Hello. Are you still there? Of course you are. We’re all still here, stuck in this locked airless room with the stopped clock.
By the time you read this, somebody might have unlocked the door and fixed the clock. We may have a government. Or we may not. Who knows? If anybody does know, they’re staying schtum.
Even Act leader David Seymour, whose lips usually flap faster than a ventriloquist’s dummy – which, come to think of it, he rather resembles – appears to have sealed his own mouth with Super Glue. He has even forfeited having (yet another) swipe at New Zealand First leader Winston Peters. And there was one for the having.
After a day of evidence at the coronial inquest into the 2019 terrorist massacre of 51 people at Christchurch mosques, Peters posted a tweet stating the office of then prime minister Jacinda Ardern received an email of the terrorist’s manifesto minutes before the killings started and that she failed to share this information with the public – and with him. It took no time at all to establish, complete with TV footage, that Ardern had told the public about the email two days after the shootings.
Therein lay the opportunity, a nice juicy opportunity, for Seymour to unleash his inner chihuahua to take out the seat of Peters’ pinstriped suit. Ruff, ruff. Instead, nothing.
That glue Seymour used to keep his trap shut must be industrial strength because he and Peters have a long history of trash-talking each other. Seymour has called Peters a clown and a “charismatic crook”. Peters has called Seymour a politcal cuckold. And so grown-uply on.
Maybe Seymour’s dead. We know Peters certainly isn’t. He will never die. He’s the undead, as the election results proved. Peters, like Jesus before him, has risen again. As he foretold.
Mind you, Jesus didn’t stand on the mount tweeting his followers stuff that turned out to be tosh. Will Peters apologise? That is a rhetorical question. Like Donald Trump, Peters’ mantra is “never explain, never apologise”, so he dug in, further tweeting, “For those political apologists and feckless media, there is an existing transcript of a phone call made by the prime minister to the deputy prime minister at the vital time of a crisis when a terrorist had just massacred innocent people...” This finally revealed what it was actually all about; it was about him and some perceived slight.
Misinformation aside, it is surely at the very least bad taste to be attempting political point scoring when the circumstances of the murder of 51 people are being examined. Also, Ardern is gone, as is her government. So what, exactly, is the point?
Perhaps he, like the rest of us, is just bored with waiting; he has long said that he wouldn’t enter any coalition negotiations until the special votes were tallied, which they will have been by the time you read this.
Why, by the way, does counting the specials take so, so long? Are they sent from parts foreign by carrier pigeon? And counted on an abacus? There is a very boring reason: it takes so long because of all the checks and balances, like confirming eligibility to cast a special vote, getting the votes cast in other areas of New Zealand back to the correct electorate, getting votes cast overseas back to New Zealand and distributed.
Luxon’s non-answer
Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon also wimped out on addressing Peters’ quite unnecessarily provocative tweet. He gave one of his non-answers. Get used to it. We have at least three years of non-answers ahead of us.
Luxon said: “I wasn’t party to that. Obviously, there’s a coronial inquiry going on and I’m actually very interested to see what we can learn from that, given 51 people tragically lost their lives. I think that’s what’s appropriate, and so I don’t have anything further to say about it.”
Which is odd, isn’t it, because his party certainly had plenty to say about the last government having nothing further to say about things, about their lack of transparency. Perhaps Luxon is now discovering that openness, easily called for in opposition, is much harder to practise once you’re actually in power.
Meanwhile, he has moved his merry band of soon-to-be ministers to Auckland for pre-negotiation negotiation, not because the city of the long and winding traffic jam has better flat whites, but to get away from the annoying sticky beaks in the press gallery. He has nothing to say about whatever pre-negotiation negotiations he’s having with NZ First and Act who have also long banged on about the lack of transparency from Labour.
What can we deduce from the silence of Luxon and Seymour on Peters’ twerp tweeting? You don’t have to be a press gallery sticky beak to figure that out: both National and Act know they still may have to do a deal with Peters, who, on the basis of that tweet, is not in the best of moods.
We need a mole. Or a bug. Where are Richard Nixon’s Watergate buggers when you need them? Mostly dead, one imagines.
Tatts out
There was some news. Likely police minister Mark Mitchell announced that gang members may be forced to cover their tattoos with make-up if the Nats’ proposed ban on gang insignia isn’t adhered to (well, duh).
Applying make-up takes some practice. Just ask the Kardashians. Or any drag queen. Will the new government be providing make-up classes?
Perhaps gang members can also be made to wear frocks to cover their patches. Mind you, some of those gang jokers are rather big jokers. So the frocks would have to be plus-plus sized, like a muumuu. Gang members in make-up and muumuus. There’s an image that screams top-rating reality TV show. Where’s Julie Christie when you need her?
In a time of frustrating silence on what our new government might look like, silliness fills the void. So, too, the ancient practice of looking for omens – and those have not been encouraging, what with the death of a dream and the death of a tree.
The All Blacks did not win the Rugby World Cup. The nation wept. Blame was cast. Mostly on the ref, as is customary. Should the incoming government remove GST on therapist bills for the duration of the mourning after the All Blacks lose?
On top of that tragedy, Parliament’s sort-of-famous “roundabout” tree carked it. The oak was being moved to make way for new building work. It didn’t survive. It is now as dead as Labour’s hope of another term.
Do we have a government yet? Who knows? The longer it drags on, the harder it is to care. But it’s sad about the tree, isn’t it?
