Watching the performance of the government so far, I keep coming back in my mind to the 1980s movie Three Amigos, in which a trio of silent-movie stars turn up in a small Mexican town. They think they’re there to do a show, but the locals have mistaken them for real western gunfighters who, they hope, can save them from a villainous bandit. So when our heroes are supposed to go in with all guns blazing, they do a song-and-dance routine instead.
All too often over the past eight months, Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters and David Seymour have resembled those amigos.
Politically, there’s no shortage of villains to aim their policies at – poverty, homelessness and climate change spring to mind, for a start – but they generally seem to be looking in another direction altogether: mainly, backwards. Devotion to rolling back the clock is rapidly becoming the hallmark of this government. We are all losing count of the number of things they’ve repealed, retracted, removed, reduced, repurposed.
There seems to be a curious reluctance to engage fully with the 21st century; rather, the impulse is towards recreating a time somewhere in the middle of last century when Chaps Got Things Done without any fuss or new-fangled nonsense like climate change or co-governance – a time when real men never used public transport, ate hot coal for breakfast and kids didn’t need pampering with a free school lunch.
Hence, a barrage of box-ticking “action plans” loud with the cracking of whips and exhortations from chief amigo Luxon. It’s like shooting tin cans off the top of a fence instead of confronting the real baddies.
It makes an impressive show, but, meanwhile, the boys from El Rancho Global Warming are heading for town and 102,000 homeless New Zealanders are on the train pulling in at high noon.
True, the chances of Luxon, Peters and Seymour being able to successfully govern the country were never great. Not so much three amigos, perhaps, as the three horsemen of the improbalypse.
Lined up together, they look ill at ease. Luxon is so bland he makes John Key look like Freddie Mercury; Peters is, well, Peters; and Seymour, who seemed to acquire some stature in opposition, now comes across as slightly manic, with the light of a zealot in his eye.
For the moment, however, the government is getting away with it, masking its potential for disunity with ceaseless activity. Tick! There goes another box. Zing! Another tin can down. They’re busy doing things to us, not with us – no time for that sort of palaver. It’s all very well, and it may indeed achieve the sacred trinity of Growing the Economy, Boosting Productivity and Lowering the Cost of Living, but wait a minute, isn’t there a day after tomorrow? And some years after that? That thing we used to call the future?
The future is cancelled
The coalition’s general disregard for the long-term consequences of its actions is striking. So striking that you wouldn’t put it past them to introduce a bill abolishing the future (on the basis, of course, that the future “doesn’t align with our strategic priorities”). There’s a hint of this approach in Act MP Mark Cameron’s bill seeking to stop regional councils from considering the negative impacts of climate change in consenting decisions.
Can’t see that one getting far but hey, if ministers can openly promote oil drilling, smoking and anti-Māori measures, then anything’s possible.
The most egregious example of failing, or rather, deliberately choosing not to think too far ahead, is, of course, climate change. Dozens of moves suppressing or defunding measures designed to mitigate global warming have already been taken, and now we have the government’s “climate strategy”, a document so lightweight it makes the average office memo look like the Bill of Rights.
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts, who bears an uncanny resemblance to 1950s National prime minister Sid Holland, uttered honeyed words like “overarching mechanism” as he unveiled the strategy but couldn’t conceal what amounts to a mish-mash of wishful thinking and virtue signalling.
Watts did say that climate change is complex and confusing for many New Zealanders, which is true. For instance, rather than be asked to explain how the Emissions Trading Scheme works, some of us would rather volunteer for root canal surgery. Without anaesthetic.
Another glaring example of short-term thinking is Housing Minister Chris Bishop’s urban sprawl policy, which has even raised the eyebrows of some developers, who wonder where all the infrastructure for these new homes will come from. But for Bishop and colleagues like Simeon Brown and Shane Jones, that’s irrelevant. “Move fast and build things” appears to be their motto, and damn the torpedoes.
Joking aside
Luxon, one feels, is an essentially decent man, and thank god that at least he has a sense of humour: his line about renters being grateful for landlords being given $2.9 billion in tax deductibility was hilarious.
Nor can it be easy being at the head of a cabinet table around which also sit not just Peters and Seymour but rogue ranchers like Jones and trigger-happy newbies like Act’s Nicole McKee.
But as someone probably familiar with the Bible, he might know that line from Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Not literally, of course, but there is such a thing as poverty of spirit, and growing the economy is not a goal that gets people swelling with pride.
Yes, governments have to protect their citizens’ standard of living or they’re toast. But one also looks to our leaders, of whatever political stripe, to be a bit bigger than that. To show vision, imagination; maybe even – gasp – inspire a little. Get too technocratic and you invite a populist reaction, the kind Donald Trump feeds on, from people sick of being treated as soulless components of a strategy.
On the other hand, Luxon’s regular Bible reading might be Matthew 6:34, in which we’re advised to take no thought for the morrow, “for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself”. God help us if that’s the case.
Denis Welch is a former political columnist for the Listener. Danyl McLauchlan is on leave.
