Christopher Luxon "performatively" responding to the Abuse in Care Inquiry report. His speeches have been heartfelt, but his Government has moved much more slowly than was advised by the inquiry. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Christopher Luxon "performatively" responding to the Abuse in Care Inquiry report. His speeches have been heartfelt, but his Government has moved much more slowly than was advised by the inquiry. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland.
One whole year, and birthday celebrations to go with it. The Government was in celebratory mood last week, even if the coalition partners could not agree who was responsible for most of the “good things” they’ve done.
But that’s par for the course:they’re very good at performing as high-achievers, this lot, which is not at all the same as achieving a high level of performance.
Performativeness – yes, it’s a word – is a very different thing from performance.
To be clear, this is not about whether the various ministers have policies I approve of. It’s about whether they’re doing what they claim to be doing, or deceiving us.
The performativeness comes in many forms. Last week Health Minister Shane Reti announced that $30 million of “extra funding” will allow the creation of 50 new positions for senior doctors and 75 for senior specialist nurses.
This is welcome, of course. But the context is that the Health Commissioner, Lester Levy, is cutting $1.4 billion from the health budget in this financial year. That “new” money has been reallocated from desperately needed services elsewhere.
It’s the same with the police. There are now more cops on the beat in central Auckland and Wellington, which is great, but this is because the police are pivoting away from family harm callouts. That’s appalling.
In family harm as in health services, lives are at stake.
The Good Shepherd charity reports that nearly half of all homicides and reported violent crimes in New Zealand are related to family violence. The police themselves warned minister Mark Mitchell in March that reducing family harm callouts would put lives at risk.
Why are they doing this? Because they can’t cope.
Former police commissioner Andrew Coster said in February that family harm callouts had increased 80% in 10 years. They are now the “single largest demand activity for frontline staff”, according the police’s own annual reports. And they estimate two-thirds of incidents are not reported.
We need a much bigger, better strategy to deal with domestic violence. But the police, with Government support, are reducing their responses without any serious attempt by anyone to put a new strategy in place.
Having more cops on the inner-city beat is valuable in itself, but it’s performative. Crimes of domestic violence are far more common, often more serious, and usually committed in front of children, or to them.
This is the crime epidemic we should be talking about, but the Government has allowed resources to be moved away.
Other Government policies are also likely to kill people, most obviously the repeal of key elements of the smokefree regulations and reversing the lower speed limits.
More people could die from the underfunding of climate-resilience work, too. Fifteen people lost their lives in the summer floods of 2023 and too little has been done to prepare for the next.
As for air pollution, mostly from vehicles, it kills 10 times as many people in this country as crashes on the roads. Yet Government policies like slowing the transition to EVs and underfunding public health campaigns are making it worse.
Another aspect of performativeness: bold policies unsupported by data. Boot camps are one example. There are many more.
When Newsroom analysed 84 regulatory impact statements (RIS) and other reports on new policies, it found that in 57% of them, officials reported either a lack of data to support the policy, or that data existed but did not support the policy.
Officials said they could not say if Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee’s proposed changes to firearms law were the best way to achieve Government policy, because she had instructed them not to look at alternatives.
Health Minister Shane Reti, "performatively" discussing the benefits of the Healthy Homes Initiative in Lower Hutt last week. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Where data does exist, it can be misleading.
Reti boasted last week about the Healthy Homes Initiative, introduced by National in 2013 and expanded by them in 2016, and expanded again by Labour in 2022.
It’s a great programme, run by Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora and showing great results, including 18.6% fewer hospitalisations.
“For every dollar spent there has been an estimated $5.07 in health savings over the following five years,” Reti said.
And much more could be done. A mere $55.6m was spent on this programme from 2013-2021, with another $30m added in 2022.
But Healthy Homes isn’t funded past this year, other funding for complementary programmes like Warmer Kiwi Homes has already been cut and Housing Minister Chris Bishop’s new approach to social housing puts less emphasis on the value of warm, dry homes.
Compare that 1:5 benefit with the proposed Warkworth to Wellsford Expressway, one of Brown’s Roads of National Significance (RONs). It will cost upwards of $2 billion and for every dollar spent, the expected return will be a mere 70 cents. It’s a waste of money.
Funding is not yet approved, but the Government insists it will be built.
The alternative is to build a three-lane road (alternating passing lanes) with median barriers. Easier, faster and far cheaper to build, just as safe, and more appropriate for the expected volume of traffic. It would, in other words, represent a government performing well.
But whoopee, a “four-lane highway from Auckland to Whangārei” is far more performative, so that’s what we’re getting.
David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill contains a set of goals for “good law-making”, including cost-effectiveness. But the record to date suggests Cabinet as a whole has not read this document. Perhaps they make darts with the pages and throw them at each other.
Luxon has led the way with expectations of performativeness rather than performance, with his 100-day plan and quarterly “action plans”. The Newsroom review found that with three-quarters of the policies, officials said there wasn’t enough time for proper analysis.
Indeed, formal quality-assurance checks were not even required for projects in the 100-day plan.
Then there’s straight-out bluster, including all the empty threats by Resources Minister Shane Jones and others to energy companies, banks and supermarkets.
Performativeness can be designed to show decisiveness, as in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ cancellation of the iRex Cook Strait ferry deal, which she did before a new strategy was in place.
It’s similar with the fast-track legislation, promoted by Bishop, Brown and Jones, which puts the appearance of being decisive ahead of the value of an evidence-based development strategy.
Offshore wind farms abandoned because the Government wants seabed mining. What a travesty.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis, who "performatively" cancelled the iRex Cook Strait ferry project. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Oddly, performativeness can sometimes be confusingly indecisive. Willis insists she is not pursuing an austerity strategy, although she also insists she is totally focused on spending cuts and debt reduction, to return the economy to surplus as quickly as possible.
That’s the classic definition of austerity. Treasury has advised Willis that her policies are even more austerity-inflected than Ruth Richardson’s were in the early 1990s.
But complicating the picture, Willis is also quietly increasing government borrowing by $12b and we will not be back in surplus as soon as promised. Fair to say she’s being as austere as she thinks she can get away with.
One function of all the performative noise is distraction: it means we don’t get to talk so much about an agenda that’s being more quietly pursued.
This includes the spectre of privatisation, climate denialism, rewards for the financial backers of the coalition parties and something no one in the Government will ever say out loud: time’s up on Māori progress.
If these things aren’t true, we need to hear them say how and why.
If this was a Government dedicated to improving the greater good, instead of performatively looking like it was, there would be less crowing about gang patches and a full-scale focus by police, health and community services on the most devastating impact of gangs: meth, especially in provincial towns.
There would be a serious, comprehensive response to the social, cultural and economic implications of the Abuse in Care report. The speeches, including Luxon‘s, have been impressive, but the inquiry wanted action within four months and far too little of that has happened.
There would be much more meaningful help for poorer schools, social housing and provincial economies, and a systematic rethink of all development through a climate-action framework.
They’d abandon the idea they can fix the health system while slashing its costs. They would withdraw the appallingly divisive Treaty Principles Bill now.
And our record emigration levels would be declared a national crisis.
Instead, we get performativeness. The pretence at important action.
The irony of having all those ministers being performative is that their leader is not very good at it himself.
He’s allowed the narrative to take hold that Seymour and Winston Peters are laughing at him. He’s still gabbling at us, all that “look, what I am saying to you is that the Government I lead is relentlessly focused on growth” stuff.
Some people call it management-speak, but that’s surely an insult to most managers. There’s a job in TV waiting for the PM, if they ever make a Kiwi version of The Office.
Maybe you think it doesn’t matter. But what will happen when we face another pandemic, a major earthquake, or foot and mouth, another Cyclone Gabrielle – there’s a long list of very possible disasters – and the coalition partners start grandstanding and pressing their narrow selfish interests as they do now?
Would Luxon know what to do, and be able to do it?
