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As spectacles go, it was like watching a three-legged dog run across a minefield.
Quite how this week’s post-Cabinet press conference ended up being an event best watched through one’s fingers is a mystery. Still, there was no denying it managed to be thrilling as well as horrifying, as you watched its progress and waited for the poor thing to explode.
Ostensibly the Prime Minister, the down-to-Earth multimillionaire Christopher “Luxe” Luxon, and his Minister of Corrections, the life-like Mark Mitchell, were a major league double act making a grand announcement about something they’re obviously proud of: an extra $1.9 billion to lock people up.
They certainly mounted the stage of the Beehive’s theatrette strutting like cocks of the walk.
They did manage, without any hitches, to deliver their prepared remarks about how they were delivering on election promises to get tough on crime and make our communities safer, blah, blah, blah.
It was when they went off-script to try to explain to the assembled hacks where this extra $1.9b for Corrections had come from and what it was buying that things descended into farce.
The kindest thing you could say about Mitchell is that he had not supped from the cup of clarity that morning. The more he attempted to explain how many new prison beds the government was adding and where, the less sense he made and the more hilariously baffling it all became. Beyond his usual bromides, Luxon, the straight guy in their double act, made little sense either, but reckoned “I don’t know how I can be any clearer...”
Aside from David McPhail and Jon Gadsby, and Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, New Zealand has produced few classic comedy duos. But it’s fair to say after this performance at the Beehive theatrette, we surely have another. If the Flight of the Conchords were New Zealand’s fourth-most popular comedy folk duo, then Mitchell and Luxon, the Flight of the Cock-ups, are the fifth.
So how many new prison beds will be added by 2028? To find out you needed to read the clarification statement issued almost immediately after the farce was over, making the three-legged dog in the minefield stuff somewhat redundant.
Will this extra $1.9b make our streets safer? Out in the real world we’ll wait and see, though it will work if you’re prepared to indulge in the sort of magical thinking Mitchell demonstrated when he said, “Maybe the criminal world will figure out there is a different government here and it is just not worth it any more”. Only in your fevered dreams, Mark.
This, of course, is not Mitchell’s first rodeo (Copyright: Winston Peters) when it comes to cocking up his figures in front of an audience.
Back in January, when the House had barely begun sitting for the year, Mitchell, also Minister of Police, appeared to be confused about the key policy promise in his police portfolio. He insisted when speaking in the House that he would deliver 500 extra officers “over the term of this government, which is three years”.
National’s policy actually said, as was pointed out by Opposition MPs, that the 500 extra cops were supposed to be delivered in two years. Mitchell was forced to correct himself after the event.
Speaking to media the day after his latest omnishambles, Mitchell didn’t seem much bothered by his dreadful performance and in further magical thinking, this time with an added dash of gaslighting, announced “it was a great announcement yesterday”.
One suspects Luxon will be the judge of that — just as he was with the now former broadcasting minister Melissa Lee and the now former disability issues minister Penny Simmonds.
Saint Jamie of Marlborough
Mitchell wasn’t the only one offering master classes in magical thinking this week.
It seems NZ First’s Jamie Arbuckle — a list MP most of us would struggle to identify if he was the naked one at the party’s annual conference — seems to suffer from the delusion that its fine for an MP to have two paying jobs.
Arbuckle, also a father of four, has been a Marlborough District councillor for the past 14 years. It turns out he still is, even though he became an MP last October. Being a councillor (base salary $40,250) is not a full-time job. Being an MP (base salary $164,000) is.
But Arbuckle told a reporter that he felt he was managing to do both, so he would hold on to both — and both salaries — until this October. Resigning then would save his council the cost of a by-election. What a saint he is. And selfless to a fault.
Of course a normal person might have figured that trying to hold onto both jobs might, firstly, be far too much work to do the full-time one justice, and, secondly, would be liable to earn you the nickname “Fatty Pay Packet” Arbuckle for double-dipping your snout in the public trough.
But no. Arbuckle reckoned it was all good. At least he did until the Luxe announced it wasn’t — “being an MP is a full-time job,” the PM said — and an almost embarrassed-sounding Winston Peters, Arbuckle’s NZ First leader, told media that Arbuckle’s “mistake” had been “fixed up”.
But has it? The solution seems to be that Fatty Pay Packet is giving the council’s 40-grand salary to charity, but he’s still not quitting as a councillor until October.
What happened to “being an MP is a full-time job”? And who’s getting the better value for money? The ratepayers of Marlborough or the taxpayers of New Zealand? Or neither?
On ya bike, Julie Anne
Well, that was a relief. Julie Anne Genter wasn’t anywhere near Parliament this week.
After blowing her foo-foo valve in the House last week and shouting in associate transport minister Matt Doocey’s face, the MP for Rongotai and Greens’ spokesperson for temper tantrums, was said to be “working from home”.
This week, she emerged briefly to utter more mea culpas of dubious sincerity and claimed she would be undertaking something called “de-escalation training”. She then headed for the Chatham Islands, which are part of the Rongotai electorate, for a three-day stakeholders’ forum. It is understood she flew in a plane rather than biked.
Before taking off, she defended her indefensible behaviour saying she is “very passionate” about her policy specialties, like expensive cycleways most people will never use. This was backed up by Greens’ co-leader Marama Davis, who said it was important her MPs were passionate.
It’s a curious use of the word. It can mean committed — which is fine in most things — but it can also mean zealous.
It will now be up to Parliament’s privileges committee to decide which meaning Genter’s “very passionate” behaviour is closer to. Any suggestion that the committee will send her to Coventry for her outrageous behaviour is untrue. She’s already been sent to the Chathams.
A plate of deep-fried crazy
Further extraordinary notions from inside the curious mind of David Seymour. The Act leader has declared sushi — sushi! — to be “woke”.
First question: has anyone told the Japanese? Second question: is sushi wokeness now official government policy? Question three: if you eat enough of it, will it turn you into Chlöe Swarbrick?
Seymour made his remarkable sushi remark on social media after announcing free school lunches will continue until the end of 2026 and will be extended to kids under five. However the per lunch cost for high school kids is being cut from $8 to $3, helping save $107 million.
“We’ll be feeding kids in schools the fruit and sandwiches their parents would give them,” he wrote, “not woke food like quinoa and sushi.”
Seymour, it should be said, has what one might call a difficult relationship with food. Before a lunch interview with the Listener in 2021, Act’s then head of communications Rachel Morton, suggested Seymour be allowed to pick the restaurant because “he’s quite a fussy eater”.
Seymour then confessed over steak and chips — he wouldn’t touch the shared salad because “it’s a lot of chewing for the amount of nutrition” — that he was funny about food because he had an illness as a child.
He said his mother, who “got into some kooky theories”, decided to treat him by feeding him sheep’s liver. “So the texture of that traumatic experience put me off a whole range of food for years.”
Following the news that sushi has been declared woke, it is understood avocados are living in fear they will be next.
