Danyl McLauchlan: How is Casey Costello able to keep her job?
Casey Costello: An open wound bleeding dreadful media coverage. Photo / Getty Images
It’s hard to think of a minister who has inflicted more damage on their own government in its inaugural year than Associate Health Minister Casey Costello. With Labour still licking its wounds, the Greens obsessed with internal troubles and Te Pāti Māori under investigation for alleged misuse of census information and failure to file annual financial statements, the New Zealand First MP may constitute an entire opposition party of her own, managing to generate headlines containing the words “government”, “tobacco”, “industry” and “health” on a regular basis for almost the entire year.
In late January, RNZ reported that Costello had proposed a freeze on tobacco excise taxes. She claimed the suggestion came from officials; documents quickly emerged contradicting this. A month later, she ditched Labour’s Smokefree legislation. In July, she slashed the excise rate on heated tobacco products at an estimated cost of $216 million.
She has been in a state of open warfare with the Ministry of Health, and has struggled to explain the origin of a document she distributed to officials claiming that “nicotine is as harmful as caffeine”, and other arguments that seemed unusually friendly to the tobacco industry.
She has been forced to apologise for withholding information from public health researchers after the Chief Ombudsman found her office’s handling of Official Information Act requests was “unreasonable and contrary to law”. The Prime Minister is now being drawn into defending Costello’s antics in Parliament’s Question Time.
Reshuffle avoided
Under normal circumstances, she would have been reshuffled out of the portfolio so quickly there would have been scorch marks on her office carpet and a politician-shaped vacuum behind her desk. But Costello is a NZ First MP; she serves at the pleasure of her leader, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, not the Prime Minister.
Peters lives by the premise that the best defence is a good offence, and even a bad offence will do in a pinch. Labour’s health spokesperson, Ayesha Verrall, has conducted a sustained prosecution of Costello, and Peters recently revealed in Parliament that Verrall’s sister-in-law was one of the ministry officials who had access to information about the tobacco taxes, implying she was the source of the leaks. The ministry said Verrall’s relative had notified the potential conflict of interest but it then failed to notify Costello.
Wellington is a disgustingly clannish city: everyone is either married to or divorced from everyone else, and this does create countless conflicts of interest. But Labour has hundreds of fellow travellers embedded throughout the public sector, gleefully leaking and briefing the opposition and media against the government they despise.
The government’s outrage about this is partially justified: it is the elected representative and it is supposed to be served by politically neutral officials, not covertly undermined by partisan activists. But public health officials who are asked to progress pro-tobacco legislation will always become whistleblowers, and the Ombudsman’s criticisms of Costello’s ministerial conduct validate their decision to defy their own minister.
To have an Associate Health Minister wreaking havoc on the scale of Costello is an existential threat to the government.
An infected wound