Quin on Labour’s looming reshuffle

Phil Quin at The New Tasman blogs:

The justified consensus is that Goff needs a game-changer in order to cement his leadership and have a faintly realistic hope of toppling John Key later this year.  This is more about perception than reality — and a game-changer needs an element of surprise.  This story has set the bar so that elevating Jones and sacking Parekura along these lines will merely meet expectations and deliver no benefit to Goff in the public estimation at all — and the grief and plotting associated with reshuffles like this is a high price to pay for a zero-sum game.

For the reshuffle to reset the deck, Goff now needs to exceed these expectations by making radical changes to his senior team, adding political cost and increasing the risk of instability that comes with it.

I agree, that Goff needs to be fairly radical. His main frontbench is entirely comprised of Ministers from the last Government.

He needs to break from the past by presenting some high-profile scalps:  Ruth Dyson is hopeless in Health, and should be shown the door.  The fear is that she will make Goff’s life hell from the backbench because she is an incorrigible troublemaker.  This argument depends on believing that Dyson is not already plotting her heart out , something that only someone who has never met her could possibly believe.

Heh.

Do more than restructure the front-bench, but re-imagine it by discarding the outdated and pointless front/2nd/3rd bench hierarchy that inevitably constricts flexibility.  A straight-forward shadow cabinet model allows Goff to make bolder changes that align better with  the policy and political challenges the Party faces.  Such an 20-member shadow cabinet could be: Goff, King, Cunliffe, Mallard, Jones, Street, Chauvel, Hughes, Parker, Cosgrove, , Mahuta, G. Robertson, Dalziel, Shearer, Davis, Nash, Ardern, Twyford, Sepuloni and Hipkins.   (For those keeping track, this means that Dyson, Hodgson, Chadwick, Parekura, and Mackey are the highest profile casualties).  Importantly, long-term servants like Rick Barker and Damien O’Connor also miss out — sending a strong signal of change.

I can’t imagine Goff would be this bold, but it would certainly give him a better chance – only 11/20 are former Ministers.

Goff should move Trevor Mallard from education and appoint him to a key strategic role overseeing the campaign.  Shane Jones should get education; Kelvin Davis, Maori Affairs.  Cosgrove to Health.

I can’t see Cosgrove being a fit for health. Shane Jones for education could be a breath of fresh air – but is Shane willing to do the hard yards in a major portfolio?