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Napier MP Stuart Nash
Stuart Nash (Photo: Getty Images, additional design Tina Tiller)

PoliticsMarch 29, 2023

A brief history of Stuart Nash’s big mouth

Napier MP Stuart Nash
Stuart Nash (Photo: Getty Images, additional design Tina Tiller)

The revelation he leaked cabinet conversations is just the latest example of the Napier MP failing to hold his tongue.

National MP Simeon Brown did a rare good tweet last night. In the wake of news that Stuart Nash had been sacked from cabinet, he wrote: “A rare misstep from Stuart Nash.”

It’s the type of Twitter-centric joke that Brown is usually the butt of – every time Brown himself does or says something ill-advised, it’s labelled a “rare misstep”. But it works because Nash, too, has a fairly storied history of faux pas. While perceived as a hard-working and generally competent minister, his loose lips mean it’s unsurprising that he’s the one dumped out of cabinet this week for sharing private conversations. 

As we prepare to learn what, if anything, Nash intends to do next in his political career, let’s take a look back at some of the times he’s been caught out saying, doing or simply vibing the wrong thing.

2017: Police and mental health

Just a few months out from Labour sweeping to power under Jacinda Ardern, Nash, then the party’s police spokesperson, made headlines for saying people with mental health conditions probably shouldn’t be police officers. 

“I think there are enough people out there who would make brilliant police officers without any existing mental health condition,” he said. “It’s a lot safer for men and women who want to become police, and for our communities, if people who want to enter the police don’t have an existing condition.”

Nash later apologised, saying his comments were “uninformed and uneducated”. 

2019: Gym stoush

A “loud and uncouth” confrontation broke out between Nash and another individual at the parliamentary gym, it was reported back in February 2019. The incident occurred after a gym-goer wanted to use some equipment that, it was alleged, Nash had been hogging.

Nash has stated many times on the record that he likes to work out and he’s been dubbed the “minister of muscles” by some. It’s unclear whether this week’s cabinet sacking will also see that unofficial ministerial portfolio reallocated.

A shirtless Nash getting the Covid-19 vaccine (Image: Stuart Nash/Instagram)

2019: Airport outburst

In August of 2019 Nash was made to apologise after swearing at an Air New Zealand staffer when he turned up late and couldn’t board his flight.

“I said words to the tune of ‘for beep’s sake’,” Nash told reporters at the time. “You should never shoot the messenger, and I’m the first to admit I perhaps acted in a way that I shouldn’t have.”

As Newshub’s Jenna Lynch pointed out, this particular airline aggression came just a few months after Nash had tweeted his annoyance at a flight being late because “some clown slept in”.

2020: Fishing sector ‘criminals’

Nash upset the fishing sector in 2020 when leaked footage showed him referring to some in the industry as criminals. He was also caught out saying NZ First, then in a coalition arrangement with Labour, was responsible for the delay in getting cameras onto fishing boats. (Nash remains close to NZ First, even after the party failed to get reelected in 2020)

Nash would later say his comments were only about a particular seafood company that had actually been prosecuted (and were therefore, technically, criminals).

2021: Groundswell ‘a mixture of racism and anti-vax’

Just weeks before an angry mob occupied the front yard of parliament, Stuart Nash said in parliament that rural advocacy group Groundswell was full of racists and anti-vaxxers

While not a totally discreditable comment – Groundswell certainly played its part in pushing anti-government rhetoric during the Covid-19 pandemic – it caused an unwelcome distraction at a time when some farmers were genuinely concerned about government policy. 

2022: Noodle-eating backpackers

In 2020, Nash launched a clamp down on freedom campers who he said “pull over to the side of the road and… shit in our waterways.”

Two years later and Nash went a step further, saying New Zealand wanted to attract high spending visitors and not just those who “travel around our country on $10 a day eating dried noodles”.

He clarified that while backpackers were still welcome in New Zealand, they were not the government’s priority in the wake of Covid-19.

Stuart Nash delivering a speech. (Radio NZ/Dom Thomas)

2023: The Coster call

And so we come to the year of our lord 2023. Not long after becoming one of the more visible faces of the Cyclone Gabrielle recovery in his electorate of Napier, Nash was embroiled in controversy after it was revealed he had called up the police commissioner Andrew Coster to express his upset over a particular court ruling. And how did this phone call come to light? Nash told Mike Hosking about it live on the radio. It was a boast that backfired, with Nash quickly stripped of his prized police portfolio but allowed to hold onto his other ministerial roles.

2023: A cabinet tumble

And not long after that, Nash was demoted down to the very bottom of the cabinet ranking. Two more allegations of misconduct had come to light. One involved another case of Nash improperly commenting on police conduct and then for some reason telling Mike Hosking about it. He was then found to have contacted a senior MBIE official over an immigration case rather than following established procedure. 

It was Nash’s final warning – what could possibly go wrong?

2023: Goneburger 

A couple of weeks later (this week), Nash was officially dumped from cabinet. Prime minister Chris Hipkins said the latest claim, that Nash had disclosed private cabinet conversations with a pair of donors, was inexcusable. He was sacked before even having the chance to resign.

For now (at least) Nash remains the MP for Napier.

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Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller
Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONPoliticsMarch 29, 2023

Winston Peters’ wooing of Stuart Nash

Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller
Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller

The NZ First leader is throwing his arms open wide to the booted Labour minister, but a waka jump isn’t on the cards. 

While the Chrisses of Labour and National competed on who was most outraged by the latest skeleton bounding out of Stuart Nash’s bulging closet of cabinet infractions, Winston Peters sniffed an opportunity. Instead of denouncing a breach of core cabinet principles in Nash’s leaking copious cabinet details to a couple of mates who happened also to be donors to his political campaigns and who happened also to have their own commercial interests, Peters spoke up for his old mate.

“Nash shouldn’t have done what he did as it broke Cabinet rules – but he is now being hung out to dry,” said Peters in a series of tweets. “Let’s not have the hypocrisy & hand-wringing from a number of Labour Ministers who constantly leaked information to media about what was happening inside the Cabinet NZF was in. Labour Ministers blatantly telling media that NZ First was being the handbrake and how we voted inside Cabinet – including blocking the $55m media bribe. This happened frequently and the media all know it. So let’s not have this ‘holier than thou’ routine.”

He added: “The fact is Nash’s comments served no personal gain. He was trying to help hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of workers keep their jobs by extending government support. On this Nash was right.”

Last night, following the cutting of the thread to cabinet – already he was on a “final warning” – Nash by his own account had a “long conversation” with former NZ First cabinet minister and pal Shane Jones. But he had not been offered a place with the rival party, he told the NZ Herald, and was not pondering jumping ship. “I’m Labour to the core – always have been, always will be, Nashes have been for a long, long, long, long time,” said Nash, whose great-grandfather was Sir Walter Nash, Labour prime minister of the 1950s.

Despite the lineage, Nash is widely regarded as so far to the right edge of the Labour Party that – back in the Cunliffe days – there was speculation he could even defect to National. Under Jacinda Ardern, that became in some ways an advantage. He could, for example, mix with Mike Hosking and Mark Mitchell in the laddish weekly politics chat on Newstalk ZB. That didn’t work out, of course. The common thread in Stuart Nash’s blotted copybook is not simply the breaches of cabinet rules, but that he announced them himself on a hugely popular radio station; or, in the leaked cabinet discussions, he sent them via email rather than, say, over the phone. 

One of those donors is Troy Bowker. A Linkedin foghorn long before Rob Campbell, Bowker is perhaps most remembered for standing down from his place on the Hurricanes board after lambasting Sir Ian Taylor for “sucking up to the left loving Māori agenda”. His most recent comment on the social media hotbed that is Linkedin blasted “the woke ideology typical of Jacinda and her followers”. Anyway, Nash said he would not take donations from his mate after the “left loving Māori agenda” moment, but Bowker, an investment banker, has been generous in other donations, including, as Richard Harman noted this morning, as “a substantial donor” to New Zealand First. 

MP Stuart Nash wearing a suit and pasted over a red and blue background
Stuart Nash (Image: Bianca Cross)

None of that means, of course, that Nash is about to leap into the embrace of NZ First. His links to Labour are real and deep and it would undoubtedly be a wrench to do so. But don’t write it off. The appeal to New Zealand First is obvious. Nash has a large personal support network in his Napier seat and across Hawke’s Bay. He has name recognition across much of the country, a knack for retail politics and – notwithstanding the occasional career jeopardising divulgence – performs well in media. 

Entertain this: Nash swaps his tie, announces himself no longer Labour but a New Zealand First MP and resumes parliamentary activity, lobbing oral and written questions, with parliamentary support staff to prosecute the new party cause. Don’t entertain it for long, though. Owing to the new rules on “waka jumping”, if he were to declare a new party affiliation, the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill kicks in, and a byelection would be triggered. 

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Nash could, however, stand down as a Labour MP and say simply that he intends to contest the next election as a NZ First candidate. In that case, the ball would be in Labour’s court on whether to invoke the bill. In the recent case of Gaurav Sharma, Labour said it was not interested in doing so; the byelection was triggered by Sharma resigning his seat. To invoke it this time would not be without complications. Not least: does the Napier electorate really need an expensive byelection as it continues to deal with the ravages of Cyclone Gabrielle?

Most of this is probably academic. As of Wednesday morning, the likeliest outcome seems to be Nash announcing he won’t contest the next election for any party. He certainly doesn’t seem sufficiently deluded and vainglorious to go down the route of creating a new “major political force” with a name like the Bring Back Democracy and Progress for our Nation Party. Still, as far as NZ First is concerned, don’t rule out Winston Peters seeking to change his mind. And an ironic footnote, in the lack of an option to transmogrify from a Labour to a New Zealand First MP, is that it is Winston Peters who made it so. The pledge to “introduce and pass a ‘Waka Jumping’ bill” was literally in the 2017 coalition agreement.


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