(7) FAQs

What’s with the ‘Hon’ thing in front of ministers’ names?

‘Hon’ is short for ‘Honourable’. All ministers are given the title and they will usually keep it after they finish being ministers, e.g. former opposition MPs who were ministers in a previous government may still carry ‘Hon’ in front of their name.

‘Rt Hon’ is short for ‘Right Honourable’. This is technically more prestigious that simply ‘Honourable’, though its application is a bit more complicated.

Prior to 2010, it was given to senior ministers and judges, thereby making them a member of the Privy Council in Britain (which is an advisory body to the Queen, but with no real political power).

Following some changes in 2010, ‘Rt Hon’ is only given to the Governor-General, the Prime Minister (head of the Executive branch), the Speaker (head of the Parliament branch) and the Chief Justice (head of the Judicial branch). People permitted to have ‘Rt Hon’ from 2010 onwards are not members of the Privy Council, so the title actually doesn't mean anything as such.

Can a ‘Minister outside Cabinet’ become a ‘Cabinet Minister’ in time?

Yes they can. That’s the aim of the game pretty much.

Perform well in Parliament, show that you can deliver outcomes in the portfolios allocated to you, work well strategically with other ministers…and hey presto, you could be the next Cabinet minister.

Two pre-requisites worth noting.

First a vacancy in the ‘top 20’ (i.e. the Cabinet ministers) must arise. Meaning that a Cabinet ministers has screwed up and been sacked or they’ve retired.

Second, it’s the leader of each government party (National, ACT, and NZ First) that get to decide who gets the ministerial positions allocated to their respective party (laid out in the coalition agreements). And within that allocation, who gets the coveted Cabinet minister positions! So for a minister outside Cabinet to accede to become a Cabinet minister will require a good working relationship with the party leader. Fall out with them at your peril!

What do Ministers get paid? I heard they took a pay cut recently.

Well, the Labour ministers did during the heigth of the COVID-19 pandemic. They took a 20% pay cut for 6 months (commencing in April 2020). So did the chief executives of many public departments. But normal service has resumed and the payments are listed here.

Do Ministers have their own advisers and if so how many? Do they have a full staffing allocation?

Yes they do. They operate below the radar a bit but the 'ministerial advisers' (sometimes known as 'political advisors') are incredibly influential in terms of what ministers think about policy and what positions they ultimately take. Each office usually has a junior and a senior adviser. They are not public servants (i.e. they don't come from government agencies) but are people the minister hires to give them political advice. Many go on to become MPs and ministers themselves, e.g. the previous Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.

Inside a minister's office are also 'Private Secretaries'. These are public servants who have been seconded from the relevant agency. So the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety, for example, would have a couple of secondees (usually for 18 months) from MBIE, possibly also 1 from WorkSafe, to act as the conduit between his office and those agencies.

Are the ‘ministers outside cabinet’ given like less important portfolios?

The diplomatic answer here is that all portfolios are important.

But in reality, certain portfolios are so important that they will inevitably go to Cabinet Ministers.

Examples would be Finance, Health, Education, Police, Justice, Defence. Though it’s interesting to note that both Climate Change and Environment currently sit with Ministers outside Cabinet - this is presumably what the Prime Minister decided during the post-election coalition negotiations.

The exception can be when we have a ‘support party’ in place. This is a party that commits to vote with the government party/parties on the confidence votes held each year (see session 2), and they get ministerial positions in return. But, the thing is, these are never Cabinet Minister positions, i.e. a support party only ever receives ‘Minister outside Cabinet’ positions (think the Greens in 2017-2020). New Zealand First has been a Support party in the past (2005-2008) and its leader (Winston Peters) was given the Foreign Affairs portfolio. This is a portfolio that normally goes to a Cabinet minister, but in any negotiation to form a government the ‘norms’ may be tweaked to come to an arrangement to build a majority of 61 or more votes in Parliament.

If you’re a minister outside Cabinet, can you bring up a Cabinet paper in your portfolios?

Yes you can. We didn’t have time to go through the Cabinet Committee part of the Cabinet decision-making process. But in short, most Cabinet papers don’t go directly to Cabinet. Instead they go through one of 11 Cabinet Committees (the number of committees changes). These are like smaller groupings of Ministers who have the ‘first crack’ at a Cabinet paper - often with more detailed analysis and discussion than happens at Cabinet. You can see these Cabinet Committees listed here (not to be confused with Parliamentary select committees).

Once the Cabinet Committee makes some decisions, the relevant minister then takes the paper up to Cabinet for approval. Now if you are a minister outside of Cabinet, you will be a member of some of the Cabinet Committees - meaning that your officials can write you up a Cabinet paper and you can take it to the relevant Cabinet Committee. You can lead the discussion at the meeting and hopefully get it across the line. But, of course, being a minister outside of Cabinet means you won’t be there when the paper travels up to the full Cabinet (usually the week after the Cabinet Committee has met).

This leaves you two options.

First, brief another minister (who is a Cabinet minister) to talk to the paper at Cabinet on your behalf. This usually works well enough.

Second, if you are extremely keen to attend Cabinet, and feel that you need to be in the Cabinet room in person given the nature of the decisions Cabinet is being asked to make, then a minister outside Cabinet can ask the Prime Minister to attend Cabinet just for that one item (i.e. just the Cabinet paper). PM’s typically says yes and so they literally wheel an extra chair into Cabinet for the minister to attend. Once the item is done, the minister would leave and Cabinet continues. This mechanism, might be used by Hon Simon Watts, Climate Change Minister, for example as he is a Minister outside Cabinet but no doubt will want to attend Cabinet from time to time as the coalition government makes big decisions on climate change policies.