New Zealand First leader Winston Peters and Act leader David Seymour. Photo / Twitter
EDITORIAL
If a new immigrant landed at Auckland Airport today, they would be hard-pressed to know who the Prime Minister of New Zealand is.
While National leader Christopher Luxon has the keys to the 9th floor office at the Beehive, it’s the coalition leaders Winston Peters and David Seymour, and their MPs who are dominating news headlines.
Fortunately for New Zealanders, headlines or media attention are not gold, because if they were, Peters and Seymour would be “bullionaires”.
Peters and NZ First have had a number of wins in the coalition Government’s three months in office and have escaped relatively unscathed.
Any pushback on cuts to their portfolios are dumped in the lap of National’s Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ Budget bag of tricks.
Even the Smokefree repeal, which was slammed by health workers and pushed through by Associate Health Minister Casey Costello, has been somewhat tempered this week after the NZ First MP also unveiled her plans to tackle the vaping industry and shops, which have replaced corner dairies as preferred ram raid targets.
The previous Government rightly believed vaping was the silver bullet to smoking cessation - and to be fair, it has helped some long-term smokers get off the nicotine. But it has also created a group of young people hooked on vaping who would have never smoked tobacco in the first place.
The policy move was a good win for NZ First.
Then Shane Jones popped his head above the parapet to suggest reopening Marsden Pt Refinery. It’s a pie-in-the-eye policy that grabbed headlines and the minds of Kiwis because when the previous Government and the Marsden Pt Refinery owners decommissioned it in 2022, tradespeople left the area for more sustainable work and the plant sits there like a white elephant waiting for a 20,000-volt resuscitation. Whether it operates again or not doesn’t matter but the genie is now out of the bottle in the minds of the electorate.
Another win for NZ First constituents.
And you can never underestimate the master Peters, who can manufacture a headline at the drop of a state of the nation speech, when he compared “co-governance to the Holocaust” then blamed “blatant misreporting” on the ensuing criticism.
Some might consider at 78, Peters might be a wee bit forgetful, but nothing could be further from the truth. Peters’ brain capacity is firing on all cylinders.
Seymour made headlines when he took the moral high ground after being spat at during a Palmerston North school protest haka turned political and nasty.
Spitting at a person - a dignitary in fact - during a haka is accepted within Māori culture, but tikanga-wise, it was hardly a good look in the circumstances.
Seymour could have made a big scene over this and spat the dummy but didn’t, and came away appearing all the better for it.
The upshot for Luxon is that Peters and Seymour (Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister-in-waiting) have pushed him out of the headlines.
He’ll want to ensure they don’t keep dominating the limelight, lest voters get the wrong idea about who’s really in charge.
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