Ministers and Senators Behaving Badly Series 4

If you can't convince them, then confuse them …
Government senate leader Mathias Cormann initially took Labor’s
questions on notice and then tabled a one-page response, which said: “I
can confirm that the performance requirements for the prime minister’s
contract were fully satisfied.”
Opposition senate leader Penny Wong demanded: “So why was he sacked
– unanimously sacked?”
Asked in parliament on Wednesday about the NZ audit findings, Cormann
said: “The Labor Party are clearly getting more and more desperate. They
can see that Prime Minister Morrison is somebody who gets results.”
The NZ Office of Tourism and Sport was established in July 1998 and
Morrison was appointed as its inaugural director.
As head of the office, he reported directly to the then NZ tourism minister
Murray McCully. Morrison’s office was supposed to collaborate with the
Tourism Board, a separate and independent government entity.
The NZ auditor-general’s report said Morrison commissioned a review of
the NZ Tourism Board’s operations without informing its board members
fully or allowing them input.
He then used the report, which asserted the board was operating “in a
tactical rather than a strategic way” – a description the board disputed – to
demand its chairperson be sacked.
“We were surprised by the vehemence and timing of this advice,” the NZ
auditor-general said.
The report criticised Morrison’s review process and described how he had
presented alternative grounds for sacking the chairperson – over what the
board described as a technicality – when legal advice cast doubt on his
original judgement.
The report found that a month into the job, Morrison told the minister he
had “serious misgivings about the board”, with which McCully was already
clashing.
The picture that emerges is of a power struggle between Morrison’s office
and the board, and between the board and the minister, in which Morrison
sided with the minister.