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Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly column that appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings. If you enjoy a “serious laugh” - and complaining about politics and politicians - you’ll enjoy reading Greg’s latest grievances.
Once upon a time there was a Finance Minister who thought she could be a Ferry Godmother too.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she said to the mirror on the wall, “who is the fairest ferry fairy of them all?”
“You are,” said the mirror, which thought she was joking.
So it was that the Finance Minister, who liked to strangle vowels until they were dead, grandly announced to the tiny, broke country of New National-led Land that she was its new Ferry Godmother.
Drunk with sudden ferry power, the first thing she did was to huff and puff and blow down the deal done by Labour to replace the Cook Strait ferries, the vital transport and rail freight link between the North and South islands. The Ferry Godmother claimed the deal, at more than $3 billion, was too expensive so it had to die like a frog standing in the way of a coal mine.
“But hold on,” said the mirror. “Is it really that expensive? The 3.45km city rail loop in Auckland is costing much more — $5.5 billion — and it is not nearly as vital to the national interest as the government’s Cook Strait ferry and rail freight service. Besides, isn’t your new government all about investing in and building lasting infrastructure? And isn’t it hugely risky cancelling the ferries deal without having an immediate replacement plan, particularly given the old ferries are nearly at the end of their lives and keep breaking down?
“Are you not worried about a disaster like the Wahine? And what about the break-fee for the existing deal? Won’t that be millions too? Aren’t you being short-sighted and stupidly ideological?”
The new Ferry Godmother, who struggled not to appear arrogant when challenged, was unmoved. “Don’t you worry about all that, I know what I’m doing. I’ll have a much cheaper deal organised with the wave of my wand.”
But a whole year passed, and nothing happened. Nothing at all. Then suddenly, in the last week of the political year, the Ferry Godmother announced she would be making a big announcement on her new ferries. The little half-broken, mostly broke kingdom of New National-led Land rejoiced.
That week, during a press conference for the nasty media hobgoblins, the Ferry Godmother tried to throw ferry dust about. But it became clear to the mirror that the Ferry Godmother’s plan was mostly imaginary. She wasn’t throwing ferry dust, but bull dust. The Ferry Godmother was trying to cast a bull dust spell over the proles of New National-led Land!
Not only would the Ferry Godmother not say how much the new ferries would cost, she couldn’t say whether they would be rail-enabled like the ferries she cancelled a year ago, nor could she guarantee the new ferries would be in service by 2029 — which was already three years later than the original plan. But it would be cheaper, apparently the most important thing with new ferries.
She also threw bull dust on her secret numbers, appearing to save some money for central government by having much smaller ships and by possibly offloading substantial costs of port redevelopment onto others, like the regional councils. On top of that, no decisions would be made until next March. It was almost like, after a whole year, she had no new plan at all!
Instead, the Ferry Godmother had waved her wand and created a new, crown-owned company that would buy the new ferries and oversee new port infrastructure work. It would be called, because she had such imagination, Ferry Holdings, a business that anyone could see was the first step toward privatising the government-owned ferry and rail freight service.
“Don’t worry,” said the Ferry Godmother when the hobgoblins of the media and the opposition cried out in despair. “It will work. And failing that, if some corporate vampire were to sink its teeth into the ferry service for me, that would be wonderful.
“After all, the proles of New National-led Land don’t need to own their own country or its key infrastructure.”
The Ferry Godmother and the Act Party, the troll that lived under the Auckland Harbour Bridge, knew it was much, much better if the market ran things anyway because that had worked so well with the power companies, banks, supermarkets and with BlackRock.
The mirror was appalled. “This is not a fairytale,” it muttered to itself. “It’s a nightmare and everyone will live unhappily ever after.”
Release the Hounds
What’s got a nice coat, bares its teeth a bit, often growls if you go near it and isn’t always a safe bet?
It is Winston Peters, of course, the ancient political greyhound who has been racing around Wellington for more dog years than anyone can remember, and who refuses to retire because, well, he seems to think old hounds can learn new tricks.
The old pooch has certainly learned one when it comes to greyhound racing, an “industry” he was still defending in June.
His decision this week to ban the appalling business of dog racing in New Zealand might well fall into the file marked “About Bloody Time”, but it was the right call to make, and Peters deserves some credit for it.
It just goes to prove that if enough animals are brutalised by trainers, doped with amphetamines, horribly injured, euthanised after injury, (or even if they’re healthy but not wanted) and there are enough damning reports written calling for an end to this animal maltreatment-for-profit industry, Winston Peters, who has been Minister for Racing three times since 2005, will finally do the right thing. Hooray for him.
But a bigger hooray for the end of an “industry” that should have been shut down a decade or more ago when it became very clear just how brutal, a wild-west business it was and is.
Of course, racing greyhounds will have to suffer for another 20 months before this vile business finally comes to an end, which is plenty more time for more dogs to be injured and euthanised.
But it does give the 1000 or so people employed by the industry time to work out what to do next. That’s far more notice and time to plan for a future than, say, the hundreds of small-town mill workers who have lost jobs this year have got, not that this heartless government seems to care about them. Yet the greyhound industry is still whining like a beaten cur.
There is the worry of what happens to the nearly 3000 racing greyhounds. Peters’ plan to re-home them all is ambitious to say the least, particularly given a 2021 University of Auckland study that found ex-racing greyhounds can be “poorly equipped … to cope with the expectations placed on them as pets”.
There is also this: Peters’ decision to kill the greyhound racing industry is very much in contrast to this government’s outrageous and shameful decision — prompted by, big surprise, the Act Party — to restart the disgusting live export trade of farm animals by sea to places like China. So hooray for the greyhounds. But what about the animals affected by the return to live exporting by sea, Winston? Any love for them?
Trick or Treaty Polls?
How many New Zealanders care enough about the meaning and intention of their country’s founding document to understand what Act leader David Seymour is up to with his unprincipled Treaty Principles Bill?
Not as many as you might think, if we are to believe a TVNZ poll released this week.
While the poll showed more of those surveyed opposed the bill (36%) than supported it (23%), the most astonishing figure was that 39% didn’t know enough about it to say either way. This, after months and months of coverage of the issue in the media, a propaganda campaign by Act and its ugly fellow travellers Hobson’s Pledge, a haka by Te Pāti Māori in the House and a 42,000-strong hikōi to parliament.
The fact that nearly 40% are still clueless does rather suggest that a referendum on the treaty principles — which Seymour and his stooges want — is a very bad idea. There are two reasons:
The first is that if there is such a large number of New Zealanders — what might be called, in market research terms, the Apathetic Losers — who are still so disengaged from this bitter, high-profile debate they don’t know what to think, it doesn’t exactly bode well for them voting if there was a referendum held.
And two, if there were to be a referendum on the treaty principles, this up to 40% of Apathetic Losers would be ripe for manipulation through propaganda by individuals and groups with lots of money and no scruples — like, say, the Libertarian Right — who might successfully convince enough of them to be anti-treaty to win the vote.
It certainly worked for the Vote Leave campaign in the UK. It used powerful digital manipulation and propaganda targeted at the ignorant and politically apathetic to win the referendum vote on Brexit, precipitating the stupidest decision in British history. Why would Act and its fellow travellers not try to do the same thing here?
As it happens, Act released its own poll this week, done by Curia, the go-to polling company for the Right. This poll doesn’t appear to have directly asked whether people support the unprincipled Treaty Principles Bill or not but inquired whether treaty principles should be decided by “bodies” like Parliament, the judiciary, the Waitangi Tribunal or a referendum, even though a referendum is not a kind of law-making body, just a one-off vote.
Act claims, albeit dubiously if you look at the actual figures, that the poll shows “New Zealanders think the best way to decide what the treaty principles are is through a referendum.”
But what kind of referendum would it be if nearly 40% of New Zealanders have no idea about what they think about the issue? Would such a vote be democracy in action? Or just an opportunity for dark forces to manipulate and precipitate the stupidest decision in New Zealand history?
Political quiz of the week
What kind of botched medical procedure is Act leader David Seymour performing in this picture?
A/ A logic bypass.
B/ A dodgy history reconstruction.
C/ A harebrained principles transplant.
D/ A Pākehā racism biopsy.
