Sunday
Media theorists use the term “concentration discourse” to describe the way certain topics become dominant in news coverage and social media. The tech platforms famously elevate issues that are polarising; provoking anger and outrage to maximise traffic and content generation. The author Andrey Mir writes, “Ad-driven media produced happy customers. Reader-driven media produces angry citizens.”
Discourse is currently concentrated on Israel’s invasion of Gaza: the most polarising topic since the rise of the anti-vax movement. This week will bring vandalism at a synagogue in Christchurch and the officers of Act and National Party MPs, including those of Christopher Luxon and David Seymour, will be splattered with red paint in Auckland. The Tamaki for Palestine group takes responsibility, calling the incoming government a “coalition of complicity” for failing to call for a ceasefire or condemn Israel’s actions.
Internationally, a lot of this polarisation is playing out on the left. UK Labour leader Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden have come under heavy criticism for their failure to call for a ceasefire. Councillors in the UK are resigning from the Labour Party. NZ Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins seems to have come under similar pressure: today he calls a press conference in Labour’s caucus room to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The Grey River Argus, a socialist newspaper printed in Greymouth in the late 19th-early 20th century, was in the habit of directly addressing foreign leaders in its editorials and once began a column, “We have repeatedly warned the Kaiser …” Obviously, the Netanyahu coalition doesn’t base its war policy on the declarations of Kiwi politicians. But Hipkins’ call was seen by National as a breach of protocol.
Hipkins is emphatic that he made the statement as Labour leader, not as caretaker Prime Minister, and was not breaching the convention that he consult with the incoming government. But he is still caretaker Prime Minister, and foreign affairs in such circumstances are traditionally conducted on a bipartisan basis. Labour gave National four minutes’ notice before making the announcement. The problem with conventions is that they only work if all sides bother to observe them.
Monday
We’re currently experiencing a fifth wave of the coronavirus, with high levels of infection detected in wastewater samples across the country. It’s a reminder that whatever our new government looks like, it will spend a lot of its time reacting to unexpected events rather than calmly rolling out its freshly negotiated policy agenda. The Key government was voted into power during the Global Financial Crisis, which led to the slow-motion collapse of several of New Zealand’s largest finance companies. This was followed by the Christchurch earthquake. The Ardern government dealt with the Christchurch massacre and the outbreak of Covid-19. Chris Hipkins was immediately confronted with the Auckland Anniversary floods followed by Cyclone Gabrielle.
It’s often botched responses to events that bring governments down. Think George W Bush during Hurricane Katrina, or Scott Morrison travelling to Hawaii during the Australian bushfires. The Hipkins-Ardern government had the opposite experience -- performing well in a crisis but mishandling the day-to-day policy delivery. “The public service functions extremely well in emergencies,” one now-former minister explained to me. “It’s only when you’re not coping with a catastrophe that nothing works.”
Tuesday
The slow-motion collapse of Wellington as a functional city continued today, with Wellington Water telling the Wellington City Council it needed to invest more than $2 billion into its ageing pipes. It’s an impossibly large amount, even for a local government body that isn’t pouring money into rebuilding its own council buildings and trying to subsidise a multinational cinema company (the council has been secretly negotiating to buy the land beneath the derelict Reading Theatre on Courtney Place).
The council was one of the few local government bodies to get excited about Labour’s Three Waters project (it could transfer its multibillion-dollar infrastructure liability on to some new, co-governed mega-entity). But that scheme will be one of the first to go on the incoming government’s policy bonfire, and the council will find it almost impossible to persuade other government bodies to voluntarily join forces with it to help fund the replacement of leaking and degraded pipes.
Wednesday
This week saw the election of two right-wing populists on two different continents: Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Javier Milei in Argentina. Both campaigned on reducing inflation, which hit 14.5% in the Netherlands last year. It’s now at around 6%, although the country has gone into recession after interest rate hikes. Inflation in Argentina is at 140%. Milei has promised to solve this by abolishing his country’s central bank and adopting the US dollar as a national currency (this is probably a terrible idea, although sustained triple-digit inflation is also terrible, and the most important factor in Milei’s rise is the incompetence of the centre-left Peronist coalition he’s replacing).
Wilders will have to govern via coalition, but Milei has free reign. He’s a libertarian who owns five cloned dogs and boasts of a psychic connection to their parent, a now-deceased mastiff called Conan, whom Milei believes he met 2000 years ago as a gladiator in Imperial Rome. His nickname is El Loco: the madman. Obviously, he’s an economist.
So, there’s still a lot of energy behind the populist right. Donald Trump will almost certainly run for US president again next year and given Biden’s dire approval ratings, there’s every chance he could win. There’s a popular theory around Wellington that Winston Peters is a useful safety valve against a populist-right uprising in New Zealand. He makes all the noises of a radical populist but always governs like an establishment centrist.
Thursday
The new government was supposed to be announced today but wasn’t. It’d be nice to think the delay was over principled policy stands, but reports suggest David Seymour and Winston Peters were squabbling over the title of Deputy Prime Minister.
Friday
They did it. It’s our first three party coalition government. Winston Peters is foreign minister, David Seymour is “Minister of Regulation” a position that doesn’t exist yet but will be created next year, alongside a new agency which will be funded by disestablishing the Productivity Commission, an agency Act created last time it was in government. They’ll take turns being Deputy Prime Minister. Peters will go first. Each party will need the support of their coalition partners to pass any legislation which should, theoretically, incentivise them all to play nicely and work collaboratively. But this is not how Winston Peters and the New Zealand First party has operated in the past. More than any MMP arrangement we’ve seen so far, this coalition is vulnerable to a breakdown in relationships leading to a breakdown in government.
