CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@cainmark Yeah, we all came here to post this. Whippet indeed good. Good whippet.
@phil_stevens @Natasha_Jay

@jeremy_pm I don't think we're debating, just two people on the same side talking about political strategy.

We probably won't figure it out perfectly, but I'm pretty sure the confusion comes down to whether we're counting the number of ministers a party has, or estimating how much power those ministers have to get things done.
@Salty

@jeremy_pm To illustrate with an extreme scenario that's very unlikely: suppose we had 15 Green MPs and Labour gave us a choice between two options:

1. All 15 Green MPs get an associate minister role outside Cabinet for an area they really care about.

2. Greens get only one minister, but it's the Finance Minister, deciding where money gets spent across the whole government

I would pick the second option. Hard on our MPs, but more power to get stuff done.

Obviously this won't happen, but realistic scenarios will be somewhere between these extreme options, and we'll need to decide which are worth it.
@Salty

@jeremy_pm I think we've misunderstood each other, and it's probably due to an ambiguity in what it means to be “in government”. I'm an active Green Party member, and I want the Greens to have as many MPs in Parliament as possible. I also want those MPs to be part of a majority bloc that forms a government. I believe we're all in agreement there.

However… “government” can also mean the Executive, i.e. ministers, which are appointed by the Prime Minister. Not all ministerial roles have equal power, and I'd rather have a smaller number of powerful ministers inside Cabinet than a larger number of weak ones outside. That way we have influence over all decisions, including short-term day-to-day ones.

Because the PM appoints ministers, it's not a given that more ministers automatically means more practical power. It depends a lot which ministries and whether they get to participate in Cabinet.

@Salty

@Salty The context is also different this time.

James always said that his project was to see the Greens into government and out the other side, which I took to mean demonstrating that we're a stable coalition partner and not just a protest vote. That’s been achieved, and we don't need to prove it over again. Next time, we should have a different political objective.

That might look like showing we can run major parts of government, or it might be something new: showing that we can make the cross benches a new way to exercise power. If I was making decisions for Labour I'd prefer the former.

@jeremy_pm

@jeremy_pm I disagree that we disagree. You're quite right that Labour's coalition choices have been defined by rational political calculus. I'd have made the same decision each time in their position.

But I also don't expect them to offer more to the Greens than the absolute minimum they can get away with. Not because they hate us or anything, but because they have their own people to be loyal to. They will want to fill powerful positions with Labour people.

So I expect Labour to offer the same deal even if NZ First isn't in the picture: Cabinet posts for Labour ministers only, one important ministry for a Green co-leader outside Cabinet, a smattering of associate roles. And I think we should be willing to sit on the cross benches instead of accepting that, because it seems like a similar degree of power in practice.

I guess my bottom line is that we're consulted on everything, whether that's in Cabinet or seeking our votes in Parliament for every bill.

@jeremy_pm Me either. We're dealing with multiple interlocked crises and we've wasted the last century or so making them worse. I want to have strong values and know what the right direction is, then seize every opportunity to move in that direction.

In government, you can only do that short-term opportunity-seizing inside Cabinet. Outside, you can get wins, but you're always vulnerable to Cabinet deciding they don't care about your longer-term direction.

The most powerful Green minister so far was James Shaw for Climate Change. The best he could achieve was a framework system for the longer term, deferring most of the actual work, and punting the obvious problem of agriculture that Labour were too gutless to confront. It's been comprehensively ignored by National. I'm not excited by more ministerial roles like that. I think we need to make hundreds of short-term concrete decisions in the right direction, not a few big abstract ones.

@jeremy_pm So far, Labour has only ever shared Cabinet with New Zealand First. They've never had a coalition with Greens in Cabinet, and they've treated the achievements of Green ministers outside Cabinet as things to rip up at the first opportunity in order to court National voters.

I don't think Labour is prepared for a full coalition with Green ministers inside Cabinet. While some Labour people may have absorbed that it would be different, I expect there to be mid-ranked Labour MPs who resent Greens getting posts that they feel entitled to based on their positions within the Labour Party. I'd like to see more evidence of a cultural shift in Labour to be ready for this situation.

@jeremy_pm It's not just about the numbers, because ministerial roles have different degrees of influence. A finance minister has effective veto power over all government decisions. A Deputy Prime Minister gets constant media attention. A minister inside cabinet gets to participate in all collective decisions. A full minister outside Cabinet can only has influence over their particular portfolio, to the extent Cabinet allows. An associate minister outside Cabinet… is ignored until there's a scandal they can be blamed for.

So if Greens and TPM are 30% of MPs and have 40% of roles, but all the roles are outside Cabinet and mostly associates, I'd consider that a bad deal. I'd rather have 20%, but in Cabinet with significant influence over collective decisions, not just isolated portfolios.

@jeremy_pm I’ve chosen “below 30%”, but with some specific reasoning.

The baseline should be that the total number of ministerial roles is proportional to the number of seats the parties bring to the coalition. However… for smaller parties the raw numbers aren’t enough: it's important that they remain visible in the media and can demonstrate that their most important policies are taken seriously. The coalition will fail if smaller parties disappear from view, so they shouldn't accept just a bunch of associate roles: they need a disproportionate number of senior Cabinet posts.

At the same time, Cabinet isn't huge. So if the trade-off is that a prominent Cabinet post comes at the expense of a less-than-proportional total number of ministerial roles, so be it.

This means that ambitious people in the larger party need to recognise that they're not guaranteed Cabinet posts. Which I feel is good, because it means they have to understand that a coalition isn't just on paper.