The Minister for Everything, Paul Goldsmith, is being uncharacteristically, annoyingly and, quite possibly, deliberately boring. In other words he is being a minister. You would not put it past him to be playing at being a caricature of a minister. Just to be annoying. He is very good at being annoying – he enjoys it, you suspect. He manages to be boring and mischievous at the same time. He has a lively sense of fun.
Except when he’s being boring. For example – he gets only one otherwise we’ll all nod off – when asked about ambition, he says: “Well, I don’t know really what the right answer is to that. I’m ambitious for the country.”
He waffles on about how his goal was always to be a senior minister in a “government that makes a difference and improves the lives of New Zealanders”. A snorting sound may have been heard. Had he heard it, too? “Yes, I did. I wondered what that was.” It was accidentally made. “Of course.”
This is the point where I say, “Right. That’s it. I’ve had enough of the waffle.”
There are not too many senior ministers you could imagine saying this to. They’d take umbrage. You are supposed to take ministers seriously. They take themselves seriously and can go po-faced and pompous at the drop of a hat. They become sales people for their party. And he has always been what you might call obedient to a fault to his party.
But Goldsmith, try as he might, is unable to take himself too seriously. He just laughs with delight at me telling him to cut the waffle. He is innately good-natured, I think. I already knew this.
This is boring but if he’s going to be called the Minister for Everything, there had better be a list of his portfolios: he is Minister of Justice, Minister for State Owned Enterprises, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations and Minister for Media and Communications. I may have just out-bored him.
Is he the Minister for Everything? “Not at all, but I’ve got a reasonable variety of things to do, certainly. I’m not going to die of boredom.”
I was the one in danger of dying of boredom. That was a joke. Truly.
He likes jokes. I had one for him and it is that he might be said to be polygamous when it comes to portfolios. Is that funny? “Vaguely.” Well, it made me laugh. “That’s all that matters,” he said, hardly condescendingly at all. If his sense of humour was a cracker, it would be a crispbread.
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have fun from time to time,” he says. “And there are some politicians who take themselves too seriously. I wouldn’t put any names on that but there is a kind of piece of institutional advice out there, and that gets passed through the caucus, which is something along the lines of: take the job seriously but never take yourself too seriously. I think that’s a good motto to live by.”
He is said, by some, to be the funniest bloke in politics. Go on then. Say something funny. He treated this with the contempt it deserved. “Nothing springs to mind. Humour only arises in the moment. Parliament is a very rich source of sometimes the sublime and sometimes the ridiculous.”
He says the funniest person he has encountered in politics “in our generation” was John Key. “I was saving this for my memoir but, you know, I might never get around to it. The first time he spoke to me at caucus, when I was a newly elected MP, he came up behind me and said, as we were going out: ‘Goldsmith’.
“And I thought to myself: ‘the Prime Minister is talking to me. He’s going to give me a job to do. Maybe I should chair a select committee? Or he’s going to give me an important task.’ He says: ‘Goldsmith. Get out of the way. Can’t you see I’ve got a country to run?”
Celebrating failure
I interviewed Goldsmith in 2011 when he entered Parliament on the National Party list, after having tried and failed in 2005 and 2008. We were in a restaurant in Wellington. I ordered champagne. Then I asked what it was we were celebrating. He had won, and not won. He had just failed to win Epsom. Act’s John Banks took the seat. That was the plan all along. National had a deal with Act: Goldsmith would campaign for the party vote but not for himself. I ribbed him mercilessly – he called it goading – about this farce of a non-campaign over our dinner.
That’s all ancient history but I raise it again because, for one thing, it underlines his loyalty to the party. It also demonstrates that he has the stamina and strategy to play a long game. And also because it might annoy him. Two can play at that particular game.
I remind him that he said then that I was taking a “mocking” tone, but that he more than matched me in the mocking department. “Well, as the great philosopher Michael Jones, the rugby player, said, it is better to give than to receive.”
In and out of the doldrums
When, or if, he writes his memoir (he will, betcha), will he make judgments on his peers? Will there be any juicy gossip?
“Well, there may be some time for some reflection at some point. If I ever get around to writing one I’ll make sure it’s a good read, and that requires a little bit of entertainment.”
Actually, he likes writing about politicians, so I have the idea of getting him to write this so I don’t have to. Send me through an intro, I say. “I can’t be bothered. It’s Friday afternoon.” Lazy bugger.
In April, the Herald’s Audrey Young wrote that he must be “pinching himself. Three years ago he was in the political doldrums.” Asked if he was in the doldrums, he deflects and starts banging on about the National Party having been in the doldrums.
I wanted to know whether he had been in the doldrums. He had watched National PMs come and go, and in 2020, as National’s finance spokesman, he had made an error of $4 billion in the party’s fiscal plan. He called it then “an irritating mistake”. That’s one big ouchy mistake.
“That was tough going. But after a little period of eating wild honey and locusts, I’ve come back and under several niches to work away on. And that feels good.”
Since we spoke he is again in the naughty corner for telling seafood industry bosses Māori customary marine title would be reduced from 100% of the coastline to 5%. He told reporters he “came up with” the figure in the course of a conversation. He is not spectacularly spot on with figures.
He might have been, briefly, a bit left wing. “I studied history at the University of Auckland for six years and by the end of that I was a little bit, shall we say, confused. But it didn’t last long.” He has said he was “brainwashed” by a left-wing history department.
How does he know he’s not brainwashed now? “Ha, ha. Well, I think it’s good to always be challenging your assumptions and ideas. And one of the best ways to do that is to have four kids, like my wife and I have. They’ll always be quick to challenge you and point things out. I remember one of my girls when I tried to persuade her to post some pamphlets for me, campaign pamphlets saying all of the wonderful things we’re doing. She said, ‘You know, Dad, nobody reads them.’”
His kids are 23, 20, 17 and 14. They might be right-wingers. “I couldn’t answer for them on that front. They’re all independent thinkers. But I have no immediate fears for them when it comes to their political outlines.”
His wife, Melissa, might or might not be a Goldsmith supporter. “There’s been much debate about whether she would vote for me in Epsom. And I’ve never been crystal clear as to what she’s done there.”
He says some of his dearest and oldest friends are “raging lefties”. He doesn’t have any left-wing political mates. But he gets on well with Labour’s Willie Jackson. Jackson was incensed when Goldsmith removed all the te reo words from an invitation to an Australian MP to Matariki celebrations (Goldsmith said, ridiculously, that an Australian MP wouldn’t know that Aotearoa was New Zealand) and demanded an apology. Water off a minister’s back. Of Jackson he says: “He’s always slightly overblown in his rhetoric and so sometimes you have to take a grain or two of salt with whatever he says.”
Peculiar friends
He won’t own up to having political enemies. “Politics is something that creates enemies without having to work for it. So I don’t go out of my way to create any of my own.”
Ask him if there are any politicians he dislikes and he says, in his annoyingly measured way: “I think you’ve got to admire anybody who’s prepared to stick their head above the parapet and get into it.”
Unless those sticking their head above the parapet are that last Labour lot, about whom he had much to say, none of it, predictably, flattering. So I’m not going to let him bang on about them here. He should have taken up the offer to write his own profile. If he had, and hence got to write his own hagiography, how would he portray himself? “As a hard-working family man.” That memoir is going to be a riveting read.
He is too careful to indulge in overblown rhetoric, more’s the pity. He is also too clever. He is cultured and well read. He likes Hilary Mantel and Charlotte Grimshaw. He plays the piano very well. He has a black belt in taekwondo, which might not count as culture.
He likes peculiar people. He gets on well with David Seymour. He kind of has to, doesn’t he? He wrote the biographies of Don Brash and John Banks. Journalist Nicky Hager said of the Brash bio that it was commissioned by the National Party. Goldsmith said it wasn’t. He now says “Nicky Hager” in a tone that suggests he’s just stepped in dog shit. Was it commissioned by National? “Not necessarily. They were probably Act members, most of them.”
Asked whether he liked Don Brash, he pauses and says, “Aah. Yeees.” Brash is peculiar. “I think he’d admit that he was peculiar.”
John Banks is “a dear friend”. Now he’s definitely peculiar. “Yes. And I think he’d admit it as well. That could be said of you, and me.”
From him, that is presumably some sort of strange compliment. In what ways is he peculiar? “To adopt a political lifestyle, you have to be … it’s kind of slightly unusual and relentless. So it takes a particular type. You’re constantly launching into rooms of people you don’t know and then sort of striking up conversations for hours. And it requires a particular personality, really.”
Which is what, exactly? “Well, you’ve got to be reasonably outgoing. There’s a constant sort of tension between being very attuned to what other people think of you, which you have to be anyway to be successful as a politician. But at the same time you have to compartmentalise it because if you got too concerned about what everybody thought about you, including what you read on Twitter [now X], you’d never get out of bed in the morning. So, you have to have an ability to cope with these things at the same time.”
He says he thinks his public profile “comes and goes, comes and goes. I’m just a toiler in the field doing my bit for the party and the country.”
He really should have earnt another, very loud snort for that particular bit of flannel.
Despite marks off for the waffle, and this is the really annoying thing about him, it is impossible not to enjoy him. Should you be partial to enjoying a crispbread cracker.
