Here’s a starter for 10: if a spaceship had landed at Waitangi this week and a bald, bobbleheaded alien with a striking resemblance to Mark Zuckerberg emerged to demand “Take me to your leader!”, who would you have pointed it in the direction of?
Would it be the equally bobbleheaded and other-worldly David Seymour, Winston Peters (aka the world’s angriest man), or the one who looks the most like the ET, our 42nd prime minister, Christopher Luxon?
It is not a trick question. Waitangi has long been something like Squid Game, a do-or-die trial of character for politicians of all stripes to demonstrate whether they have the right stuff to be leaders in the face of belligerent words or worse, particularly at Waitangi’s lower Te Tii marae.
Some have managed to shrug off the hostility, like National’s former leader Don Brash, and long-time cabinet minister Steven Joyce. Both got one in the noggin — mud and a dildo, respectively — from protesters, but stood their ground, with Brash famously calling out to the mud thrower, “Good shot”.
Some, sometimes surprisingly, have not coped as well; the usually stoic Helen Clark, then Opposition leader, came close to crying when, as a woman, she was forbidden from speaking at Te Tii in 1998. Others faced with the prospect of rancour or threats of disruption have chosen not to attend at all, like former Prime Minister John Key, who eschewed Waitangi in 2016.
This year’s celebrations, coming as they did after weeks of rising anger and rhetoric from Māoridom over Seymour’s still-to-be-presented Treaty Principles Bill, promised to be a particularly compelling episode of Squid Game. Not least because the likely combative, high-pressure confrontations expected on the treaty grounds would also be a handy gauge of which of the three leaders — or, to give them their rap crew handle, “The Three Headed Taniwha” — is the real alpha male in their coalition of convenience.
In the event, what we got was something like a live-action manifestation of Sigmund Freud’s model of the psyche — id, ego and superego — with each of the three leaders demonstrating which bit of the coalition’s personality they are.
Naturally, Peters was all id, the instinctual and ranty bit of the government’s psyche. Getting to his feet, the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister started by announcing he’d be “very, very brief” because he had places to be and other more important people to meet, so there.
As Peters embarked on what resembled a TED Talk for idiots and the heckles and boos inevitably rose, he went full-insult comic, telling the crowd, “So stop the crap. Stop the nonsense. Stop the hysteria”, before eventually storming off to be our country’s most senior diplomat somewhere else with people who were much more important.
With Seymour, we got the whiny, moralising superego, the conscience of the nation who thinks that some of us have more rights than others, with those of us who have better health, earn more and live years longer apparently the disadvantaged ones.
The Act leader had no doubt arrived at Waitangi on the defensive, given the rising anger among Māoridom. But after receiving the most intimidating wero (challenge) of the three leaders, watching his Act colleague Nicole McKee get short shrift on the paepae and then having to sit and be told by Hone Harawira that “you and your shitty as bill are going down the toilet”, he came over all thin-skinned and banged on about how others at Waitangi had been playing the Act man rather than the debate ball.
Seymour, who once called his fellow coalition leader Peters a “clown”, complained that “Today, I’ve heard people say we are spiders, that we are sandflies. Well, I’m sorry to say folks, not even Donald Trump is calling his opponents insects.” Eventually, like an Oscar winner banging on for too long, Mr Superego was played off by some of those assembled on the paepae, who broke into waiata.
Lastly, came the ego. According to Freud, it is supposed to be the most realistic bit of someone’s psyche. It’s also supposed to be the mediator between the ranting id and the complaining superego. Luxon was neither. His waffly, prepared speech was, on the one hand, like a crap John Lennon cover — “Imagine a country that embraces technology and innovation … imagine an outward-looking country hustling and connected to the world …” — while on the other, channelled a crap Austin Powers’ movie: “I want to see us get our mojo back.”
But what he mostly did was to ignore completely the issue that has been mobilising tangata whenua and others across the country for weeks. Instead, like some sort of head of sales and marketing, he offered soothing bromides about the past and gee-whiz visions for the future. Instead of taking his opportunity to reassure those deeply troubled by his government’s approaches to both the treaty and Māori, he offered PR pipe dreams.
Luxon might call that leadership. Visitors from outer space might have another view entirely.
