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Melissa Lee speaking to media on her way into the House, Parliament, Wellington. 09 April, 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Heather du Plessis-Allan: NZ deserves Luxon's style of performance management

Author: Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2024, 5:08pm

I have got nothing bad to say about Chris Luxon demoting Melissa Lee and Penny Simmonds today.

This is exactly the kind of performance management that the country deserves, don't you think?

Obviously on a human level, I feel sorry for both of those ministers because this will humiliating - but don’t tell me this wasn’t deserved.

Melissa Lee has done an appalling job of looking like she knows what she’s doing with media, with senior commentators going on the radio to say - "She doesn't know what she's doing."

And Penny Simmonds oversaw one of the biggest stuff ups for the Government, with the cutting of disability-related funding.

So Melissa Lee's been stripped of the media portfolio and kicked out of Cabinet and Penny Simmonds has lost the disability portfolio - and she was already a minister outside of Cabinet.

Now this does two things:

Firstly, it signals to voters that are there are standards in this Cabinet and incompetence will not be tolerated. That is a great signal to send to voters, it will likely lift the public regard of Cabinet.

Secondly, it sends a very important message to other ministers that if you stuff up in public, this will happen to you. Luxon's made it clear we're going to see more of this as the Government goes along, and there is nothing like the threat of losing a job to make someone pull their socks up.

What's happened today will shock a lot of people, because over the last few years we've got used to Prime Minsters just putting up with their ministers doing a bad job or behaving badly in public.