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Here’s this morning’s top news from around Aotearoa and elsewhere about our political economy around housing, climate and poverty.

* The Lead: New Zealand’s most prominent lobbyist and former National Party staffer, Matthew Hooton, has been named to edit the Capital’s daily newspaper and New Zealand’s longest-running Sunday newspaper.

* The Sidebar: Hooton was a prominent back-room figure in Nicky Hager’s books about political influence and skulduggery on the right of politics, Hollow Men and Dirty Politics. Hooton now says ‘with a glint in his eye’ he wants to take the opportunity to ‘make a difference’ in solving the country’s ‘entrenched, fiscal, poverty, race relations, climate and infrastructure crises’ by broadening and sharpening the editorial focus of The Post-$ & The Sunday Star Times.

* The Bottom Line: New Zealand also has an entrenched problem of revolving doors and opaque connections between the sources of power outside Parliament and the Beehive, and those working inside it and its ministries. Hooton’s appointment, albeit spectacular and unexpected, is the latest in a long list of figures in one role jumping the species barriers without any guardrails or speed limits, including Cabinet ministers in both Labour and National Governments going almost immediately into key roles in the private and public sectors.

* Chart of the Day: The ratio of houses for sale to houses sold in any one month has blown out from two-to-one in the middle of the Covid housing boom to nine-to-one in May, when both sales volumes and prices fell again in REINZ data published yesterday.

* Scoop: Health Minister Simeon Brown has sacked the Medical Council’s top leaders over what he described as their ‘political direction’ around Treaty issues, Andrea Vance reports this morning for The Post-$. It’s also now in Stuff (See more below in Today’s Top Six and Scoops)

(Paying subscribers can see more below the fold and in the Dawn Chorus video and podcast above, along with getting the Early Bird email with the morning’s scoops, front pages, key articles and cartoons.)

“ ‘I hope it unsettles a few,’ he says with a glint in his eye”

I have always enjoyed talking on occasion with Matthew Hooton and regularly read his columns, although I take them with a few more grains of salt than I take with other political columnists, often because they’re already much spicier. He’s an enthusiastic type who loves the stories and the players in New Zealand political economy as much as any other tragic politico, and he’ll often surprise you with a fact or perspective that adds to the wider picture.

But he is not a journalist or editor with an ingrained reluctance to favour one side over another, nor someone who is wary of using their own power in case it hurts people. I’ve also been on the other side of some in his circle of politics’ instincts to ‘win,’ and to do whatever it takes for his side to win. Anyone who has read his emails and quotes divulged in Nicky Hager’s books Hollow Men and Dirty Politics will know what I mean, although I also sense he has changed and matured from those days.

So when I read yesterday he had been appointed the Editor in Chief of The Post and the Sunday Star Times, I was gobsmacked. He’s never worked as a journalist or editor, has never run a large team of journalists and editors, never run a publishing business, and is not universally popular or trusted in many places in politics and the media.

It’s what I call the Koru Lounge society of New Zealand.

But more importantly, Hooton embodies a particularly New Zealand problem in our political economy: a vagueness and opacity around how power is obtained, who has it and how it is used. It’s what I call the Koru Lounge society of New Zealand. It is a network of connections and tribes that appoint each other to boards, award contracts and do deals behind closed doors, often when the door should be much more open.

Hooton is not unusual in jumping from one part of the governing apparatus to another. He’s been a National Party staffer. A corporate PR employee (for Fonterra). A PR agency owner. A representative for another country in New Zealand (Mongolia) and a connector between other players in this gossamer web of how things actually get done in New Zealand.

He’s not the first political player to jump sides in recent years, without the sort of stand-down periods or registers required in other countries. Other big species-barrier jumps in recent years include:

* Kris Faafoi’s move from being a Labour Cabinet Minister into the top job at the Insurance Council;

* John Key’s leap from being PM to being a director at Air NZ and director of ANZ Group;

* Judith Collins’ move from being a National Cabinet Minister to being President of the Law Commission; and,

* Don Brash’s jump from being Reserve Bank Governor to National Party leader and then ACT Leader.

This sort of ‘celebrity’ editor appointment has happened overseas, but not in a market with newspapers in monopoly positions in their cities. That non-partisan nature of editors of New Zealand newspapers has been a common thread through the history of our media, especially since the newspaper industry settled into two groups that carved the country up into a series of regional monopolies.

Hooton himself was enthusiastic yesterday about being offered the role by Stuff owner Sinead Boucher, and already eyeing up the prospects to reset the agenda. Here’s Hooton quoted in Stuff by Lloyd Burr:

“It’s an opportunity you can’t turn down and it’s an opportunity to make a difference. New Zealand has major entrenched problems that have been emerging over at least 20 years which the political and business classes have struggled to develop a coherent solution for.”

How does he reckon his new role will go down with those political and business classes?

“I’d hope that the powerful institutions of New Zealand - whether that’s the government, the opposition, union bosses, business leaders, sports administrators, or arts administrators - are a little unsettled by the appointment,” he says with a glint in his eye.

He told Lloyd he didn’t plan any radical changes for The Post:

“There will be some changes and we will move fast,” Hooton says. “But I suspect they’re going to be ones that the existing team and the existing readers would say ‘Yes, that’s that’s the way to go’.

“This isn’t some turnaround or fix it job. This is an acceleration job,” he says. “We’re not going to take a position on certain things, but we’ll have broader, more rigorous, and challenging content”.

He did describe his areas of interest though, where change was needed.

“We have six crises. We have a productivity crisis, a fiscal crisis, a crisis of entrenched poverty, a race relations crisis that’s growing, a climate crisis, and an infrastructure crisis. They are in many ways all linked, and they all need to be resolved,” he says.

So what does Nicky Hager think?

I reached out to Nicky to see what he thought of Matthew’s appointment. He was surprised, but could see logic of what he described as a bold appointment.

“I think he’s one of the more interesting people in politics,” Nicky said.

“There’s a chance he could do something interesting there, or a chance it could all blow up,” he said.

Nicky made a point of saying Matthew was not a racist, when some others in his circles on the right of politics were. He also saw Matthew as different to the likes of Cam Slater, a key protagonist in Dirty Politics, and as having changed over the years.

For more detail on Hooton’s involvement in Dirty Politics and The Hollow Men, here’s Adam Dudding’s piece from 2014 in Stuff and a Hager Op-Ed in The Spinoff from 2017.

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