The minister defended the omission as a ‘cock-up’, but not everyone is so convinced, explains Stewart Sowman-Lund in today’s extract from The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

A minister with many hats

Shane Jones is a busy man. The regional development minister, reported BusinessDesk, is about to head off on a 15-stop national tour to plug his $1.2bn regional infrastructure fund. As the de facto second-in-command of New Zealand First, he’s often in the media acting as the mouthpiece for Winston Peters while the foreign minister is out of the country, such as this week criticising independent MP Darleen Tana for refusing to leave parliament. Earlier in the month, as the NBR reported, he was in Australia wearing his resources minister hat and meeting with mining companies. In other words, his diary is as full as you’d expect from a senior government minister. But it’s a missing entry from that diary that’s also landed him in hot water, or at least seen him drizzled in it, with a series of headlines dating back several months questioning the omission. As we’ll get into below, there are now escalating calls for intervention from the prime minister and parallels with previous ministerial (non)disclosure dramas being invoked.

A ‘cock-up’ or a conspiracy?

The meeting was newsworthy because Bragg claimed that he was encouraged by Jones to put a project forward for consideration for the government’s controversial fast track bill, which opened the door to concerns that it amounted to undisclosed political lobbying. Jones is one of three ministers expected to have decision-making powers under the fast track bill, as my colleague Shanti Mathias explained last month. Jones defended the diary omission as a “cock-up” rather than a conspiracy, reported RNZ, saying not all meetings fell under the disclosure rules. “It depends what pōtae I wear. A pōtae is a cap. Some caps are NZ First, some caps are ministerial.”

Open and transparent

The reason this saga has dragged on from May until now comes down to Jones himself. The latest update from David Williams, also reported on by The Post’s Thomas Manch, was just this week when it was revealed that while Jones had initially claimed the dinner was a “last minute thing”, it had actually been teed up by one of his staffers. As Williams reported, Jones has “refused” to answer follow-up questions and his press secretary told Newsroom “the matter is now closed”. That may be how the minister views it, but in politics, perception is everything. And the perception of transparency (or a lack thereof) has brought down ministers in the past.

It was an undisclosed meeting that saw the end of Clare Curran’s political career back in 2018. As the Herald’s Nicholas Jones reported at the time, Curran was removed from cabinet after a meeting with entrepreneur Derek Handley. There were several added complications, such as that it was Curran’s second offence, that she was the minister for open government, and that she had once uttered the now immortal line that Labour would be “the most open, most transparent government that New Zealand has ever had”. Nevertheless, at its core, Curran’s fall came down to a failure to disclose a meeting. One that – like Jones – she claimed had been informal.

The fallout, and the ongoing questions

Labour’s Chris Hipkins was asked about Jones while on his morning media round yesterday, telling TVNZ’s Breakfast that the prime minister should be pulling Jones into line. And he invoked a more recent ministerial scandal that saw Christopher Luxon, then opposition leader, calling for a punishment. “In the last government, ministers lost their jobs for not declaring things,” Hipkins said, a reference to former minister Michael Wood’s undeclared shares. At the time, reported the Herald, Luxon had criticised Hipkins for being “weak” for failing to intervene earlier. Of course, in that instance it was a Labour leader being asked to punish a Labour minister. This time around, the one person we haven’t heard from is Winston Peters, Jones’s boss. As parliament returns next week, expect further questions to be asked.