Te Pati Maori's populism veers towards danger

When Te Tai Tonga MP Takuta Ferris complained about non-white immigrants campaigning for Labour "against Maori", was he saying the quiet bit out loud, or was he just being a racist moron?

To their credit, Ngarewa-Packer and Waititi disavowed it, but they should know that their own rhetoric about “superior genes”, and Oriini Kaipara’s celebration of the proportionality of her Maori heritage is going to lead towards this. It isn’t the exclusionary racist blood and soil nationalism of the actual far-right, but none of this would be uncomfortable in a far-right ethno-nationalist party.

TPM did once state that it wanted to curb immigration until the supply of housing met demand, but later withdrew that policy. 

The win by Te Pati Maori (TPM) of the Tamaki Makaurau by-election is hardly surprising, although that success is tempered by a low turnout, it reflect TPM’s underlying strength. Its populism. It's that populism that can lead into trouble for TPM, but also lead it towards nurturing dangerous narratives among its members and supporters. 

Most of the media has too much unconscious bias in favour of the Maori national renaissance that it, by and large, neglects to see what a key part of TPM's success comes from. Populist rhetoric, policies and behaviour that promotes a strong emotional response from Maori, especially it would seem, rangatahi wahine.  The decision to get Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke to lead the haka in Parliament was entirely strategic. It made her world famous (I even caught it being mentioned, approvingly, on the Gutfeld! show on Fox News - which is, by and large, MAGA central for US evening talk shows), which for TPM lifted them up for a new generation.

The term populist politics is almost universally used as a pejorative, because it largely plays to gut instincts and emotions, rather than a depth of thinking and reflection. Populism tends to thrive on an "us against them" narrative, which TPM hones very effectively. So much more rhetoric from TPM, from statements to their attire in Parliament is about differentiation, and as much as it may irritate some older people, especially non-Maori, that's the point.  It's very easy to accuse National and Labour for being parties that bend to the wind and are weak on principles, but TPM isn't scared of being controversial. It thrives on it, because it literally doesn't care what the majority think.

It starts by its claim of being unashamedly Maori, but it drifts further into claiming it is the most authentically Maori (because it doesn't need to accommodate the "colonialists", like Labour). 

Populism is all about a simple framing of what is wrong, and a simple framing of how to fix it. We’ve seen this before, as NZ First was built on it. The clue is in the name.  NZ First had at its core anger at what was seen as a “betrayal” of the country ("us") by “them” – being the Lange/Douglas and Bolger/Richardson Labour and National governments. Betrayal to foreign investors and concern over immigration, essentially a xenophobic fear that foreigners who own businesses or foreigners that move to NZ are only in it for themselves and not for "ordinary New Zealanders". 

NZ First was a response to a belief that neither major party put New Zealand first, and “sold out” the country to foreign investors, who bought privatised state businesses, and were “buying up land”. Furthermore, new immigration, particularly from Asia was “alienating” the local population, including Maori. After all, the 1996 General Election saw NZ First win a clean sweep of the Maori seats.  It was a brief time when the dominant policy narrative was on free-market economics (although this had only minor impact on social policy areas like health and education), and NZ First could cater to this disenchantment differently from how the hard-left Alliance did (which was essentially the socialist wing of Labour having broken away). 

Of course what NZ First did in the 1990s was scaremonger about immigrants. TPM isn't too far away from doing the same thing, as fear of immigration resonates with Maori who see it as another wave of newcomers that dilute their proportion of the population.  Those immigrants tend to be wealthier than average Maori, more highly educated, and have children that do better than the local population at school and university. They also are less likely to be engaged with the criminal justice system. In short, because many immigrants are successful, well-behaved and peaceful, they feed narratives among some as to "why don't Maori do the same?".  At its worst this antipathy towards immigrants is seen in violent crime and abuse towards them, and there are plenty of anecdotes of migrants facing racial abuse from Maori as much as other New Zealanders.  Ferris's outburst last week hardly negates that.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) was built on the belief that Scotland could be independent from the UK and be better off, but it did nurture unabashed Anglophobia. Furthermore, it also promoted the idea that not supporting the SNP was traitorous to Scotland. Of course, the SNP was undone by actually having power and performing poorly, as there is only so much patience for constantly scapegoating Westminster as the source of your ills, when you get significant power to make your own decisions about what you do with your budgets. TPM almost certainly wont face that sort of scrutiny, which makes its own rhetoric potentially more dangerous. TPM knows that without radical and unlikely constitutional change, it will never lead a government at all.  It can always blame the failures to meet the expectations of its voters on the "colonialists".

As much as TPM wants to be seen as inclusive and welcoming of all, its core belief system can easily be interpreted as highly divisive and hierarchical.

Four years ago Debbie Ngarewa-Packer wrote in the NZ Herald outlining the party's division of New Zealanders into three groups:

- Tangata Whenua (us);

- Tangata Tiriti (supporters of "us");

- Everyone else (racists).

For her, that essentially say that unless you embrace the TPM view of the world, you are an outsider. She says that Tangata Tiriti are "comfortable loudly declaring they’re recovering racists, and they teach anti-racism, extremely secure in knowing their place side by side with tangata whenua ushering in a new Aotearoa.... Tangata tiriti accept and appreciate the reason they live in Aotearoa is because the Tiriti gives them citizenship and mana equal to tangata whenua... Tangata Tiriti are people of the covenant that is Te Tiriti o Waitangi. When you find a tangata tiriti that has a heart for the covenant it’s like meeting a long lost friend, the kind you know our tupuna fought to help treasure and protect. They want to make the burden light, hold up their side of the promise, clean up their own mess. They don’t want to lead our space they want to own their own, removing barriers of discrimination and clear the way to let us through, so we can live united in peace."

This is extraordinary stuff. Tangata Tiriti are original sinners who have to recover from their sin of racism and to "clean up their own mess". They only get the right to live in Aotearoa because their citizenship comes from Te Tiriti, not birth-right nor citizenship granted by a liberal democracy. Te Tiriti is like a Biblical text that grants "peace", what happens if you dare disagree?

Tangata Whenua can't be racist, presumably, which gives Takuta Ferris some reason to think he could say what he said.

Ngarewa-Packer, whether she knew it or not, was singing from the populist nationalist playbook. There are Maori (“us”), there are those who embrace our political-philosophical-cultural opinion (“Pakeha allies”) and the enemy. It’s a hierarchy that elevates its voters, as the indigenous people who are simultaneously superior to all others in Aotearoa, but also oppressed and marginalised. The scapegoat is the “colonialist” state.

TPM doesn’t really care about immigrants being upset with it, because its base isn’t keen on immigrants. TPM also doesn’t care too much about non-Maori being upset with it, not least because it sees Pakeha opponents as simply anti-Maori racists (seeing those that ridicule or denigrate Te Reo and claiming Maori just abuse their kids and waste their lives on benefits as being what many Pakeha “really think”) that fuel its base. It ought to care about calling those Maori who don’t support it “not really Maori”. That smacks of the Orwellian nonsense of Marxist-Leninists who claim that workers who don’t support the “workers’ party” are actually traitors to their class.  The idea that Maori who are not with TPM aren’t really Maori is toxic nationalist racism.  It resembles the nonsense concept of Third World Democracy which formed the basis for the one-party states of many post-colonial African states being dictatorships. 

Clearly TPM's populism is working for it. 

However, as much as Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer want to promote an image of inclusion and simply wanting Maori to manage their own affairs (which is entirely consistent with a genuine libertarian view of humanity), it's difficult to reconcile that with populism driven by nationalism which by definition deems them and their supporters as special, and others as redeemable sinners (and redeemable only if they concede to the TPM world view). 

When TPM President John Tamihere tells Maori that they are living under a government "worse than Nazi Germany", he is feeding not just fear, but hatred and a justification to use all means necessary to overthrow the government.  Of course no sane person could possibly equate the government to the Nazis, unless it was to rabble rouse and generate passion and anger.  After all if you are fighting Nazis, is anything out of bounds?  

This is not isolated rhetoric. Claiming the government is "pure evil" is akin to this, along with claiming the government is "erasing our future". This is absolutist eliminationist rhetoric which is alongside the claims of far-right white supremacists of the "Great Replacement Theory" that there is a programme to wipe out people of European ancestry.

Liberal democracies thrive when people with differences of opinions on how to address contemporary problems debate with some respect and acknowledgement that all are entitled to their views and expression of those views. They don't thrive when politicians seek to balkanise the population into a battle between "us" and "them", no matter what historic injustices have occurred by past generations.  Particularly when they push a narrative that paints opponents as evil people who want to wipe their supporters out.

TPM leaders may think that all it does is change how people vote, but if it bleeds into changing how people interact in daily life, including giving succour to those who think they can commit or threaten violence against opponents, then it is dangerous divisive rhetoric that is every bit as racist and unhinged as any far-right ultra-nationalist movement. TPM isn't there yet, but the danger that it emboldens such thinking is very real.

The by-election without much choice

It's hard to get too much enthusiasm for the Tamaki Makaurau by-election. The Maori roll and seats have become more politicised than ever before, as they are no longer an exercise in ensuring a core level of Maori representation in Parliament, but rather an expression of Maori nationalism.  It used to be that the Maori seats would attract candidates from across the political spectrum, but no more. Of course Parliament now has 33 Maori MPs, most not being from the Maori seats, because Maori participation and representation for many is not exceptional. All parties in Parliament have Maori MPs.  The case for the Maori seats to ensure representation is weak, it is particularly so with MMP, as Maori voters (as all other voters) have the same impact in determining the proportionality of MPs in Parliament. 

As the by-election is for the electorate MP (of course) the range of choice is much more limited than at the General Election when voters enrolled in the electorate can pick any of the registered parties for the list vote. In 2023 this made a bit of a difference.

The media have portrayed the election as a two-horse race, which is realistic given the General Election, but in 2023 plenty of voters chose other parties for the party vote.  Over a quarter chose other parties.

Tamaki Makaurau voters picked Labour for the list vote at 42.8%, even though the late Takutai Tarsh Kemp won the seat by 42 votes. Te Pati Maori only received 29.8% of the party vote. 

The Greens came third with 11.9%, National fourth with 4.7% and NZ First fifth with 3.4%. Add in ACT getting 0.9% and there are 9% of voters in 2023 that voted for the current governing parties. It's hard to say they have much of a choice this time.

Hannah Tamaki ran last time and will have a limited following. Sherry-Lee Matene is little known and Kelvyn Alp, who was charged with distributing an objectionable publication (being a recording of the Christchurch mosque attack) is best not mentioned at all.

So what we actually have is a spectre of Peeni Henare, Labour list MP, trying to win "his" seat back by pandering to the far-left student activist nationalist rhetoric touted by the rather clueless Marxist nationalist Oriini Kaipara (who claimed that TPM was "repealing" legislation and wanted to look on her phone to find the party's contributions to Maori).

Henare said "We are faced by the worst government this world – and this country – has seen in a long time" like a slobbering idiot who blanks out the Nazis, Khmer Rouge and the Taliban and countless other examples. 

Kaipara and Henare both want "Iwi-led" supermarkets which of course is possible now, but they are both economically illiterate. 

However, most of all, both major candidates hold a view of the country, economy and Maori that is led by a philosophy of nationalist Marxist collectivism with a stronger state. They offer nothing to Maori who are entrepreneurs, who don't want to be tethered to the State or Iwi to govern them and their choices, and certainly nothing to Maori who don't want to give succour to Hamas, or who don't want to be a part of the tankie collective of haters of Israel, Western liberal democracy and capitalism, by giving a free pass to Iran, China, North Korea and Russia, and any groups engaging in "liberation" (totalitarian terror movements).

I am betting Kaipara will win, because the Greens, who are ideological allies of TPM, are not standing the candidate, and Peeni Henare is inauthentic.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of voters on the Maori roll want more Government, they want more cultural nationalist chest beating, and really have little interest (or concern) about the Marxist anti-capitalist, anti-Western authoritarian cheerleading that TPM undertake.

That's because, whether you like it or not, a key indicator for many Maori is pride is who they are according to their ancestors, culture and the use of Te Reo.  There is a clash of cultural views on this, and as obnoxious as TPM can be on some issues (which resemble "blood and soil" views of nationalism and a willingness to judge those who disagree with them as needing to emigrate or not being "real Maori"), what it does is demonstrate a cultural pride that works just as much as ultranationalists gain support in other countries.

TPM is not a party of ultranationalism, it's a party of socialist nationalism (and no I don't mean THAT), akin to the Scottish National Party, and it makes Maori feel good about themselves for what they are, not who they are.  It constantly rabble rouses Maori into thinking they are being oppressed, silenced and suffering (worse than the Nazis according to TPM President John Tamihere - a grifting shape shifting used car salesman type if ever there was one), all because of a conspiracy of Pakeha white supremacism.

TPM also know they will never ever ever be in a position to be in power to prove that is wrong (unlike the Scottish National Party which has spend much of its political capital in being incompetent and corrupt). 

So on we go. I hope Henare wins, as it denies TPM one more seat and reduces the overhand in Parliament by one seat, not because he is deserving.  From the looks of it, none of them are deserving, but the winner at the very least gets to say she (or he) isn't the fascist candidate.

Pity the UK

The 1970s are calling, and the UK is facing a sovereign debt crisis.  Let's be clear, it has next to nothing to do with Brexit (as France and Germany s face similar crises, although some other European countries definitely do not).  It has everything to do with economic malaise, a growing burden of welfare, pensions and the world's most centrally planned and provided health system (which is also the UK's biggest religion).  A punitive tax system, a sclerotic planning environment , a vastly over-generous state pension system, energy prices that have skyrocketed because of a blinkered commitment to Net Zero (with a planning system that makes new supply too expensive to develop in manu locations) and a fraying of public trust in institutions particularly around criminal justice and immigration, is creating a crisis in confidence economically and socially.

Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Allister Heath, believes that the Starmer Government will have to call an early election, because the Labour Party wont be able to reconcile demands to cut spending and/or increase taxes and not deliver on a sufficiently socialist agenda. The hard-left may splinter to Trotskyite tankie Jeremy Corbyn's party of Marxist/terrorist/Islamist sympathisers, and others will fear a loss to Nigel Farage's Reform, whilst the Conservatives are scrambling for relevance (given they governed for 14 years before).

 From Allister Heath, in the Daily Telegraph (formerly the Editor of business paper - City AM):

Let us, for the sake of argument, first consider the “optimistic”, best-case scenario. Another wave of punitive tax increases, targeted at those who work, save and invest, would intensify our existing pathologies. We would be doomed to stagflation, rising joblessness, falling industrial and energy production and declining living standards. The best and brightest would flee, but there would be no sudden collapse....

The worst-case scenario feels more likely, and it would begin by an abrupt loss of confidence in the credit-worthiness of the British government. We need to borrow obscenely large amounts of money from the financial markets every month, thanks to Reeves’ lack of fiscal discipline, and yet our creditors are becoming increasingly jittery. They worry that our deficit is growing, not shrinking, that the economy is barely growing and that Labour backbenchers are vetoing all cuts. They are already charging us a “moron premium” to compensate for the growing risk that we default or inflate away our debt, and these higher borrowing costs automatically mean even greater deficits, and thus even more borrowing. It’s a vicious circle. The 30-year gilt yield recently hit 5.6 per cent, its highest since 1998; another substantial increase would surely topple the Chancellor....

Britain is facing a historic reckoning. The economic and social model constructed since 1997 has turned into an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, a farrago of lies, obfuscations and delusions.

The maths don’t add up. On one side of the ledger, growth and revenues are stuck thanks to oppressive taxation, poor incentives, net zero, the destruction of the entrepot economy, the throttling of the City, labour and product market regulations, low-productivity immigration and planning rules that make building anything difficult. On the other, spending is out of control: our ruling class is content to pay out of work benefits to 6.5 million UK adults and to serve as the world’s welfare state of first resort. Our free-to-use, taxpayer-financed NHS can’t cope with an ageing population.

An honest UK politician would have to give up promises to continually inflate state pensions higher than inflation, it would have to take a hardline on able-bodied adults not working and start to reform and ration the NHS.  A scythe will be needed to cut through the detritus of decades of micro-economic regulation, and most of all the post 1940s failed consensus of planning control that kneecaps the construction of homes, business and infrastructure, inflating the cost of that which is approved far beyond the costs of comparable construction on the European mainland.

The UK needs another Thatcher.  Conservative Leader, Kemi Badenoch, at another time, could perhaps have been that person. However, it is illegal migration and the provision of housing, welfare and health care at future taxpayers' expense (through debt), and the crimes committed by illegal migrants that is the focus of so much attention and concern.  Britons, both locally born and legal migrants regard this to be at best unfair, and at worst an invasion of people seeking to take advantage of what the country has to offer. 

It seems highly unlikely that Nigel Farage has what it takes to fix the economy malaise facing the country, when he is campaigning to nationalise water.

An Act devised by silly people, passed by silly people, enforced by silly people

The Online Safety Act in the UK has a name that could come from a dystopian movie, but it was introduced under previous Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and of course the Starmer Government is in favour of it, boots and all.

As with so much legislative fervour nowadays, it was introduced to protect children by empowering a national regulator to block content, as well as require that end-to-end encryption. 

Sean Thomas in The Spectator writes:

Since the Act came into force (originally in 2023, but with greater effect in recent days), the absurdities have piled up fast. Entire Reddit communities – from harmless subreddits about cider to basic vape advice chatrooms – have gone half-dark, unable to easily implement the age verification systems. Niche forums for LGBT teens, survivors of abuse, and mental health support groups have shrunk away rather than risk falling foul of vague ‘harmful content’ clauses. A forum about ‘fixed gear cycling in London’ (yes, really) shut down because it feared it couldn’t afford the compliance overhead.

The absurdity of it was seen a few days ago when Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, said that Nigel Farage was on the side of Jimmy Savile - the late disgraced former DJ and TV star who, after his death, was found to have committed multiple sexual offences against young girls (none of this online or facilitated by the internet, as he was as technologically illiterate as the politicians supporting this Act). 

Thomas rightly says:

it’s a naked attempt to distract from the fact that Peter Kyle – a man so well suited to his role as Technology Minister that he appears to have no background in technology, no experience in the technology sector, no career with technology companies, no obvious technological training, and a degree in ‘International Development’ – has no argument.

Former Conservative Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Nadine Dorries apparently: once walked into a meeting with Microsoft and bluntly asked when they were ‘going to get rid of algorithms’.

One of the most egregiously inane things any politicians can do is to pass laws as a kneejerk reaction to a problem and especially being seen to address a problem.

This is an example of that. Thomas points out the threats not just to free speech (which politicians care about that nowadays, as it is so often seen as coded with being a Nazi, a pedophile or a terrorist), but to the whole IT sector in the UK.  

The result is a legal ambiguity so vast it could engulf an entire industry. Startups will die under the compliance burden. Larger tech and AI firms will shift labs and headquarters abroad. And Britain’s AI industry, briefly a potential world leader, will find itself reduced to the digital equivalent of a wine bar shut down for not having a government-approved corkscrew made of chocolate.

Let us hope our local politicians don't think this is a model to copy, bearing in mind both sides of politics seem to not be immune to this.

No to another mega-Ministry

One of the ideas getting traction within the Government is the idea of merging the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MHUD) and the Ministry of Transport (MoT) into a mega agency. The “logic” behind it is threefold:

• More integrated policy thinking that will not only enable more housing to be built, but also the infrastructure to support it;

• Diluting the de-growth and pro-central planning culture of MfE (which most recently decided it was appropriate to submit on the Regulatory Standards Bill);

• Saving money (through administrative rationing).

This is a mistake, because its theoretical basis is rooted in some assumptions that don’t bear close scrutiny. Working backwards the notion that mega-departments are more efficient is largely a chimera. The larger the bureaucracy the slower it works and the less responsive it is, and it more difficult it is to retain specialised knowledge and experience as it gets swamped within multiple layers of management. Treasury likes mega-agencies for two reasons:

• Fewer managers is said to be more efficient;

• Fewer agencies makes them easier to monitor and hold accountable.

Unfortunately, this ignores the behavioural responses of public servants to this sort of structure. In a large department it becomes harder to get the attention of the top layers of management. In some cases that can help, because clever and competent public servants can get on with their work unbothered by the chief executive or deputies, but that also means the less clever and competent have their work not subject to the same scrutiny. The Adam Smith Institute in the UK has called for the UK Home Office to be broken up for exactly that reason. The incremental savings of a few fewer managers (which is disputable when you look at the structure of MBIE – New Zealand’s existing mega-Ministry – which has large units, with branches under them and sub-branches) is lost when there is significant failure both in delivery and public policy.  

The UK already has had experience merging Transport, Environment and Local Government, from 1997 until 2002. Transport was split out again because the cultures of the agencies clashed internally, slowing down progress and making it difficult to get institutional focus on major reforms.  

Australia by contrast does have a mega-agency responsibility for transport policy at the Commonwealth level, in an organisation called DITRDCA (Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Culture and the Arts), which struggles to retain institutional knowledge in any segments of its activity. However, as a Federation, many of the functions in those sectors are carried out by States and Territories, so it is less of a day to day concern. Similar mega agencies do not exist at the State level.

The benefit of smaller agencies is that they can be nimble and responsive, and can pivot quickly when policy priorities change.  They can readily collaborate and work together with each other, if there is clear project leadership across agencies. The idea that collaboration within a large agency, with managers and branches with their own interests is necessarily easier than between smaller agencies is largely theoretical, because it depends on the individuals. Bear in mind MoT implemented radical restructuring of ports, airports, land transport funding, the governance and delivery of urban passenger transport all as a small agency, stripping down its functions over the years.  It's not clear what radical reforms MBIE as a major agency has done, and it is abundantly clear that DIA, with its de facto oversight of the water sector (i.e. next to none) did little until the Ardern Government saw it as a way to bail out local government and start to implement the principles of He Puapua (which remains on ice). 

On the second point, the idea that a key reason to merge agencies is to dilute the culture of the one you don’t like, or which is corrosive to government policy is not a good way of diluting the poison, because it spreads the poison across a wider field. The answer for the Ministry for the Environment is not to merge it, but to cull its responsibilities and split what remains among other agencies.

The Partnerships, Investment and Enablement business group should be abolished because Government should not be seeking to “tangibly shift mindsets and change behaviours in New Zealand through effective partnering and engagement within the public and private sectors”. The culture of MfE is anti-development, anti-growth and it the behaviours that need changing are those ones.  

At best the Environmental Management and Adaptation business group should be placed within the Department of Internal Affairs to work with local government, specifically regional councils on their statutory function, and the Climate Change Mitigation and Resource Efficiency business group should be part of MBIE, which has oversight of economic regulation of natural resources.  

It is so obvious that the next time a Labour-led Government takes power, almost certainly with the Greens, that a Ministry of Housing, Infrastructure and the Environment would be rebranded into a Ministry of Sustainable Development or the like. The culture that would be dominant will be the one inherited from MfE and will seek to decimate private provision of housing, as well as turn transport policy into one big behavioural change programme that treats active travel and public transport as being good, at any cost, while treating private motoring and the movement of freight by road as being malignant. 

One of the legacies of Labour Governments is that they implement structural reform of Government that National Governments rarely reverse.  Don’t forget the optics of splitting MfE (“integrating environment across policy”) may not be great and of course the Opposition will cry that it is about decimating the environment, but the public largely will not care (other than the ones who vote Green anyway). Splitting MfE into Internal Affairs and MBIE will dilute MfE’s culture because it divides it. Merging it with MHUD and MoT keeps it intact, despite pleas from some that it will dilute the priority of the environment, it will place it in the centre of two agencies seeking to resolve issues that are, in part because of the prioritisation of the environment through the RMA that stops stuff being built.

The MHUD is essentially an oversight agency for Kainga Ora, as well as the regulator of rental housing and other accommodation. The synergies with the MoT are weak, especially given MoT’s functions range from monitoring the land transport funding and regulatory sector, through to the economic functions of all transport modes. There is little that MHUD can bring to aviation policy, and indeed most of the transport policy issues affecting MHUD are undertaken by local government. 

If there is a case for a merge, then MBIE makes more sense for MoT than MHUD, because MBIE does look after network industries in infrastructure, such as energy and communications, but that was tried before in the late 1990s and ultimately abandoned. 

So the idea of merging agencies should be put in the bin. There is a better case for reviewing their functions and determining whether some should exist at all, and if so, who is better placed to manage them.  Putting climate change policy in the DIA or MBIE is likely to be preferable than having it dominating housing and transport.

Merging MfE, MHUD and MoT smells of something that the Greens or TOP (remember them?) would advocate. MfE is by far the agency with the most dominant culture, and it is one that is philosophically antagonistic to the Government it is meant to be serving.  It should not poison housing and transport policy with that culture. 

The Government should run a mile from it.