Scrutiny Week. It sounds like something Chairman Mao might have cooked up. It has the vibe of political wrong-uns being dragged in front of a baying crowd to be accused of something counter-revolutionary then hanged for the encouragement of the others.
As it turned out, our Parliament’s first Scrutiny Week was less Cultural Revolution-bloodbath and more the same old faces flogging the same old excuses in the same old rooms.
Dreamt up by Parliament’s standing orders committee during its last three-yearly review of how the House goes about its business, these so-called Scrutiny Weeks (there will be two a year) are intended to be high-pressure select committees in which MPs can metaphorically hold ministers’ and officials’ feet to the fire and make them explain what it is they’re spending our tax dollars on and why.
It sounds like the sort of “criticism” session the Great Helmsman would have approved of, though sadly, he’d have thought, without the actual holding of feet to the fire.
In actuality, the first Scrutiny Week seemed to be business as usual with ministers deploying their traditional array of tactics when faced with tricky questions — claptrap, ambiguity and blaming someone else.
When asked at the health select committee to explain his monumental failure to deliver on an election promise of 13 new cancer drugs from July, Health Minister Shane Reti opted for claptrap, saying it was all just a communication problem. He claimed he and his Oompa Loompas had been working on this promise all along behind the scenes only to discover — shock, horror! — they couldn’t deliver it by July, and then failed -- oops! -- to tell everyone in the Budget.
“I take responsibility for the communication,” Reti said. “We should have done a better job with that and given patients some sense of direction and sense of hope and time frame.”
Nice try, Shane. It wasn’t the communication, or lack of it, you buggered up. It was your signal failure to deliver what you’d explicitly promised to an already vulnerable group of New Zealanders.
And the reason for his failure? Reti argued it wasn’t until he had access to the “tools of government” that he realised that the delivering was going to be a bit more complicated than the promising, which is like saying he’d only realised heart surgery was tricky after he’d opened up the patient.
And what part of the well-established and well-understood Pharmac model for selecting and buying drugs was a mystery to Reti, a medical doctor, before the election? Despite the Scrutiny Week scrutiny, we don’t know, but he did have the chutzpah to make another promise: the drugs will be delivered “soon”. How soon is “soon”? We’ll find out “soon”.
Meanwhile over at the social service and community select committee, that over-exercised word was also getting an outing. Despite the announcements of Newshub’s closure and TVNZ’s programme cuts coming months ago -- and notwithstanding the PM sacking Melissa Lee for her performance as media minister -- the only thing the new Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith would say about plans for media assistance is that he’d announce something “soon”. It is unclear whether “soon” means before our local media dies out altogether, or after.
Then there is the Conservation Minister who doesn’t seem to understand what conservation means. National’s Tama Potaka told the environment committee that saving all New Zealand species from extinction was a “very aspirational and ambitious objective” and might cost a lot of money, leading to the conundrum of what to call a Conservation Minister who thinks conservation is just another word for a sinking-lid policy.
So much for Scrutiny Week, then. It was no great leap forward. More one step forward, two steps back, shouldn’t we give them all the sack?
Release the hounds!
And now from the file marked “Weird Shit Only Winston Peters Would Say”, comes this: “Dogs love racing. Watch them in the wild. Just like horses. Three o’clock in the morning, everybody’s quiet and they’re out there having a race in the paddock.”
Peters, who is Minister for Racing, said this at another Scrutiny Week select committee meeting when asked about the dubious practice of racing dogs so that humans get to bet on them.
A few questions: Where does one find “wild dogs” in these parts? Are “wild dogs” actually what everyone else calls stray dogs?
If no one is around, how do we know horses are having these secret races in the early hours of the morning? Does Winston bet on these, too, and if so, how?
Finally, what have horses running about in the middle of the night got to do with whether the greyhound racing industry, which numerous reports have repeatedly condemned, should be shut down or not?
Never mind the bollocks, here’s Jacinda
For those still hankering for the halcyon days when Saint Jacinda of Aotearoa was in-charge, rest assured that Ardern’s post-parliamentary career in pointless virtual signalling is still going strong.
In a social media post this week she shared “a wee project” she’s been working on, something called “Field”.
This isn’t, as you might imagine from its name, a project involving the re-wilding of a cow paddock in Taranaki or a footy ground in Te Kūiti, but is a “12-month programme that supports and connects global political leaders who embody political leadership that draws on the strength of kindness and empathy”. So, not involving Putin and Netanyahu, then.
Field will create a network of “like-minded political leaders” who “want to unite, rather than divide”, which is an ironic “wee” project for Ardern, who, towards the end of her premiership, arguably became the most divisive leader this country had seen since Muldoon.
In any case, Field is “all part of my ongoing mission to help rehumanise leadership, and just be useful!” Gawd help us.
Meanwhile another former Labour prime minister, the rather more politically substantial Helen Clark, has just co-authored an important report for the World Health Organisation arguing lessons have not been learnt from the Covid and Ebola pandemics, and has told world leaders they are “gambling with their children’s and grandchildren’s health and wellbeing” by failing to prepare for a future pandemic.
Now, that is being useful.
Flightless kiwis
If the Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher “C-List” Luxon, has anything to show from his trip to Japan apart from social media posts, it has to be a big red-face.
The almost-too-predictable breakdown of the Royal New Zealand Air Force 757 tasked with carting him and a bunch of business leaders and journalists to Japan was yet another black eye for New Zealand, though, helpfully, a plane that won’t take off serves as a useful metaphor for the popularity of Luxon’s government in its first six months.
Predictably, too, there has been more talk about replacing the Air Force’s two crappy 757s sooner rather than later, though, predictably again, the government remains reluctant to be seen spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars on something that only the likes of Luxon can use.
No worries. Here at Another Kind of Politics, we’re about solutions, not problems. And the solution to the 757 crisis is what those of us who have owned our share of clapped-out cars call an “insurance job”.
Fly the 757s to the Aussie Outback and set fire to them, abandon them at some airport in Haiti, crash them into something in Uzbekistan … It doesn’t matter as long as we write them off, then we can claim the insurance money and buy a couple of smart new ones. Problem solved.
In the meantime, the next time Luxon needs to travel abroad to tell a world leader what they presumably already know — that New Zealand is “open for business” — we suggest he talk to his mate Peter Beck. Nothing says “open for business” like arriving strapped to a missile made by Rocket Lab.
