Sunday
The new Energy Minister Simeon Brown announced that he was dumping the Lake Onslow pumped hydro scheme. The backstory here is that more than half of New Zealand’s electricity is produced by hydro power and the big hydro dams in the South Island produce the lion’s share. Every few years we have dry years: the lakes run low and there’s an energy shortage which is met by burning coal and/or gas. If we want to be a net zero emitter we need an alternative source of energy.
Enter Lake Onslow, an elevated, artificial lake in Central Otago. The government proposed to use surplus energy generated in non-dry years to pump water up into the lake, turning it into a giant battery which could then function as a hydroelectric dam in the dry years when the other dams were underperforming. Everyone loved this idea until the estimate of the cost rolled in: $15.7 billion. And costs on government infrastructure projects almost inevitably blow out; the bigger the cost, the bigger the blowout. At least 6% of GDP for a single energy project that wouldn’t actually deliver more energy – just stabilise the current supply. So, the scheme is dead, and short of a massive drought and power crisis, it’s hard to see a subsequent government reviving it. National’s plan to ensure energy security is to fast-consent loads of solar, wind and geothermal projects. But we’ll need an awful lot of photovoltaic (PV) panels and wind turbines to offset those hydro dry years.
Monday
Raj Manji stepped down as leader of The Opportunities Party (TOP). Founded by Gareth Morgan back in 2016, TOP is the party of “evidence-based policy”. Which means lots of policy nerds love it but since policy nerds are only a tiny fraction of the population TOP has never come close to the 5% threshold, winning 2.2% in this year’s general election.
There’s a famous book about the psychology of mass movements called The True Believer, and the money quote is: “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.” It’s hard to say what most of our political parties are for, but easy to say what they’re against. National and Labour are against each other, Winston Peters is against the media, sociologists, Te Pāti Māori, the Serious Fraud Office etc. TOP is for the very abstract notion of evidence-based policy, but they aren’t against anyone or anything (other than non-evidence-based policy).
The new government’s anti-honeymoon (bitter moon?) continued this week. Someone leaked a confidential Cabinet paper to Newshub disclosing that Treasury advised the incoming Workplace Relations Minister Brook van Velden against repealing Labour’s Fair Pay Agreements. Cabinet leaks are rare, and they’re generally ministers and their staff covertly undermining each other. This looks a lot like the public service leaking to attack a politician and policy choice it dislikes. If so, it’s a clear violation of public service neutrality. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) is investigating the source of the leak, but anyone clever enough to have access to Cabinet information is probably clever enough to cover their tracks when they hand it to the media.
Tuesday
Today marked the opening of the new Parliament. It’s our 54th, and it’s been running since 1854: one of the longest continual democracies in the world today. It began with the swearing in of MPs.
Philosophers who study language have a fixation on a form of speech called “performative utterance”: it’s when your speech performs an action rather than just conveying information. Saying “I do” during a wedding ceremony or telling your boss that you quit your job, or a judge pronouncing a sentence on a convicted criminal are performative utterances. It’s a mode of speech that marks a surprising amount of life events: legally you’re not even dead until a medical practitioner says you are.
When you become a member of Parliament you must swear an oath that you’ll be “faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles the Third, His heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.” It’s similar to the oaths sworn by judges, police, armed forces and new citizens, all as set down in the Oaths and Declarations Act 1957. It’s a performative utterance and if you don’t say the oath you cannot become an MP.
Swearing allegiance to King Charles and his heirs is understandably problematic for Te Pāti Māori so during the ceremony they first swore allegiance to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and their mokopuna. Then they swore allegiance to King Charles, etc, although New Zealand First MP Shane Jones complained to media that they altered te reo and swore to “Kingi harehare” which translates as King skin rash.
The Greens swore in dressed in Palestinian shawls. And when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon approached the Clerk of the House the sound on my livestream glitched so he took his oath in high-pitched Korean (spoken by his alphabetical predecessor Melissa Lee). Gerry Brownlee was elected Speaker.
Wednesday
Two big political stories today. The PISA results (the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment) showed that the decade-long decline of New Zealand’s education system in the international rankings continues. And there was a ferocious debate about whether public servants should continue to be awarded extra pay for proficiency in te reo Māori. Part of National’s grand theory of politics is that Wellington’s political class and the left-wing parties representing them are intensely interested in the latter story but indifferent to the former, while the rest of the country is more exercised about issues like crime, prices and the quality of the education system. There was a gesture towards this in the Speech from the Throne, delivered by Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro on behalf of the new government, which noted, “The government enjoys the confidence of a clear majority of members in the 123-seat House of Representatives, but it is the people outside Parliament who will be the government’s priority in decisions made over the next three years.”
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Every new MP gets to give a maiden speech where they introduce themselves to Parliament, telling their life story and outlining their political values. These are usually rather dire but every now and then someone hits the mark. This year, it was National’s new MP for Rangitata, James Meager (Ngāi Tahu) who delivered a powerful speech, speaking candidly about his family and early life, then sent shivers through every right-wing politician, commentator and activist in the country when he thundered at the parties of the left: “Members opposite do not own Māori. Members opposite do not own the poor. Members opposite do not own the workers.”
Those three groups once overwhelmingly voted left because it was clearly in their interests to do so. Left-wing political parties around the world are struggling to understand why their core demographics are drifting to the right, a phenomenon political theorists refer to as “the great realignment”. The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein once suggested that the contemporary left is often “symbolically liberal but operationally conservative”: employing progressive and even radical rhetoric while delivering outcomes that favour the wealthy, educated knowledge workers that fund and control the parties of the modern left. Whatever the cause, it is also unclear how the government Meager belongs to intends to serve any of those groups – workers, Māori, the poor – either symbolically or operationally.
Thursday
It was another shaky week for the new government: the leak, the protest. Their next big set piece is Nicola Willis’s mini-budget on December 20, a document Willis is already laying the rhetorical ground for by accusing Labour of concealing billions of dollars in “fiscal cliffs” in the government finances. That doesn’t sound like a mini-budget that will be filled with happy surprises for the nation.
During the election campaign National defined itself in negative terms – it was against the incumbent government and its policies. That was good politics: the government was incredibly unpopular. But when the new coalition was formed it was still thinking and talking in oppositional terms: it was at war with the media, against the principles of the treaty, prioritising the rollback of existing legislation.
Who is it for? So far, landlords and the tobacco companies. That’s not a problem, yet. After they’ve made it through their first 100-day programme of rollbacks and cancellations they’ll still have about 1000 days to govern. But they’ll need to articulate a positive vision of what they’ll do with that time: of what they’re for instead of just who they’re against.
