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Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly, mostly satirical column on politics that appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings.
Welcome to Growth Year, New Zealand!
Forget 2024, the year when every single, economic decision taken by the government made not a single iota of difference to our tanked economy, and welcome in 2025.
This will be the year when our slumbering, stinking bum of an economy, still sleeping off its six-year Labour hangover apparently, finally wakes up, gets up and goes back to work. Huzzah etc.
How do we know this? Well, the Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire, Christopher Luxon, has said so, and you can take everything Captain Enthusiasm says to the bank. Just ask the people of Dunedin, where they are waiting for their new hospital to be built.
The big question, actually the only question, is how Luxon will manage to perform this miracle of economic growth in an economy so stagnant?
Has he, say, found the secret to economic success through harnessing the modern miracle of AI? Which is to say, has he asked ChatGPT, “How in fuck’s name do I fix the New Zealand economy”?
No.
Has he, say, direct-messaged the world’s richest man Elon “I was just stretching my arm a bit” Musk to ask him to buy us, sack most of us and turn us into a profitable if techno-fascist hellhole?
No.
Perhaps Luxon has got lucky during the summer break and found several billion bucks in change down the back of his Beehive office couch?
No.
The Prime Minister reckons he is going to fix our buggered economy’s lagging economic growth by attracting more tourists, allowing more mining and making it easier for more foreign investors to own more of New Zealand. He might even sell off a few state-owned assets as well, if he gets back in next year. So not so much 2025, then. Let’s call this year “More of 2014″. It’s like John Key never left office.
But in being Key 2.0, Luxon is missing a trick. In announcing these back-to-the-future solutions that may or may not move the growth dial, Luxon is ignoring another back-to-the-future panacea that could really grow the economy: Dame Jacinda Ardern.
Forget beef, forget lamb, forget milk. The country’s biggest export success for 2025 could well be the Cult of Saint Jacinda, a growth industry that has two (likely) hagiographic documentaries on the way and a (likely) self-serving memoir coming out in June. It’s as though she’s turned into a one-person “rock-star economy”.
To some New Zealanders, the return of Jacinda-mania will be welcome. To them, Ardern will always be Gandhi in a skirt.
To others, mostly (but not exclusively) to political opponents, she was five years of sizzle and no goddamn sausage.
To others still, she is the so-called “kindness” leader who, when faced with growing personal unpopularity, a tanking economy and the prospect of turning a historic electoral victory into an electoral loss, unkindly left her party in the lurch when she stepped down as PM and leader at the beginning of an election year.
Labour, as we all now know, went on to suffer one of the worst electoral reverses in New Zealand political history. She meanwhile buggered off overseas to leverage her international profile.
But who cares what we little people at the bottom of the world think? Overseas, Ardern remains a saleable celebrity, a popular advocate for her nebulous “kindness” politics in a dark world, a darling of the progressive left despite being a self-declared republican who accepted a dame-hood.
What Ardern has become is our own Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: she has a bit of a story people (apparently) want to hear, even if, same as the Sussexes, it’s not a very interesting story.
Still, if she’s canny like Harry and Megs, it is a story that can be endlessly repeated and repackaged for profit through books, documentaries, podcasts, merch and overpriced jams.
To get New Zealand back on a growth track again in 2025, New Zealand’s does need to go back to the future, all right. So all aboard the Ardern growth bandwagon, everyone.
When Two Tribes Go To War
What kind of New Zealander are you? Are you a “change-maker” or a member of the “majority for mediocrity”?
According to Act leader David Seymour, in another of his bombastic State of the Nation speeches, these are the two “invisible tribes” that make up New Zealand.
Apparently “change-makers” aren’t people who will break a tenner to help you feed a parking meter, but “people who act out the pioneering spirit that built our country every day”, whatever the hell that means.
The “majority for mediocrity”, according to Seymour’s latest socio-historic brain fart, are the rest, those without the “pioneering spirit” who “blame one of the most successful societies in history for every problem they have”.
In short: change-makers good; majority for mediocrity bad. Which is Seymour doing his best to divide us again rather than bring us together. It worked for Donald Trump.
But as it happens Another Kind of Politics agrees with Seymour. New Zealand is made up of two different types of people: those who are onboard with Seymour and his mediocre us-and-them politics; and those who aren’t.
Who do reckon has the workable majority?
Seas of change
Say what you like about US President Donald Trump, but some of his ideas can make a lot sense. After enough cocktails. Like his demand that the Gulf of Mexico should now be called the Gulf of America, at least by MAGA Americans.
Why shouldn’t different countries call the same stretch of water by different names? What possible difference does it really make in the end?
Which brings us to the Tasman Sea. Why should it be name after some dead Dutchman who means nothing to no one, when it could be named to better reflect its current role?
In New Zealand the Tasman could be called the “Gateway to Better Wages, Healthcare and Just About Everything Else”. And in Australia, “Turn Back Now, If You Value Your Wages, Healthcare and Just About Everything Else”.
Political quiz of the week
What is the Luxon family doing in this photo?
A/ Catalogue modelling for Farmers.
B/ Demonstrating the dangers of giving everyone the same Christmas present.
C/ Posing for a frightening “Before And After”.
D/ Proving social media is the worst thing in the history of the world, ever.
