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Hasn’t it been wonderful to see the Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher “Luxe” Luxon, having such fun on his cheap-and-cheerful package tour of Asia this week?
Some may question the wisdom of being seen having a jolly good time in parts foreign on the taxpayers’ dime in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis — and while he’s slashing thousands of public service jobs — but I’m sure the Prime Minister’s ever-reliable political radar is once again serving him well on this one.
Mind you, you can get a three-night Singapore stopover, including a free tour of Universal Studios, for as little as $622pp right now, so I’m sure someone who once managed what was then the 57th largest airline in the world got himself a good deal.
From a distance — which in this case is some 9000km — it is always difficult to gauge the value of these sorts of prime ministerial grip-and-grin tours, apart from a chance to collect yet more lets-wait-and-see commitments on trade and pictures of gripping and grinning in front of various flags.
The stated intention of the Luxe’s package tour this week to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, with a bunch of business types in tow, is signalling that the Southeast Asia region is “more crucial than ever to our prosperity and our security”.
Well, when you are currently playing major footsie with the US over joining tier 2 of the Aukus alliance — a military bloc created to contain China, our biggest trading partner — it’s probably not a bad idea to shore up other trade and security relationships in other parts of Asia in case President Xi gets shirty and makes an example of us.
So, on balance, even if it doesn’t amount to this country selling anyone a hill of beans, the Luxe shaking the hand of Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin and Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong is a good thing — even if Lee, somewhat bizarrely, announced almost immediately after his meeting with Luxon that he was stepping down from the PM’s job in favour of his deputy.
But this wasn’t the strangest thing to happen on Luxon’s Singapore stopover.
We were also treated to him having breakfast with a Singaporean social media “influencer”, which resulted in two nations watching the Luxe slurping food in some down-market food hall. Talk about making a Singapore noodle of yourself.
One can’t help but think that slurping noodles with a social media “influencer” is a very long way from Jacinda Ardern on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert or John Key on The Late Show with David Letterman. What next for our new PM? Making endless “fun” TikTok posts about every single thing he does. Oh, actually, he’s already doing that …
Still the noodle slurping wasn’t a complete waste of time. It was during that riveting cultural exchange that he confessed that, when it comes to Asian food, he prefers “mild spice”.
This is actually very big news if you live in Spice World. Given he is a multimillionaire, you’d think the Luxe would be Posh Spice. Instead, we discover he is Mild Spice.
Who do you reckon makes up the rest the Parliamentary Spice Girls? Perhaps Chris Hipkins as Ginger Spice, Simeon Brown as Baby Spice and Gerry Brownlee as Sporty Spice. And Scary Spice? Definitely Winston.
The Big Bad Wolf and Little Red-Tape Riding Hood
Once upon a time, Act leader David Seymour went to a playcentre in Wellington to announce he was going to huff and puff and blow all the red tape away from preschool education. It was a shameless photo op to announce changes critics say will lower preschool teaching standards, though Act says they will make it easier for new centres to be established.
Still the Big Bad Red-Tape Wolf decided it was probably not a great idea to read Act’s nine-page “Building the foundations for education success” strategy to the innocent preschool kids who had been roped in to help sell his government’s new policy.
Instead, he decided on sharing Oi Frog! which sounded much more interesting, though in the end was rather disappointing for the Wolf. It turned out Oi Frog! was not about his NZ First mate Shane Jones wiping out the last remaining native frog colony so that a multinational company could mine coal for export to China. Instead, it was about a frog sitting on a log. Stink.
But hello, what’s this? On a shelf behind the Wolf someone, possibly someone called Troll, had prominently placed a copy of another book, one called Taking the Lead: How Jacinda Ardern Wowed the World.
The Wolf began huffing and puffing again and seemed to suggest, in a fit of pique, that Ardern was something like the Wicked Witch of the West because she’d helped save lives with lockdowns and vaccine mandates during the height of the Covid pandemic.
“Oi Frog! seemed to be a warning to children about authoritarian people that tell you what to do all the time,” the Wolf said.
Some might view that as hugely ironic coming from someone who, though he has no children of his own, just a fortnight ago seemed to suggest he knows better than parents whether a sick child should be sent to school or not.
After making his wild allegation, the Wolf went back the office to huff and puff and blow more red tape away.
Everyone else — excepting those who died from Covid-19 — lived happily ever after.
