Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Thomas Coughlan
Thomas Coughlan, Political Editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people's stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
Minister Chris Bishop described a performance at the Aotearoa Music Awards as “crap”.
Musician Don McGlashan confronted Bishop at the time, telling him after his rant to “shut up”.
Two polls out this week showed conflicting results.
National Party frontbencher Chris Bishop never bought into the cliche that in politics “explaining is losing”.
Laudably, the minister is of the view that politicians can and should explain complicated topics to voters – and that attempting to do so isn’t always a losing trick.
Bishop gotthe chance to put this to the test this week after he put his foot in it at the Aotearoa Music Awards (AMA), criticising aspects of singer Stan Walker’s performance as “crap”.
But the affection is a one-sided affair. The music biz tends to skew to the green-red side of things. Musician Don McGlashan, who took umbrage at Bishop’s outburst, once told TVNZ he would rather “have sex with a very ugly crayfish” than hear the broadcaster use Anchor Me as a backing track for an item on the victory of John Key in 2008.
For whatever reason, it has not blunted Bishop’s passion for a local tune. It’s not so much a case of, to borrow a phrase, “don’t you love me any mo-ore?” as one of there being very little love between musicians and tories to begin with.
Bishop didn’t apologise for the outburst. Fair enough, taking a view on a work of art is not simply permissible, it’s sort of the point. The reaction to the spat from the awards organisers, in the form of a statement saying they were committed to providing a ”safe, respectful and inclusive environment”, was risible.
Somewhere between the Wigglesand The Rite of Spring, most people grow out of “safe” music. Describing a show as “crap” doesn’t really have much impact on anyone’s safety one way or another.
Cabinet minister Chris Bishop did not enjoy Stan Walker's performance. Photos / Getty Images / NZ Herald
Clark was right (the films are great, the books are better), and Bishop will hope his explanation that he should have kept his thoughts to himself will age just as well. And who knows, it may.
The real offence was not what he said, but the fact that he said it when and how he did made him look like a lout.
Bishop, living out the lyrics of Lydia, didn’t hold the grudge against the industry. He happily trotted along to Fur Patrol, who were performing a couple of days later. Good gig, apparently.
Of far greater importance to the Government will be the twin polls out this week, painting a confusing picture of the political landscape.
Both parties are subtly trying to claim their preferred poll as the one that is closest to reality. Christopher Luxon said he didn’t recognise the Reid numbers (code for, National’s internal polling looks like TVNZ’s), while Chris Hipkins said Labour’s internal polls are closer to RNZ’s.
The parties of Christopher Luxon and David Seymour both faced difficult polls. Photo / Mark Mitchell
We’ll see the next Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll soon. If Luxon is right, and Curia (which does National’s internals) is closer to TVNZ, then that poll may function as something of a tiebreaker.
But if Hipkins is correct, and the polling from Talbot Mills (which does Labour’s internals) is closer to Reid, then there’s a very good chance one of its polls will make it into the public domain in the not-too-distant future too.
The political landscape painted by these two polls is stark. If we’re living in the RNZ-Reid universe, the coalition has gambled its fortunes and lost by a whisker. If we’re living in the TVNZ-Verian universe, then the coalition has pulled off something rather remarkable. Between slashing pay equity moves and coming after KiwiSaver subsidies, Nicola Willis’ 2025 Budget is the least “retail” Budget we’ve had in a while.
These decisions may have been the right call. In two decades’ time we may praise the Budget for bringing forward productivity-enhancing investment and encouraging more domestic saving that ultimately grew the economy and shrank the wage gap with Australia.
At the moment, however, the Budget looks a lot like giving a big tax break to business paid for by squeezing women’s pay increases and punishing savers. Indeed, Talbot Mills’ polling published in the Herald last week shows voters are distinctly unimpressed by this Budget, thinking it to be bad for them, bad for the economy and bad overall – a rare hat-trick of negative reaction not seen since the poll began asking that question in 1996.
But to Bishop’s point, explaining might not be losing. An astonishing 39% of voters in the TVNZ-Verian poll side with the Government on the pay equity changes compared with 45% who opposed them. That’s still more people against the Government’s policy than in favour, but the fact that the number supporting the changes is so high for a policy that would normally whip up such strong opposition suggests the Government has paid minimal political price for what might have been a deeply unpopular policy.
The RNZ poll had the margin wider, with just 25.5% supporting the changes, but if you only poll people who say they understand the reforms, the level of support rises to 38.5% – still behind the number against the changes, but a high number nonetheless.
Considering how unpopular these changes might have been, the Government must feel like they, well, got away with it.
And what a prize: $12.8 billion in freed-up money, mostly spent on an adrenaline shot to the New Zealand economy, in the form of the Investment Boost tax credit.
Labour has pledged to find money to reverse the changes. Siphoning money from the $6.6b Investment Boost fund is a good place to start. It could put restrictions on the type of things that can be claimed for – a cap on very large investments, or carving out smaller ones like cars.
But freeing up serious cash to return it to pay equity funding raises its own problems. By 2026, the coalition can argue people’s jobs and rising wages are tied to investment that is contingent on Investment Boost staying. That would force Labour to explain why putting pressure on mainly private sector wages is a price worth paying to fund the claims of mainly publicly funded workers.
Making that argument won’t be easy.
Labour will be kicking itself that it didn’t exact a greater political price from the coalition over the changes. Hipkins has publicly questioned Te Pāti Māori’s self-absorbed battle with the Privileges Committee at a time when the Opposition’s focus might better have been directed at pay equity.
Two of Labour’s MPs, Willie Jackson and Adrian Rurawhe, delivered the two strongest speeches on the final debate over the punishment suggested by the Privileges Committee for the three errant Te Pāti Māori MPs this week.
Rurawhe’s speech was probably the most moving. A former Speaker, who now rarely speaks, he warned the government about the dangerous precedent set by its decision to walk away from a consensus decision on the punishment that should be meted out to the MPs.
MPs breach privilege quite a bit, but most get let off without any serious punishment because Parliament needs to continue functioning and voters have a right to know that all the MPs they’ve sent to Parliament will have their voices heard. Rurawhe, warned, as only a former Speaker could, that the government had set a dangerous precedent that a future majority could use to snuff out or frustrate voices it didn’t like.
Then, in a pivot reminiscent of Jacinda Ardern’s now-memed 2017 finger wag at breakfast TV host Mark Richardson, he turned to face Te Pāti Māori and, invoking the memory of the party’s founder, Tariana Turia, essentially told the co-leaders to grow up and start showing up to debates.
Rurawhe tends to hold his tongue in the House, which made this stern contribution all the more memorable.
One conclusion that can be drawn from these polls is that the race is tight – and that Labour and its putative coalition is performing better at this point in the cycle than others have done in the past. For six months now, a variety of polls have shown Labour ahead of National, and in some polls have shown it taking power.
That puts the party in a better position than most first-term oppositions, perhaps going back to the 1990-1993 Parliament (which would have seen a change in Government had the FPP votes been counted as MMP ones). Where Labour is in a more difficult position is in regard to its coalition partners, who may be behind the party’s difficulty in converting wavering National-Labour marginal voters.
The party has begun working on that difficult challenge. MPs’ language towards Te Pāti Māori has hardened in recent months. Hipkins clearly has a lot to do, but his job is getting easier.
If Mr McGlashan will spare the very ugly crayfish, we may be anchored in the middle of the deep blue sea, but one thing the polls agree on is the tide for National is shifting.
