Opinion: Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Let’s all play Whac-A-Mole. Do we have any choice? Nope. You can’t go anywhere at the moment without a pesky policy mole popping out of its hole to offer you stuff, only for it to be whacked down by a rival mole popping up from its hole. National would spend $24.8 billion over 10 years on its transport plan. Whack goes Labour, saying its costings are, er, out of whack.
Up pops the Labour mole and – thwack! – GST will come off fruit and veges. Then it pops back up and adds more tax on fuel. This is known among moles as a self-whacking.
National then joined it with double whack. It said it will dump Labour’s policy of giving every citizen free prescriptions. Instead, free scripts will go only to those on low incomes or the pension. With the savings, National would fund 13 cancer drugs currently available in Australia but not here. The scrapping of the free-for-all prescriptions – saving an estimated $316 million over four years – would fund the required $280m for the cancer drugs over four years.
It’s quite canny. It looks good. Who wouldn’t want people with cancer to have access to better treatment? The catch: the new drugs would treat about 1000 people a year, which is hardly up there with Jesus and his miracle of the loaves and fishes. But if you are unlucky enough to get lung, bowel, kidney, melanoma, or head and neck cancer, you’d be grateful for any chance at a slice of a loaf or a fillet of fish, wouldn’t you?
Labour’s prescription plan is for all five million of us, should the entire country get crook and need some pills.
This is as much an ethical dilemma as it is a medical one. Free medicine for the masses versus specialised medicine for a few? What would Jesus do?
Grumpy faced
Parents used to say to their kids: “If you’re not careful, the wind will change and you’ll be stuck with that face forever.” Finance Minister Grant Robertson, formerly a genial gent, has definitely gone all grumpy-faced. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is looking ever more like a chap in a panic. National’s deputy leader, Nicola Willis, is doing her best not to look super-smug-faced while she’s dealing out the whacks to Labour. She is a gifted disciplinarian. She has the geniality of a kindly but strict schoolmarm who really, really doesn’t want to give you the strap. But, spare the rod and spoil the child.
None of these looks are good looks. They’d all better hope the wind doesn’t change.
But here’s the real whack: Labour’s polling. The latest 1News-Verian poll thwacked Labour with its worst result in six years and showed National and Act have more than enough support to govern. The headlines are calling Hipkins “Mr 29 per cent”.
Getting thwacked in the polls hurts. So, ouch. No wonder they’re all looking so cross. They’re not the only ones. The electorate, admitted Mr 29 per cent, was “a bit grumpy” with the government, too.
Some advice: beware of grumps and moles and, if you are the PM, polls. They are all pests.
Blowing in the wind
It’s an election year. Which is the time politicians go a bit crazy. They’re like cats in the wind. Cats go mental in the wind.
There must have been a stiff breeze blowing through Act leader David Seymour’s office last week. How else to explain his flight of fancy about a plot involving gunpowder and the Ministry for Pacific Peoples?
“In my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in there and it’d be all over …,” he told a radio programme.
Was he thinking: “It’s election year, so let’s have some fun? Let’s blow some stuff up”? To be clear, he wasn’t talking about blowing anything up himself. He meant some other guy, or Guy. Also, he was joking. This should have been obvious to all right-thinking people. Why is it funny? he was asked on 1News. “People are enormously frustrated about government waste … sometimes it’s a bit of fun to say if only it would all just go away. If only we could get Guy Fawkes to blow it all up.” Yep. Kaboom. Not his best joke. He was really sticking a rocket in a beer bottle and aiming it at those woke sissy Lefties. He’s a pretty good shot. But he’s not as funny as he thinks he is.
Partly, Seymour’s gripe is that, earlier in the month, the Ministry for Pacific Peoples was chastised by the Public Service Commission for throwing a farewell party last October for its outgoing head, Leauanae Laulu Mac Leauanae, at a cost of nearly 40 grand. That figure included $7500 for gifts. One of the gifts was a $225.49 box of corned beef.
Gift-giving, called fa’alavelave in Samoa, is a fraught ritual in modern-day Polynesian culture. It costs a lot and it is intricately entwined with face, or loss of it. In Polynesia’s hierarchical societies, the rewards flow to the prestigious and wealthy. Which sounds like societies everywhere, doesn’t it? A box of corned beef might be the equivalent of a pretty cheap gold-plated watch. Leauanae has since paid back the $7500 and returned all cultural gifts.
The commission undertook a full review of ministry spending on Leauanae’s farewell bash. It might be fun to lodge an Official Information Act request for the cost of former PMs John Key and Jacinda Ardern’s farewell dos as well. We’d love to know what was on their gift lists. Perhaps a collectible mid-century coffee table for Jacinda? A pair of designer golfing shoes for John?
A win for te reo
Te Ringa Mangu (Dun) Mihaka, the political protester and advocate for the rights of Māori and for the restoration of a dying-out te reo, has died, aged 81. He might have been regarded as a pest. He is possibly most famous for a protest in front of the then Prince Charles and a presumably blushing Shy Di when the couple visited in 1983. He performed a down-trou or a whakapohane, a word that briefly entered the national vocabulary. This was a win for te reo. It was also pretty funny. For some, presumably primeval reason one doesn’t want to delve into too deeply, naked bums are always funny. Unless, perhaps, you are a future king.
But Mihaka ought to be lauded for more than a bare bottom. In 1979, he took a case to the Court of Appeal demanding Māori be allowed to be spoken in our courts. He lost the case. But his fight eventually led to te reo being made an official language of New Zealand. People get gongs for their efforts to save the kiwi. Mihaka was a primary influence in the saving of another endangered species, the language. That’s a pretty significant whack to be remembered for.
