Election 2023: Beehive Diaries - a win for Winston Peters, Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon square off for Chris of the Week and a gunfight at the Fiscal Plan Corral
Chris Luxon in Te Puke with a kiwifruit that looks a bit like an orange light. Photo / Mike Scott
Chris Luxon in Te Puke with a kiwifruit that looks a bit like an orange light. Photo / Mike Scott
Where’s Winston?
It’s always nice to get reader feedback, and this week that came from avid Beehive Diaries reader, NZ First leader Winston Peters.
Winston Peters with his favourite read of the week, the Beehive Diaries. Photo / Dan Hutchinson
Peters held up a copy of the Herald on Sunday’sBeehive Diaries at a public meeting in Taupō, taking umbrage that the strip of caricatures ofparty leaders at the top of it did not include him. Poor Winston.
Peters has well and truly parachuted back into the picture now that National leader Chris Luxon has said he would pick up the phone to him, so we picked up the phone to cartoonist Rod Emmerson to rectify matters.
It’s nice to know Peters cares – he has alternated between berating the media at his public meetings for not covering him enough while simultaneously rebuffing requests for campaign coverage, telling the media he doesn’t need them anyway.
Luxon in the orange light district
Oh the irony. On Tuesday, Luxon set out National’s new traffic lights policy for beneficiaries: a three-strikes system of sanctions for those who failed to turn up for training courses or job interviews. Green is for those who turn up, orange is for those who miss a few, and red is for repeat no-shows – and comes with penalties.
On Wednesday, Luxon didn’t turn up for his interview with Kerre Woodham on Newstalk ZB. Instead he’d gone to watch the Big Reveal of the National Party bus. Pretty sure blaming a bus schedule – especially one that you’d set - wouldn’t cut the mustard as an excuse for a beneficiary missing an interview.
That’s the orange light for you, Luxon.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon with his bus instead of Kerre Woodham. Photo / Michael Neilson
Chris of the Week:
Nobody who starts the week on the orange light can win Chris of the Week, so it goes to Chris Hipkins.
Hipkins is still falling in the polls, but he’s still fighting: taking it to Luxon in the televised Newshub debate on Wednesday and bamboozling him with a NZ First candidate’s comments.
Grant Robertson warms up his fighter in the red corner, massaging Chris Hipkins' shoulders ahead of the leaders' debate. Photo / Dean Purcell
He also gets points for putting out Labour’s fiscal plan on Wednesday - before that debate - instead of waiting for a sleepy Friday.
Luxon, meanwhile, had to start his week by admitting Winston Peters was now more than a hypothetical situation and he might need his votes to form a government – potentially giving the old tusker a further boost in the polls, and giving Luxon weeks of questions about Peters instead of his own policies.
Fiscalicious: Blessed be the economists
It was the week of fiscal plans – although the Greens had to put their one on hold until Sunday after Labour’s finance spokesman Grant Robertson scuttled their big reveal by holding a press conference at the same time to respond to National’s fiscal plan.
Thoughts and prayers go to the economists, putting their credibility on the line by signing off on the various fiscal plans: an exercise that can be fraught.
The best fiscal-related quote was from Hipkins to Grant Robertson: “You’re the only person I’ve heard use cost pressures and sexy stuff in the same sentence.”
Negative Nellies:
Politicians are bickering about who is running the more negative campaign. National is slating Labour for misrepresentation of National’s policies, and Labour is accusing National of spreading doom and gloom about the nation by talking down the economy. Meanwhile, Winston Peters is accusing Labour’s Chris Hipkins of a “dirt campaign” for reading out a quote by NZ First candidates in the Newshub leaders’ debate, and Hipkins is accusing NZ First and Act of “race-baiting”.
But the most unusual line on this theme came from Labour’s Ginny Anderson, who on Wednesday morning accused Mark Mitchell of “scaring old ladies” up and down the country with his public meetings on crime.
In Beehive Diaries’ experience, it takes a fair bit to scare old ladies, so Mitchell must be very fearsome indeed.
