[ad_1]
It’s more of a melodrama than a classic Shakespeare tragedy but Michael Woods departure from Labour’s cabinet yesterday reveals him as a Macbeth or an Othello – a principled person with many fine attributes but brought down by a fatal flaw.
By all accounts Michael Woods was a well-respected parliamentarian – efficient, likeable and capable in his ministerial portfolios. No-one seems to have anything bad to say about him at the personal level. He comes across as genuine and knowledgeable in media interviews and seemed to be on top of his portfolios.
However his failure to deal with the most simple and basic of public accountabilities – declaring potential conflicts of interest related to personal shareholdings – reveals a disastrous flaw.
It’s inexplicable because no one is seriously suggesting he was personally profiting from this failure. It seems his flaw lies somewhere between arrogance and stupidity.
It’s right that he has gone from cabinet and good the rules around accountabilities are likely to be toughened as a result of his failures but repairing the damage to public confidence of recent failures won’t be easy.
In recent years too many MPs and ministers from across the board have not taken their accountabilities to the public seriously.
Stuart Nash and Michael Woods are just the latest examples. Nash was keeping his rich donors updated with government decisions in breach of the cabinet manual, arranging a dodgy workaround to get a rich acquaintance appointed to a committee Nash was responsible for and screwing the Official Information Act out of any recognisable shape. Woods failings by contrast are inexplicable rather than dodgy.
However, in both cases what matters is public confidence and at a time when parliamentary leadership faces high levels of public mistrust both politicians have done us a grave disservice.
Chris Hipkins updating the cabinet manual won’t make a difference to improve public confidence but the independent report into our electoral system could do so – provided the proposed changes around the party vote threshold and political donations can be strengthened and the main political parties forced, against their own self-interest, to accept and enact then.
Nash and Woods are reminders the public generally has poor oversight of ministers and MPs. For this reason alone I agree with others that governments should be kept on a short leash – a three year parliamentary term is plenty of time to get stuff done (provided of course a party wants to get stuff done – with the current Labour government that’s not at all clear) – four years is a year too many.
Submissions in the Electoral committee’s proposals for changes to our electoral laws are here and the deadline to respond is Monday 17 July.
[ad_2]
Source link
