In his new memoir, Steven Joyce remembers the first days of the reign of Sir John Key and a golden age of National
The next morning [after National won the 2008 election] I was nominated to do the media rounds on behalf of the party as campaign chair, and I started pretty early with Q + A, The Nation, Radio New Zealand and Newstalk ZB. Then it was straight off to John Key’s house in Parnell, where John held a meeting with Bill English, Wayne Eagleson, Gerry Brownlee, Simon Power, Murray McCully and myself, with an obligatory Herald photo.
There was much to discuss. John and Wayne had already been on the phone on election night with Peter Dunne, Rodney Hide from Act and Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples from the Māori Party. We didn’t need coalition agreements with all three but John wanted to be inclusive, and it made sense tactically to have more than one way to assemble a majority in the House. John and Wayne’s view was that all three would come together quite quickly.
John was also keen to have some sort of accommodation with the Greens, but we all knew that would be more difficult, and some of the group thought it an impossible ask given some of the Greens’ policy positions and their attitude to the centre right. It would need to go on a longer track.
The immediate question was whether John would be able to get to the Apec leaders’ meeting in Lima, Peru, in just a couple of weeks. It is important for New Zealand to be visible and active in organisations like Apec, but John would need to get the coalition arrangements and his ministry assembled first. That only left around 10 days for both, which would break some sort of record under MMP.
I went home for a couple of days’ rest and to wait for John’s call, as did every other senior MP. When it came, it was friendly and direct. "I want you to be Minister of Transport and Minister of ICT," John said. "You’ll also be an Associate Minister of Finance to Bill." He told me I’d be ranked at number 14 in Cabinet and then semi-apologised for the ranking, saying he didn’t want to paint a target on my back too early. I was pretty relaxed about the number.
I was thrilled to be there and thrilled to bits to have the transport portfolio in particular. I’d been fascinated with transport since I was a kid, and had plenty of experience traversing the country’s highways in my time growing RadioWorks. Having an opportunity to improve the roading network and everything else related to transport was a dream job. Fantastic.
John, Bill and Wayne did have the coalition agreements and Cabinet appointments all wrapped up in time for an official swearing-in on November 21. Weirdly, I was a Cabinet minister before I was sworn in as an MP. We held our first Cabinet meeting that afternoon, and then John was off to Apec in Peru, then on to London to meet UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and have an audience with the Queen. We were off to a rip-roaring start.
I had a million things to do in short order. Because I hadn’t been an MP in Opposition, I had no idea what I was doing and no staff to help me get an office up and running. I was starting with nothing. But I had a stroke of luck; Suzanne used to work with and was friends with one of the best senior private secretaries in the business, Kathleen Lambert. Suzanne got on the phone and persuaded Kathleen to be my SPS — a coup for a new mid-ranked minister. Kathleen would have had her pick of at least a couple of the top half-dozen ministers. She had previously worked for a long period for Labour’s Steve Maharey before he retired. Kathleen was a real pro, and completely apolitical.
Senior private secretaries are the glue that hold a minister’s office together. They run the minister’s office, act as a personal adviser to the minister, and are the primary gatekeeper on the minister’s time. I had little appreciation of the role they played at first, I just saw that instantly things started to happen once Kathleen became involved. I don’t know what she made of her minister on training wheels, but she took control and started to make things happen.
I also needed to find a political adviser and a media adviser. I was learning quickly that the first few days in the forming of a new ministry are a mad dash to grab the best people you can before someone else does. I was lucky again, picking up a senior policy adviser in Kenny Clark, who was related by marriage to Suzanne. He had been working in health in Opposition with Tony Ryall, but was a great generalist who I knew I could rely on. For media I was able to convince Anita Ferguson to leave the Leader’s Office and come and work for me.
You can’t do much about which physical office you get, you just take it. The allocation of offices is a top-down exercise run by the Leader of the House, in our case Gerry Brownlee. Gerry is a traditionalist for parliamentary protocol, and the Beehive is very hierarchical anyway. The prime minister and their staff are on the ninth floor, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is on the eighth, ministers two, three and four are on the seventh floor, the next five ministers are on the sixth floor, and so on down the building. I started ministerial life with a fifth-floor office as one of six ministers, adjacent to Jonathan Coleman.
I initially thought my office suite was pretty big. It had a big office for me, with quite a large meeting-room table, plus four or five offices for other staff. What would we do with all this space? Then I met all the officials. For a start my office had four ministerial advisers. These are normally youngish smart people on secondment from the portfolio ministry, to liaise between the minister and his or her ministries. Once you added the two diary and administrative staff, there were 10 people in my office including me. Many weeks it was standing room only.
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Through that first summer I built an easy rapport with the media, which I was able to mostly maintain for my whole time as a minister. While some of my colleagues operated from a position of suspicion of the media or of particular journalists, I tried to give them all the benefit of the doubt. My impression was that for the most part they just wanted to do their job, tell the story well and move on to the next one.
During an interview, a useful mental exercise is to remind yourself that you are talking to the public at home, rather than the journalist in front of you. If you get annoyed at a journalist’s questions, then the public will likely interpret it as you getting annoyed with them, and that’s very unhelpful. I won’t say I remembered this strategy every time, but I think my batting average was reasonable. When the cameras are on you it is very hard to think of all the things you need to think about, but as my friend Wayne Eagleson was wont to say, "Politics isn’t a game of perfect."
Most of my break was taken up with reading. Lots of reading. There was so much to learn. I likened the flow of paper coming at me like sucking water from a fire hydrant. That remained true for my first years in office; it all just came gushing at you. I made the flow worse by asking each agency for some extra background summer reading to help me get up to speed. That became a tradition for me.
It rather stuffed my break, but it helped me stay ahead of the game. I also had a training programme of my own over that Christmas period. Suzanne had given me the full boxed set of the British comedy series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister for Christmas, and we watched our way through it. Some of it turned out to be uncomfortably close to the way the New Zealand public service operated, and I had cause to remember it several times in the years ahead.
My favourite example is when something politically contentious is buried way down near the bottom of a briefing, and if you don’t read all the way through, you miss it. Then much later, when the proverbial hits the fan, you ask why you weren’t told. At that point the officials say, "But you were, minister. Here it is on page wherever of the briefing we sent you three months ago." I learnt to read everything in full.
A mildly abbreviated excerpt taken with kind permission from the new number one bestselling memoir On the Record by Steven Joyce (Allen & Unwin, $37.99), available in bookstores nationwide.
