Government has just one more Cabinet meeting before pre-election wind-down

Wednesday, 10 June 2020

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reflects on New Zealand's response to the Coronavirus.

The Government has just one more Cabinet meeting before it begins to wind-down some of its key decision-making powers.

On June 19, three months ahead of the election on September 19, New Zealand will enter the pre-election period.

This is traditionally a time when governments exercise restraint.

In New Zealand, this means the Government is likely to hold off making significant appointments or starting big campaigns.

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The convention is somewhat murky – it’s only a convention for starters, albeit an important one. That means governments can break the rules, should they choose to.

Overseas, particularly in Australia and the UK, governments observe a strict caretaker convention or “purdah” period in the lead up to the election, winding down the significant business of government. There, the government continues to run the administrative business of state, but leave big spending announcements until after the election.

Dean Knight, associate professor of law at Victoria University said that, in New Zealand, the Government had “full authority right up to the election”.

“That contrasts quite a lot with other jurisdictions that throttle right down before an election day”.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she will avoid making significant appointments in the run up to the election.

There are several reasons for winding down, however.

A ban on new government advertising campaigns is “to avoid partisan advantage,” being given to the current government by the civil service.

“It’s to ensure those who are in government don't have the might of the civil service behind them,” Knight said.

Avoiding significant appointments has a different rationale. It respects the fact that one government shouldn’t seek to stack appointments with people sympathetic to it, which could be a problem for the next government.

Shadow leader of the house Gerry Brownlee said he would want the Government to adhere to the rules around appointments and advertising at a minimum.

He is particularly concerned about the ongoing Covid-19 ads, which recently adopted the slogan “Unite for the recovery,” having previously used the slogan “Unite against Covid-19”.

Brownlee said there was an ongoing question about the appropriateness of the ads.

“How do you deal with ongoing Covid-19 ads given that Covd-19 and those ads are so associated with the Prime Minister?” he said.

The Taxpayers Union this week raised a complaint with the Auditor-General over the ads saying they were not “primarily informative or educational, unlike earlier Government COVID-19 advertisements”.

Taxpayers Union spokesperson Jordan Williams said the ads, “moved into the realm of thinly veiled political propaganda at the taxpayers’ expense”.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said after Cabinet this week that she would uphold the Cabinet Manual when it came to significant appointments, and that significant spending decisions had already been made though last month's budget, and therefore fell outside the pre-election period.

“Now we have the job of just continuing on an agenda that means we’re supporting New Zealanders in our recovery,” she said.

But while the Government’s spending was appropriated in the budget, the Covid-19 fund means a lot of the money has yet to be allocated and distributed - raising the spectre of the fund turning into an election vehicle.

Brownlee said he would like the Government to look at taking an even more rigid interpretation of the caretaker convention in the pre-election period, to adopt a more British approach and exercise restraint.

This could be a problem for the current Government. It has yet to make an announcement over whether it will build the costly Auckland light rail line, and it is also currently making announcements about where it will spend the roughly $20 billion left of its $50b Covid-19 recovery fund.

Brownlee said he appreciates that Covid-19 has put the country into an extraordinary time, but he does not want to see the fund turn into an election “slush fund”.

“The problem is they had $20b worth of unallocated spending in the last budget, that’s an enormous amount of money. If that was designed to become their election campaign slush fund that would be a problem,” he said.

“We certainly wouldn’t want to see the announcement of initiatives that started during the regulated period”.

He said that, were the Government to use the fund during the regulated period, he would want a “high level of consultation”.

“It is a unique time in New Zealand’s history. It’s not a time for the country to completely back of making decisions about the interests of New Zealanders, we would expect a high level of consultation but in the end the rules are the rules.”

Knight said the circumstances around Covid-19 were unique, and there might be a case for disempowering the Government’s ability to make large decisions after Parliament was dissolved on August 12.

“When the government is not accountable to the house in the usual way they should throttle back activities,” he said.

Knight said the effective ban on significant spending commitments that exists in pre-election periods overseas was justified on similar grounds to the restraining around significant government appointments.

“One government shouldn’t be hamstrung by another,” he said.

This could be problematic for decisions like the Auckland light rail network, which National has opposed. The current government could sign off on the plan with weeks to go before the election, lumping a potentially new government with the task of building (and paying for) something it had opposed.

Knight said the fact that New Zealand had a comparatively brief three-year election cycle meant that interpreting the pre-election period too liberally undercut the current Government. In the UK, Parliament can go for five years without an election.