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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.
Hello and welcome to the annual Drunken Muldoon Awards, in which Another Kind of Politics honours the great, the good, the damned and the complete and utter prats of New Zealand politics.
Named for the seminal moment in New Zealand politics when Prime Minister Robert Muldoon announced a snap election after a few too many whiskies, the Drunken Muldoon Awards recognise the sort of unforgettable cock-ups, miscalculations, misstatements and bare-faced truth-bending that make the modern New Zealand political scene the reeking, flaming dumpster fire it is. We have many prestigious baubles to bestow for 2024. So, without further ado, the 21 winners are:
The Bashar al-Assad Trophy For Most Popular Politician of the Year: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. The out-of-touch multimillionaire likes to pretend he isn’t interested in his polling. But what kind of salesman does not care about having so many unsatisfied customers? Not a successful one, that’s for sure. While the exact extent of his lack of popularity in his first year as prime minister has differed from poll to poll, he is undeniably the least popular first-term prime minister this century. He’s also one of the most travelled, having gone on multiple overseas sales trips this year. Given that the more people see and hear of Captain Air Miles, the less they like him, this was for the best. Think how much more unpopular Luxon might have been this year if he hadn’t spent so much time overseas.
The Anarchist’s Cookbook for Political Party of the Year: Te Pāti Māori. Not so much an opposition party, more a tauā [war party] that has stormed the Parliamentary pā and isn’t taking any prisoners. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, Act leader David Seymour’s unprincipled and doomed Treaty Principles Bill has been a boon for Te Pāti Māori’s profile and popularity, resulting in the biggest hīkoi on Parliament in at least a generation and the party receiving its highest ever result in a recent 1News-Verian poll. The MPs’ haka in the House even managed briefly to make New Zealand politics international news, while also giving us the hilarious sight of Speaker Gerry Brownlee, a cross between Mr Creosote and a blancmange, doing some furious frothing about unparliamentary behaviour.
Much more concerning than that haka is co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi’s sometimes violent rhetoric, the stink around the use as a polling station of a Manurewa marae connected to one of its MPs, and Ngarewa-Packer’s refusal to explain her nearly $40,000 bill for a supposed work trip to Hawaii. At times it can be hard to tell if Te Pāti Māori is there to be an unrepentant advocate for Māori or to be a wrecking ball out to do as much damage to our parliamentary system as it can. Probably it’s both.
The Eco-Friendly E-Cycle Tour of The Political Wilderness: Darleen Tana.
Most Unsuccessful Gang Leader of the Year: Police Minister Mark Mitchell. The government showed how tough on crime it is by making the ultimately victimless crime of wearing a gang patch illegal, while at the same time being nowhere near meeting the life-like Mitchell’s promise of having an extra 500 more cops on the streets by the end of next year. In fact there were 80 fewer police officers on the streets this November than in November 2023, while there were 190 more people on the National Gang List than when Labour was in government.
The Pork-Barrel Politics’ $100 Nudge-Nudge-Wink-Wink Backhander: The Fast Track Approvals Act.
The Royal Appointment to the Ancient Order of Hypocrisy: Dame Jacinda Ardern. It’s amazing, really. Ardern hasn’t been prime minister for almost two years and yet she keeps finding new ways to be really, really annoying. First, the self-declared republican signed on to be a royal lickspittle, becoming a trustee of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize. Then, after Ardern said “yes” last year to being appointed a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, the self-declared republican actually bent the knee for the Prince himself as he officially made her a dame in a ceremony in the UK in October.
Ardern finished the year by flying to Chicago for the US Democrats’ convention where the new dame announced she was backing Kamala Harris for president. Unconfirmed reports suggest Harris lost. On the plus side, the post-politics Ardern is looking much healthier and more prosperous. Unlike the country she governed for five years.
The Do Not Resuscitate Order For Apparently Having No Idea How Many Management Layers There Are In Our Failing Public Health System: Health Minister Shane Reti.
The Giant Pothole Of Contempt For Road Safety and Public Transport: Simeon Brown.
The Yeah-Nah Wet Tea Towel For Being Bloody Useless: The Labour Party. After a shamefully quiet first year in opposition after getting the boot by voters last year, Labour leader Chris “Flaky Pastry” Hipkins grandly announced at Labour’s national conference his intention to make the National-NZ First-Act coalition a one-term government. Out here in the real world, that sounded like the most hollow of hollow pledges, particular given that the party’s big new idea at the conference was a capital gains tax, something that Hipkins unceremoniously dumped in the “bonfire of bills” before the last election in a vain attempt to get re-elected.
A new tax on rich pricks might win a few votes, but it is hardly the sort of bold, new vision for the country that’s going to see them back in power in 2026. It is also exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a desperate Labour Party. And it took the government all of 30 seconds to point this out. Using an obviously prepared media attack line, Finance Minister Nicola Willis accused Labour of being like a “bad boyfriend that says they’ll change but keeps on doing the same old stuff”, which made Willis sound like a bad girlfriend who thinks she’s funny but isn’t.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion History Prize: David Seymour.
The Emperor’s New Clothes For Economics: Nicola Willis. The Finance Minister talks a good game — even if she strangles every vowel to death as she does it — but it looks suspiciously like not a single decision she’s taken in her first year in office has done the economy any good at all.
The latest fiscal update, released this week, shows the economy is not just in the toilet but nearly around the U-bend. How much of that is the fault of the last Labour government, the pandemic, the world economy’s post-pandemic hangover, global inflation, cost of living crisis and high interest rates, etc, and how much of it is National’s fault for its austerity-like fiscal cutting, is really up to who you ask. But what we can definitely say is that Willis’s tax cuts with borrowed money, public sector cost-cutting, public service sackings, giant tax breaks for landlords and so on haven’t made a blind bit of difference to growing our tanked economy. Or at least not yet.
Things may well improve next year. Particularly now Willis is going to be more creative with her accounting. To make the government’s books look better in the future, she is introducing — against Treasury’s wishes, apparently — a new way of calculating the government’s operating balance before gains and losses. Nice work, Nicola. Why fix the economy when you can fix the books?
The Boris Johnson Medal For Being Loud, Boorish And Parading One’s Intellect: Shane Jones.
The Honorary Darwin Award For Attempting To Remove Itself From The Parliamentary Gene Pool: The Green Party. How many MPs did the tiny party lose this year? Three? Four? The good news is there are still 31 left on the party’s list who haven’t yet been called up, so the Greens should make it through to the 2026 election without running out of list MPs.
Political Miracle of the Year: The $604 million for 54 new drugs. Having pledged before the election to fund 13 new cancer drugs, National’s first proper budget completely ignored the promise while crying fiscal poverty.
Then after a hurricane of criticism and cyclone of anger, the government suddenly found $604 million over four years to fund not 13, but up to 54 new drugs through Pharmac, leaving the Good Lord Above mightily unimpressed with the Nats’ ability to perform miracles with other people’s money for the sake of political expediency.
RMS Titanic Memorial Prize For Ferry Procurement: Nicola Willis.
The Golden Greyhound’s Tail For Wagging The Dog: Winston Peters. After spending most of the year out of the country being Foreign Minister, Peters ended the year by sticking it to the Nats. The newly-minted Minister for Rail is somehow now in charge of sorting out the Cook Strait ferry procurement farce, and has won hearts and minds by finally ordering the releasing of greyhounds from racing. Love him or loathe him, he’s a cunning old dog.
The NZ Winegrowers’ Quote of the Year: “Take some wine and fuck off”. Almost no one outside of Parliament and his electorate had ever heard of National minister Andrew Bayly before October. Then, while at a Marlborough winery, where he called a worker a loser three times and told him to “take some wine and fuck off”, Bayly became the country’s most infamous failed insult comic. We’d say stick to the day job, Andrew, but wasn’t that what you were doing when you told that poor fellow to “take some wine and fuck off”?
The Philip Morris Lifetime Supply of Cigarettes For Services to Smoking Cessation: Casey Costello.
The Marie Antoinette Memorial Cake Stand For Catering: David Seymour. Having declared sushi “woke”, the Associate Education Minister and famous foodie was allowed to reconfigure the school lunches programme, a scheme he previously called wasteful public spending and had argued that the new government should cut.
The end result was the slashing of the cost of the kids’ lunches from $8.68 per student under the Labour government to just $3. He also, without any kind of tender process, handed the contract to provide those $3 lunches to a global conglomerate with a track record for poor quality and service. Publicity pictures of the new lunch offerings — some looked like someone had been sick into tinfoil trays — only added to the sense that the coalition and the Act Party in particular hate poor people. Children might be young. They might be growing. They might be vulnerable. They might even be the future. But in Seymour’s world that doesn’t mean the little bludgers deserve an extravagant $8.68 lunch on the taxpayer. As a punishment, Seymour should be forced to eat one of his $3 lunches, the one that looks like vomit, every day for the remainder of his time in office.
The Oranga Tamariki Crybaby Award For Making It All About Her: Karen Chhour.
The Prince Andrew Crown For An Outstanding Sense of Entitlement: Christopher Luxon. Despite living in his own mortgage-free Wellington flat and having a prime ministerial salary roughly 10 times more than average full-time salary in New Zealand, the Prime Minister still chose to start his time in office by claiming, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis no less, the up-to $52,000-a-year housing allowance available to prime ministers. His reason? It was an entitlement and he was entitled to it.
He eventually decided that despite it being an entitlement he was entitled to, he would no longer take the entitlement, even though he was entitled to it, and decided he would instead pay the entitlement back, which he did and was absolutely entitled to do. After which the taxpayer is entitled to ask “what the hell were you thinking?” In related entitlement news, Luxon later humbly bragged to a host on right-wing radio that he was financially “sorted”.
* Another Kind of Politics will return in late January with its predictions for the new political year.
