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

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

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.

Kiri Allan, Phil Twyford, Michael Wood, Clare Curran, even Nanaia Mahuta - the Foreign Minister who didn't like international travel.

It took forever for Hipkins or Ardern to demote the under-performers, and they suffered for it - public opinion of them was tainted.

That is clearly not how Chris Luxon operates, and it’s a good thing.

Because who doesn’t want performance from the people that we pay to run the country?

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