what in the trade is termed as having “a safe pair of hands”; someone whose performance warrants them being rewarded with a seat on his or her party’s front bench in Parliament.
It is not a portfolio to be entrusted to the minister at the very bottom rank in the Cabinet — even if doing such is designed purely for the purpose of sending a message by means of utilising such symbolism.
1 NEWS’ political editor and John Campbell discussed what’s next for Dr David Clark.
As much as Ardern insists that she cannot and will not sack Clark from the Health portfolio, she will have no choice but to transfer that role to a minister who enjoys a much higher ranking than Clark is now enduring.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that Clark’s retention of such a highly-prized job bar for the short-term would require Ardern to correspondingly not only to look ridiculous, but to be the target of ridicule flung at her by her opponents — and not least because such a stance would make an absolute and total mockery of her claim that under normal circumstances, Clark would have been gone from her ministry and pronto.
Well might Clark flog himself for failing to set the right example.
That option remains open, however. The best example he could now set would be to chuck in the job he still holds and retire to the back-benches, if not from Parliament entirely. But don’t hold your breath in expectation of that happening.
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