Ethnic Communities Portfolio is Gesture to New Zealand First ties

Judith Collins held the police portfolio before the reshuffle, along with Corrections, but she has lost them both and picked up Revenue, Energy and Resources, and Ethnic Communities.

She has also been moved down two places on the Cabinet rankings, but new prime minister Bill English insisted she had not been demoted in the cabinet shuffle. We foresaw this tactical re-assignment..

Our report last Monday, a week ago......

Monday, 12 December 2016 07:54NZ National Government new Co-Leaders Curb Rebels

Day one of the Dream Team means coping with problems before they become bigger problems and in politics this means people which is what the word politics actually means.

Top priority is hardly surprisingly Mrs Judith Collins MP, minister of police.

The new team knows that Mrs Collins must be kept in the tent and also kept busy, very busy.

Mrs Collins demonstrated her determination of purpose when she reached for the top job and did so without any support from the National government’s king-makers, people such as Murray McCully MP or of enforcers such as Steven Joyce MP, the new minister of finance.

She compounded this by mooting that she was the one, the match maker, within the National government to bring into the fold permanent stormy petrel Winston Peters MP of New Zealand First Party.

She might just as well have offered her colleagues a cup of tractor sump oil.

Mrs Collins is the National Government MP who most equates to Margaret Thatcher, also a tax lawyer.

So as today draws on and the coronation caucus smiles however insincere, along with the sound of clinking glasses recede into the evening the new premier Bill English MP and his deputy Paula Bennett MP will crystalise their thoughts on Mrs Collins.

They will do so in concert with solving another problem..

It is one to which long running National governments have found themselves in the quite recent past to be prone.

This is of the seemingly spontaneous but in fact carefully orchestrated advent of a middle class revolt.

It is currently a low-level threat in the form of a peoples’ party currently being nurtured by pop-economist Gareth Morgan.

Mr Morgan’s movement centres on the need for an asset tax .

This it is claimed is required to cope with the problem of the well-off sidestepping paying tax.

Voiders and evaders alike slide past it by a process of expensing blended with the advantages presented by the much storied absence of a capital gains tax..

Enter now the solution to be seen to be at least facing the problem.

It is Mrs Judith Collins MP.

But now with a new title.

That of revenue minister..