OPINION:
Nicola Willis puts the kibosh on mischievous suggestions that she and her party leader are anything but happy together.
That faint, far-off rumbling you can hear is Wellington’s rumour mill grinding away gleefully as usual. This mill puts you in mind of those pretend telephones primary-school kids would cobble together with tin cans and bits of string. They were used to pass on rumours. That, say, your teacher, Miss Tweed-Taylor, and the headmaster, Mr Brown-Corduroy Trousers, had been spotted up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Or that she was plotting to toss him out of said tree. When confronted with this salacious rumour, Miss Tweed-Taylor crisply responded: “I am not going to indulge this.”
National’s deputy leader, Nicola Willis, gave short shrift to questions about plots to toss her headmaster out of the tree. Had Auckland business figures approached her with concerns about whether her boss, Christopher Luxon, was the right chap to lead the Nats in the Charge of the Right Brigade? Was she going to roll him? She shut this down decisively, cutting the string between the tin cans with an, “I am not going to indulge this.
“There’s no basis to the idea that I want to do anything other than work with Chris Luxon to make him prime minister,” Willis said. She has no intention of pushing Luxon out of the tree. She’s quite formidable, though. You’d be ill-advised to go up a tree with her just in case she had a pruning saw secreted about her person.
It is fairly widely held that this bit of mischief has been stirred up by the Prime Minister, Chris “Sausage Roll” Hipkins. He does have a barely concealed air of boyish mischief about him. He, like protagonist William in Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, doesn’t seem to mind causing a bit of bovver. And you can quite easily imagine the PM’s pockets are used to store odds and sods that might come in handy: a fistful of marbles, a gob-stopper, a slingshot and perhaps a pruning saw.
There is the idea that being the Leader of the Opposition is the worst job in politics. It isn’t. The worst job in politics is being the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. You are either one of those nodding dogs riding smilingly in the rear of the car, or you’re a scheming plotter intent on rolling the top dog.
Unless you are in New Zealand First. You suspect that Winston Peters has perfected a form of thought control that prevents anyone from even dreaming of toppling him. In the unlikely event that you somehow managed to have that thought, you’d be given the order of the boot faster than you could say shark in a sharp suit.
He has been ominously quiet lately. A quiet Winston is a dangerous Winston. Like the shark in Jaws, the water might look still but you know he’s lurking out there somewhere waiting to bite your head off.
Little unusual
Andrew Little, the former Labour leader, former minister of health and now Minister of Defence, among other things, seems to have gone a bit colourful, or … something. He posted a completely dotty video on Twitter recently. It was Pink Shirt Day, which is designed to raise awareness of bullying. Little’s video showed him wearing a bright pink jumper while doing strange things at Parliament: inspecting what appear to be MPs’ postboxes, posing in the chamber, going down in Parliament’s antiquated lift. That last scene might have been ill-advised: surely he should have been ascending?
Perhaps the images were artificially created. National has been accused of using artificial intelligence to create creepy images for its attack ads, spoofs of The Fast & Furious films, starring Luxon aka Vin Diesel. Luxon said: “I have modelled my look on Vin Diesel.” Which passes for a joke, presumably. Less a joke than a nonsense was his response to the alleged use of AI: “I don’t know about the topic in the sense of I am not sure. You are making an accusation that we are using it, I am not sure that we are.”
Could he be in danger of being replaced by Vin Diesel, a politico bot, or Nicola Willis?
Sweet pill
The Budget has been and gone and, as always, the government was very happy with it and the opposition very unhappy. No doubt someone who will be happy with its free-prescription part will be the old man seen recently at a pharmacy in Masterton. He was charged for his scripts and he said he’d never had such a big fee – more than $50. His eligibility for the high-use subsidy had run out with the start of the year. He didn’t have enough money to pay. People are kinder in small towns. He could pay later, said the pharmacist. But could he?
Arena Williams, the Labour MP for Manurewa, posted this on Twitter: “The $5 prescription fee was charged per item, so my dad pays around $50 a month for medicine … Scrapping the fee means he’ll never choose between heating his bedroom and his health.”
To which Nat-for-life Judith Collins responded: “Seriously? Arena, be a good daughter and help out your dad. You can afford to.”
Seriously? Arena be a good daughter, and help out your Dad. You can afford to. https://t.co/1bgpKHxdBE
— Judith Collins (@JudithCollinsMP) May 19, 2023
She has a point. But not everyone who can’t afford to pay for their medicines has a somebody in their lives who can afford to help them out.
There is also the not-inconsequential matter of pride.
Of course, people who can afford to pay should pay. But that would involve means-testing, which would be another cost. Perhaps it might be made voluntary. If nothing else, it would be an interesting social experiment: to see how many people who can easily afford to pay will actually pay.
Willis, who at least has the grace to put her hand up when she gets things wrong, has said she regrets the way she “communicated” that National would repeal the free access to scripts. It was a “nice to have”, she had said, not a priority. It looked mean.
“I do regret the way that I communicated that, because I think that we are really clear that we don’t want the prescription charge to be a barrier to anyone being able to access medicine … "
How have we ended up with an old man in a pharmacy who can’t pay for his pills and no doubt felt humiliation and panic? How have we ended up a country where a fire in what once would have been called a dosshouse killed at least five people? There was no sprinkler system. This ought to be illegal.
Even the name, Loafers Lodge, is an insult. Being indigent and sneered at for a perception that you have somehow failed in the crapshoot that is life, thus becoming mostly invisible, being hungry, cold and worried about a bleak future ... that doesn’t leave much time for loafing. Being poor is the hardest of work.
In the penultimate episode of Succession, while delivering a guerrilla eulogy for his brother Logan, Ewan Roy said of the late media mogul that he was a man who had “closed men’s hearts. Fed that dark flame in men … that keeps their heart warm while another grows cold. Their grain stashed while another goes hungry … he was mean. And he fed a mean meagreness in men.”
Let’s not be mean, or meagre, eh?
