It’s rare for our politicians to reach any kind of consensus on anything — frankly if you ask six MPs from the six parties currently in Parliament whether breathable air was a good thing, you’d probably get six different answers.
So it was pleasing to hear most politicians across the political spectrum agree that Warner Bros/Discovery closing TV3′s Newshub by the end of June was not a good thing for the 300 or so directly affected, the news media in general and the country at large.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins and Act leader David Seymour both offered the view that the closure of the only privately-owned TV news service in the country was a “sad day” for democracy. Prime minister Christopher Luxon called it “sad and shocking”, while deputy prime minister Winston Peters, hardly the journalist’s friend, called it a “disaster for democracy”.
The troubling exception — the frankly ugly fly in the stinky ointment of disappointment — was Melissa Lee, National’s Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media. Lee, it should be remembered, is not only a former journalist (including working at the Sunday News), but is also a former presenter and part-owner of the company that made the long-running, local Asian news programme, Asia Downunder — a show that was heavily subsided by taxpayers through New Zealand on Air.
Despite her history, she didn’t seem much bothered by the demise of Newshub. While grudgingly conceding the move by a giant multinational company to sack some 300 New Zealanders and kill off a major pillar of our media was “sad”, she was remarkably flippant about the huge impact this would have on the country’s media landscape.
Asked if she was concerned that, from July, there would be only one choice for television news in New Zealand, Melissa Lee offered that there was “a whole lot of other media about”, including on Sky TV, though she failed to mention its very limited local news service on Prime is actually produced at Newshub, and therefore could well go when Newshub goes.
She also made it quite clear, too, as did Luxon, that there would be no government bailout for Newshub.
That wasn’t a surprise. We all know that the only way for a giant multinational company to get a sweetheart deal from a New Zealand government to protect hundreds of jobs is to be a Hollywood studio or to have a smelter in Bluff.
What was a surprise was that Lee not only appeared relaxed about Newshub’s closure, but she also failed to appear on TV and radio news programmes the morning after the announcement to discuss Warner Bros/Discovery’s decision and the struggles of our cash-strapped media.
What do you call it when a former journalist-turned-broadcasting minister refuses to front to the news media about the loss of a major news media outlet? A sad day for democracy.
Pity the New Zealand Labour party. Not so long ago they were the nation’s political darlings and masters of all they surveyed with the first ever outright majority under MMP, a world-famous leader with the Midas touch and an agenda promising a post-pandemic paradise of unicorns, kindness, and economic recovery. They were possessors of the sort of political popularity that comes along once in a generation.
And now look at them. Having stunk up the room with one of the worst defeats in the party’s history, Labour now has all the allure of a reeking tramp pushing their worldly possessions around the streets of Wellington in a stolen shopping trolley.
And it’s got no better since the election. While it could be argued that the party will hardly notice the post-election departures of long-term second-stringers Kelvin Davis and Rino Tirikatene, the retirement of vice-captain and team treasurer Grant Robertson deprives Labour of not just one of its most-experienced and skilful players, but one of the few who could safely carry the ball in the House.
Meanwhile team captain Hipkins, having spent last year being King Midas in reverse as he lost ministers, voters’ support and an election, has begun the year with a 10-point loss in a preferred prime minister poll.
If Labour was a rugby team, you might say they’ve gone from World Cup contenders to dirt-trackers in the space of three seasons. But enough of the dodgy sports metaphors.
Give what’s happened since last October, one imagines the entire parliamentary Labour Party, well what’s left of it, is not only still in mourning but is likely suffering from a bad dose of PTSD, Post-Trouncing Stress Disorder. This would explain why some of its surviving MPs, and even one of its ex-MPs, have added a whole new stage to the five stages of grief in the past couple of weeks.
Having gone through denial, anger, bargaining and depression, the party has now stumbled into what can only be described as the Drunk Uncle At A Wake stage.
The first one to publicly suffer from it was Ginny Andersen, Labour’s erstwhile Police Minister, now its spokesperson for wild accusations. In a likely PTSD-induced outburst last week, she accused the new Minister of Police, the life-like Mark Mitchell, on radio of having been “paid to kill people” while providing private military services in Iraq in the early-2000s, before asking him whether he’d kept a “tally of how many you shot”. Mitchell was naturally outraged, and Andersen later apologised, but the drunk uncle, or aunty in this case, had already done her damage.
Meanwhile this week, ex-Labour minister Stuart Nash, who was sacked from cabinet last year for breaking Cabinet rules, took time out from his new business career to kick his former colleagues while they were down, essentially accusing them of being soft on gangs while in government.
This provoked surviving Labourite Willie Jackson, the party’s self-appointed spokesman on class issues, to accuse Nash of having “no class”. Whether the type of class Nash didn’t have was working, middle or upper was unclear, but the party could do without two more drunk uncles having a punch-up in public.
Post their electoral defeat, it was inevitable Labour would begin behaving like a depressed teenager with a thing for self-destruction. Parties chucked out of government always do.
But if Labour is to avoid repeating the three terms it spent in the wilderness post-2008 — which was only saved by the unexpected cult of Jacinda-mania and the even more unexpected decision by Winston Peters to go with Labour — it needs to escape the drunken uncle stage of grief and move quickly to acceptance. Rather than generating more embarrassing headlines, the rump who remain in parliament should be focused on shaping Labour’s future offering — and how they will win back the support Labour so carelessly frittered away in just three years.
The sooner they do, the sooner voters will start taking the party seriously again.
What kind of Prime Minister of New Zealand slags off the official residence of the Prime Minister of New Zealand?
At a do held on Tuesday at Wellington’s Premier House, Christopher Luxon reportedly told an Australia cricketer — of all people! — that the building first used as the PM’s official residence in 1863 has been “condemned”. Luxon later denied having said any such thing saying, “that’s not the language that I used”, though that’s not actually a denial that he didn’t slag off New Zealand’s White House.
Luxon, like his predecessor Hipkins, doesn’t actually live at Premier House because it has “long-standing maintenance issues”, which Luxon seemed to indicate would not be fixed on his watch because of the cost-of-living crisis.
Here’s a question: why doesn’t Luxon, a can-do guy according to him, do what every other Kiwi bloke worth his salt does when he can’t afford a builder — DIY at the weekends? If he roped-in Minister for Infrastructure Chris Bishop and few others, he could have the place fixed up nicely by Christmas.
Meanwhile Luxon continues to live in his own apartment in Wellington, one of the seven mortgage-free homes our down-to-Earth multimillionaire PM owns. That would be fair enough if not for the unsavoury fact that despite owning his own mortgage-free flat in Wellington, this hasn’t prevented him from claiming in the past the up-to-$32,000 accommodation allowance available to politicians from outside Wellington. As PM, he’s now entitled to claim up to $52,000.
Here’s another question: what would you call a wealthy politician preaching fiscal austerity who took taxpayers’ money for an accommodation allowance on a mortgage-free flat in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis? The word bludger comes to mind.
