Temper, temper. If we thought the over-long election campaign and the interminable wait for a coalition deal were crotchety, crabby affairs, the aftermath seems to be shaping up like a bar room brawl. It’s been only a week or so since the coalition was finally formed, but already wild punches and wilder insults are being thrown about. Has there been an outbreak of canine distemper inside the beltway?
Te Pāti Māori is always up for a scrap. Even before the State Opening of Parliament last Wednesday, Te Pāti Rumble had its troops out in the streets for protests that were originally called “Don’t Fuck With Our Whakapapa” but were renamed “National Māori Action Day”, which sounds more like one of those annoying public health calls to get a bit more exercise.
What was this action day all about? There was no use asking Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. When first queried about what the protest might be in aid of, he had no idea. When he finally did know what was going on – something to do with “state-sponsored terrorism”, according to Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer – he sounded like some sort of libtard, calling the protests “unfair”.
Meanwhile, on the morning of the nationwide protest, tempers flared on TVNZ 1′s Breakfast show. Sitting next to each other, and looking like they wanted to whack the other with a mere, NZ First deputy leader Shane Jones and Ngarewa-Packer fought it out for the heavyweight championship of grumpy. Jones, who lives out his political life as though he’s perpetually in a Shakespearean production, called the protests “theatre” and accused Te Pāti Māori of trading in “victimhood”. Ngarewa-Packer called Jones a “dinosaur”.
She was already aggro about the new coalition’s reversal of parts of Labour’s Smokefree legislation, calling it “systemic genocide”. Is there any other kind of genocide? Jones then called Ngarewa-Packer an “insidious native parrot”. Squawk went the parrot. We don’t know what sound a grouchy dinosaur makes; Grrr, perhaps.
It does make you wonder, in a fight between a demented native parrot and a dinosaur, which would win? Depends on which sort of dinosaur, one imagines. But is Jones a Microraptor or a T-Rex?
During the swearing-in of MPs the day before the state opening, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi appeared theatrically wearing a traditional headdress.He wielded an actual mere. Are you allowed weapons in the House? Apparently only if they’re traditional.
Te Pāti Māori swore allegiance to Kingi Harehare. This can mean either “Charles” or “skin rash”.
More temper, temper had earlier come from former broadcaster Andrew “Hey, Hey, It’s Andy” Shaw, a board member of NZ on Air. Also angry about the smoking thing, he got stuck into Winston Peters, the suspected author of the change. “He’s not truthful. He’s not accurate. He’s malicious and he is here on behalf of international tobacco. His return is the worst of this gang of thugs.” Shaw then resigned, presumably in a huff.
Meanwhile, with Parliament then yet to sit, celebrated businessman Sir Ian Taylor announced he was already angry that he voted National. In a column for Stuff, he said he was so grumpy about the government’s first week he had resigned from two boards, Mike King’s I Am Hope/Gumboot Friday and the New Zealand Product Accelerator, an advisory board that sounds like something mistranslated from another language.
Taylor’s harrumphing was all Peters’ fault. “What we are seeing,” Taylor wrote, “is a disproportionate amount of power given to someone who has 8 seats out of a total of 123!” It is not quite clear what undue influence Peters has on Gumboot Friday, but it is clear that Taylor is in a major stink about the coalition government.
Ashtrays and abacuses
‘Tis the season for giving, or misgivings. And somebody, probably Big Tobacco, really should buy Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis big ashtrays. Since announcing the coalition would ditch the ban on selling cigarettes to those born after 2008, Luxon has spent his time casting about for reasons why it was a good idea, other than a revenue-raising exercise. Apparently, it’s some sort of crime-reduction strategy to curtail ram raids and black marketers.
Another of Luxon’s reasons was that smokes might be hard to find for those still able to buy them. In Northland, he claimed, the legislation would mean only one outlet for ciggies, which could have led to it being a target for crime. Actually, he later admitted, there would be 35 outlets. Oops. Somebody buy Luxon and Willis an abacus each for Christmas.
Meanwhile, Willis admitted that the stubbing out of the anti-smoking initiatives would help fund the promised tax cuts in lieu of the promised revenue from the now-also-stubbed-out foreign buyers tax – consigned to the ashtray by NZ First’s coalition agreement conditions. No wonder some wits were dubbing her “Nicotine Willis”, and Health Minister Shane Reti “Shane Cigareti”.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Luxon remains “deeply committed” to reducing fagging in New Zealand, but then he is deeply committed to many things. Mostly, it seems, scrubbing, axing and mothballing six years of Labour policies and legislation in the coalition’s first 100 days. Cancel culture is no myth. For the National-led coalition, it’s policy.
Sock it to them
What do you want for Christmas? Thanks to the cost of living, high inflation and higher interest rates, much of the country has spent the past three years trying to make ends meet, so most of us would likely settle for a nice pair of socks. Instead, we’ll all be getting a “mini budget”.
We almost certainly know what we won’t find in Willis’s mini stocking on Christmas morning: National’s much-promised but now not-fully-funded tax cuts, though this isn’t the fault of National or its coalition partners.
Last week, Willis set about shifting the blame for this to the former finance minister, Labour’s Grant Robertson, who had left her with a bunch of “fiscal cliffs” – apparently not a bunch of Treasury economists called Cliff, but a whole lot of budget holes Willis says she now has to deal with.
It looks like our modest dream of socks for Christmas might turn out to be one sock too far.
