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Welcome aboard Quick Getaway Airlines, Prime Minister. Please make sure your tray table and seat are in the upright position and your seatbelt fastened as you attempt getting as far away from the blowback from last week’s Budget as you can.
Soon you’ll be cruising at 30,000ft on a relaxing junket on the taxpayers’ dime, travelling to exotic climes where you can have an undeserved escape from the righteous anger and wintry chill caused by your cynical, shameful and unforgivable breaking of an election promise to fund 13 new cancer drugs from next month …
Really, can you blame him?
The PM, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher Luxon, certainly can’t have been the only one feeling like a holiday in the sun after last week. A week in which we learnt that despite the galaxy of hype and the universe of public sector cost-cutting, Finance Minister Nicola Willis isn’t a fiscal genius after all, just a different type of borrow-and-spend merchant from her predecessor, Grant Robertson.
Willis’s costly tax relief, delivering an average thirty measly bucks a week come July 31, won’t be enough to pay for a busman’s holiday, let alone a winter holiday in the sunny Pacific. Still, we serfs could at least bask in the warming glow of the Prime Minister spending most of the week on a pre-planned winter getaway to balmy Niue and clement Fiji.
The official reasons for the PM’s visits were to mark Niue’s first 50 years of pseudo-self-rule and check in with Fiji to drum up more business and trade. But it was also about cosying up to the leaders of both countries as the Pacific navigates what Luxon insists on calling “the increasingly choppy geostrategic waters”, which one assumes is code for China spending shitloads buying off countries in our Pacific backyard.
Quite what New Zealand can do to combat China in this influence war is hard to imagine. We certainly can’t spend more buying mates in the Pacific. According to Australian think tank the Lowy Institute, China currently outspends New Zealand nearly two to one on aid to Fiji and one and half times to Samoa and Tonga.
But Luxon, whose apparently relentless self-belief is dwarfed only by his manifest overconfidence in his personal charm, did his best to romance Niue Premier Dalton Tagelagi and Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka by making soothing noises about New Zealand having a “special” relationship with their countries.
He was also photographed once again putting his moves on a leader — a creepy first-date hand on the shoulder — just like he did with Philippines President Bongbong Marcos a couple of months back. This time it was Niue’s Tagelagi.
Luxon did have one substantial announcement while in Niue: NZ taxpayers are stumping up almost $21 million for a solar farm to help Niue cut down on diesel power generation. China, meanwhile, is sealing Niue’s roads, part of the hundreds of millions it is spending building new infrastructure in hard-up countries all around the Pacific and beyond.
Really, the Luxe would have been better spending this week pressing the flesh and passing around the begging bowl in Beijing, given the state of this country’s books revealed in the Budget.
It many respects, his mini-Pacific woo-athon is like an otherwise distant and emotionally uninvolved parent trying to buy a child’s affections after a bitter divorce. Unfortunately, New Zealand is the minimum-wage parent offering to take them for a Happy Meal, whereas China can afford to give them a trip to Disneyland.
Whatever else Luxon’s junket to Niue and Fiji did or didn’t achieve, it definitely gave us the news photograph of the year, a haunting image of the PM standing on the saddest stage in the world. During his welcome at Niue Airport on Tuesday, the Luxe was clearly directed to mount what appeared to be a box with a weird, low, chain-link fence around it while the national anthems were played. The result was the indelible image of our 42nd Prime Minister looking less like a Caesar at a Coliseum and more like a roped-off display at Madame Tussauds.
They fought the law and the law lost
Who told the Press newspaper, “These youths zoom along, with open throttles in front of other vehicles and make a nuisance of themselves”? Is the answer: A, The mayors of Levin and Horowhenua, B, Police Minister Mark Mitchell, C, A previous National minister of police, Judith “Crusher” Collins, or D, All of the above.
The answer, in fact, is Senior Patrol Officer P Lunn. He was helping bring to justice a “milk bar cowboy” at the Magistrate’s Court in Christchurch in 1951, which, incidentally, was the same year the first National government was re-elected in a snap election on the back of a reds-under-the-bed panic about the 1951 waterfront dispute.
Any confusion between the “bodgies” and “milk bar cowboys” of the 1950s and “boy racers” in the 21st century is far from a coincidence, because National governments, breakfast radio demagogues and reactionary newspaper columnists have been whipping up moral panics about apparently wayward youths for as long as forever.
Also far from a coincidence is that the lifelike Mark Mitchell’s first response to another mass “boy racer” burnout last weekend was to reach for the oldest, laziest and most useless approach: to try to legislate the larrikins out of existence.
The moral panic over raucous milk bar cowboys led to the infamous Mazengarb Report of 1954, which, among other things, blamed “juvenile delinquency” on working mothers, the ready availability of contraceptives, and young women enticing men to have sex.
What’s more, the report said, the delinquency was the result of inadequate parental supervision and advocated a return to Christianity and traditional values.
Meanwhile, at a public meeting in Auckland this week about crime in its CBD, Mitchell told the angry crowd that “in my personal view, our social fabric has been ripped, and it comes back to dysfunctional families, poor parenting and lack of personal responsibility”.
It’s like déjà vu all over again.
As for the moral panic about boy racers, Mitchell spent this week promoting a similar approach to that taken during the moral panic about boy racers led by Collins in the mid-noughties: passing legislation allowing for their cars to be permanently confiscated.
If such an approach worked, it would surely have wiped out the boy racer problem back in 2009, when Crusher Collins passed her boy racer legislation. The only tangible result of the moral panic back then was three crushed cars and a nickname for Collins.
What will the 2024 moral panic give us? Three more flattened cars and a nickname for Mitchell? Mangler Mark definitely has a ring to it.
