A Cabinet dominated by Wellington
A reader pointed out to me how massively dominated by Wellingtonians the Cabinet is. 10.3% of the population live in the Wellington Region so you would expect them to be two Cabinet seats. But what we have is they make up almost half the Cabinet:
- Hipkins – Wellington
- Sepuloni – Auckland
- Davis – Northland
- Robertson – Wellington
- Woods – Canterbury
- Tinetti – Bay of Plenty
- Verrall – Wellington
- Jackson – Auckland
- O’Connor – West Coast
- Little – Wellington
- Parker – Auckland
- Henare – Auckland
- Mahuta – Waikato
- Radhakrishnan – Auckland
- McAnulty – Wellington
- Andersen – Wellington
- Edmonds – Wellington
- Prime – Northland
So the proportion of Cabinet vs the proportion of NZ is:
- Wellington 7/18, 39% vs 10% population
- Auckland 5/18, 28% vs 34% population
- Northland 2/18 11% vs 4% population
- Waikato 1/18 6% vs 10% population
- Canterbury 1/18 6% vs 12% population
- Bay of Plenty 1/18 6% vs 7% population
- West Coast 1/18 6% vs 1% population
So Auckland has fewer Cabinet Ministers than Wellington despite more than three times the population.
Canterbury and Waikato have one Minister each to seven for Wellington, despite much the same population.
This is part of why the Government is out of touch. It is run by the professional politicians in Wellington, telling the rest of the country what to do.