National leader Simon Bridges walks. Photo / Mark Mitchell
National leader Simon Bridges walks. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Claire Trevett wraps the week in which Bridges delivered an unusual pledge, Grant Robertson's price went up, and hunts down the reasons why three MPs did not cast votes on abortion reform with an unexpected answer.
Monday: Simon Bridges' underpants pledge
National Party leader Simon Bridges set the weekoff with something of a bang, by announcing if construction started on light rail to Auckland airport before the 2020 election he would "run down Queen Street or Dominion Road with my underpants".
This immediately raised memories of former Green Party MP Keith Locke doing just that down Broadway in Newmarket after a similar pledge about Rodney Hide winning the Epsom electorate.
Former Green MP Keith Locke in undies and body paint on Broadway. Photo / Martin Sykes
Things only got more worrying when Transport Minister Phil Twyford misinterpreted this, and said it would be an incentive to get the project going as quickly as possible to spare the eyes of New Zealanders.
Decent society could only note Bridges had said "with" his undies, rather than "in" and hoped he would simply run along with them in the pocket of his suit.
Tuesday: Grant Robertson Price Index spikes.
New statistics showed the unemployment rate had dropped, but the cost of listening to Grant Robertson bang on at a Labour fundraiser dinner had increased by 25 per cent over the past year.
Labour charged $750 a head for a dinner at which Robertson was the speaker.
At two post-Budget dinners last year, the cost was a mere $600 a head.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson speaking for free at Parliament on Budget Day. Photo / Mark Mitchell
This time around, Labour were careful not to describe Robertson as a minister of any variety, so as not to fall foul of the Cabinet manual.
He had his simple Labour MP hat on for the night.
Robertson no doubt delighted the audience with a series of witty anecdotes on his chosen topics of "wellbeing, sport and the global environment".
The PM meanwhile showed she had a strong backhand when it came to compliments in her weekly interview with Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking. It was an even more fractious interview than usual as he grilled her about allegations of misconduct by a Labour staffer and various other issues.
Asked how many people had quit the party, Ardern noted that the party had a spike in membership subscriptions every time Hosking interviewed her.
After Hosking said Phil Twyford had gone off him and would no longer do interviews, the PM responded archly that not everybody who went off him refused to be interviewed.
Back in Parliament, the abortion law reform bill was revealed. It got initial support from National Party leader Simon Bridges.
Then news broke that NZ First wanted to add a referendum on abortion to the list of referendums already underway.
NZ First MP Shane Jones noted "conscience issues are as mercurial as the minds holding the conscience, so I wouldn't catastrophise it".
Mercurial is one word that springs to mind.
Wednesday: MPs prepare for the lobbying, and the OCR drops
The introduction of the abortion law reform legislation led to a rush to Parliament's IT department as MPs tried to work out email settings to weed out the influx of lobbying on the abortion reforms from other emails.
Deborah Russell tweeted an inbox full of form submissions, then Chris Bishop posted a video of his inbox automatically whisking them off to another folder.
National MP Chris Bishop moves emails on abortion reforms from one box to another. The tweet was later deleted. Photo / screenshot Twitter
He later deleted that tweet after objections he was ignoring the public, and explained he would read and respond to such submissions as normal.
There was another concerning development to Bridges' Undies Pledge: the Reserve Bank dropped the OCR to its lowest rate ever of one per cent – a 0.5 point drop.
The dollar dropped. So did the realisation that the accompanying call for the Government to speed up infrastructure spending to provide stimulus could result in the light rail project speeding up and increase the chances of Bridges' undies making an appearance.
Thursday: The loo stop that cancelled a vote
The abortion law reform bill passed its first reading by 94 votes to 23 after about two hours of debate by MPs.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had rushed back from Brian Lochore's funeral to allow her to speak on it, having given the pre-election pledge that led to the bill.
Three votes were missing from the ballot papers.
One was National MP Alfred Ngaro, who was overseas. Ngaro said he had sent through a proxy to be cast on his behalf – but it somehow did not happen.
Given Ngaro's outspoken views against abortion reform, this was something of a Copeland.
Former MP, the late Gordon Copeland had quit United Future citing opposition to the no-smacking bill only to miss the vote on that bill.
The second missing vote was National MP Jian Yang, who said he had intended to vote in favour of the bill but left it too late to make his way to the Ayes lobby.
The most entertaining miss of all was National MP Hamish Walker, who did cast a vote in favour of the bill but then left the lobby rather than return to his seat to wait for the count.
Unbeknownst to Walker, under Parliament's rules that meant his vote had to be discounted.
Walker admitted later he had been busting to go to the toilet for quite some time and could not wait any longer.
The start of his week had not been great either.
National MP Hamish Walker's car abandoned in the snow earlier this week. Photo / supplied
The snow in Southland meant he had had to abandon his car the day before – leaving him to walk 2km from his home with a suitcase to get back to it to drive to the airport to fly back to Parliament on Tuesday.
Had the three all managed to vote, the final tally would have been 96–24.
