Did Princess Anne somehow secretly slip into the country last week to attend Auckland’s Diwali Festival? Patently, that’s a preposterous notion; she was likely opening a hospital or feeding her horses. Still, you could be forgiven for thinking Her Royal Highness was in attendance given a voice at least as booming as hers was heard encouraging a member of the media to “naff off”. Anne, rather famously, said exactly this to a hack pack after falling off her high horse at the Badminton Horse Trials in 1982.
This naffer-offer was no haughty royal but our haughty new “kingmaker”, the leader of New Zealand First, Winston Peters, who was attending the Festival of Light, though by his mien he may as well have been attending the Festival of Darkness. He wandered through the crowds and passed reporters looking as if he had a thundercloud looming above his head, like a big, black grudge.
No one collects grievances like Peters. He has the memory of a particularly ill-tempered elephant when it comes to a slight.
This time he had the huff with a Sunday Star-Times reporter: “Listen, sunshine, you didn’t want to know what I was saying before the election, now you want me to tell you after,” he said. Before delivering the knock-out, “naff off”.
Peters even manages to make sunshine sound like a synonym for nincompoop, moron, or something much ruder, which was certainly the intent. Whatever the reporter’s sin was – failing to bow, perhaps –Peters said, “I’m never going to forget that sort of crap.”
There is much speculation in Wellington that what Peters wants – and what he will be offered once more, as he was under Labour in 2005 and 2017 – is the plum job of Minister of Foreign Affairs. This would make Mr Naff Off – one of our least diplomatic politicians – our country’s most senior diplomat once again.
Of course, Mr Naff Off is also a chameleon, who can cleverly conceal his temper and his grudges when he wants to. He is a lizard who can poke out his tongue at you one second, and in the next, flash that famously charismatic smile to charm the pants off you.
Behind closed doors
Righty ho. Here we are, cracking on. We know this because Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon told us so. “We’ll crack on,” he said valiantly, and with a bravado he’s almost certainly faking.
Actually, you almost feel sorry for Luxon and Act’s leader, David Seymour, having to cobble together a coalition with the ill-tempered elephant.
We have, as yet, no actual idea about what Peters wants or what he’s being offered because we, being mere subjects, have been told we can naff off until the deal is done.
Seymour, not Luxon, has the roughest deal. Before the special votes were counted, he was like a woman who suspected her boyfriend might two-time her. Now, she knows he’s not only two-timing her, she’s ended up in a ménage à trois. As Princess Diana once said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Peters has long said he wouldn’t be talking to either Act or National until those pesky special votes were back. Now they’re back, he’s back – but has he talked to Seymour about the ménage yet? Seymour has said, “The door’s open …” But for what?
It is almost impossible to imagine Seymour and Peters being civil to each other; their mutual loathing is palpable. Can you be civil through clenched teeth? Should they be patted down for duelling pistols when they finally meet?
The final voting tally saw the Nats become even more of a minority government, falling two seats to 48, while Labour’s disaster got worse with Te Pāti Māori flipping two more Māori seats. The Greens, already with the most MPs they’ve ever had in Parliament, picked up another seat. There is still one more seat to be added to Parliament – likely going to National – with the Port Waikato by-election on November 25 as a result of the death of Act candidate Neil Christensen. So now we can look forward to cracking on. Not so fast. Labour’s Peeni Henare lost Tāmaki Makaurau to Te Pāti Māori’s Takutai Tarsh Kemp by a mere four votes. A recount is likely.
Meanwhile, in the seat of Mt Deluded, otherwise known as Mt Albert, Labour’s Helen White reckoned she “didn’t do badly, I did really, really well”. By what metric she was measuring this was unclear because she barely won (by 20 votes) a seat held by Labour since Roman times.
The party vote in Mt Deluded swung like a wrecking ball against her party, too, with National the chief beneficiary of the collapse in Labour support. Perhaps White misspoke. She meant to say she “didn’t do well, I did really, really badly at maths”. The National candidate, list MP Melissa Lee, wants a recount.
Will Peters use the recounts to spin out coalition negotiations? Well, the odds of having a government anytime soon are looking as likely as Gerry Brownlee coming down your chimney on Christmas Eve bearing bon homie and mince tarts.
Here’s some other maths. Ninety-four per cent of New Zealanders didn’t vote for Peters. Who cares? Not him, no doubt. He’s back, therefore he won. The 94% can naff off. And history says he will take what he can, lord it over the rest of us, and then find himself rejected by voters next election.
Or maybe not. He really is a political peculiarity, an anomaly, a miracle of reinvention. He is, in spite of repeated political deaths, like a Buddhist who, after a lifetime of mischief-making, should be destined to come back as a mosquito, but somehow still manages to be reincarnated as a kingmaker over and over again. It makes you think the universe doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.
Bitter harvest
Surprise! The old leader of the Labour Party, Chris Hipkins, is the new leader of the Labour Party. Only a candidate for the loony bin would have challenged him for that position right now. However, there is a new deputy. Carmel Sepuloni takes over from Kelvin Davis, who lost his Te Tai Tokerau seat to Te Pāti Māori’s Mariameno Kapa-Kingi but remains a List MP.
Borrowing a pistol from Peters’ holster, the reappointed Hipkins shot from the hip: “We know that many of the seeds of our defeat were sown well before we became leaders.”
Was that a final naff off to the former-former prime minister, formerly known as St Jacinda?
