Online exclusive
Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly column that appears on listener.co.nz on Friday mornings. If you enjoy a “serious laugh” - and complaining about politics and politicians - you’ll enjoy reading Greg’s latest grievances.
Planet Earth to Darleen Tana: on your e-bike, mate. It’s time to go.
For most of us, being the subject a damning report suggesting our “credibility was significantly compromised”, and then being told to bugger off by our mates would be enough to get us to, well, bugger off. No rock would be big enough for hiding under.
But not, it seems, for Tana. After leaving the Green Party at the weekend after a meeting about a report into what she knew about alleged migrant worker exploitation by her husband’s e-bike business, she seems rather less keen to leave Parliament as well — something the Greens have, with surprising politeness, asked her to do. It is the only way to stop this embarrassing omni-shambles becoming a full-on flaming dumpster fire.
Tana has, of course, utterly rejected the report’s findings, and is apparently of the view that natural justice has not been served. This in spite of it taking nearly four months and more than $43,000 of taxpayers’ money for barrister Rachel Burt to figure out whether Tana had misled her now former party about how much she knew about what was going on and when.
Tana’s rejection of Burt’s findings suggests she may yet go rogue and cling to her seat in Parliament — and her $168,000 salary — either as an independent MP, or perhaps by throwing in her lot with Te Pāti Māori.
If she does dig in, the only upside will be the cheap entertainment provided by the Greens tying themselves in knots trying decide whether to force Tana’s exit from Parliament by invoking the “waka jumping” Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Act.
For the Greens, who have historically despised that legislation, doing so will be like bludgeoning a kerurū to death with a hammer and then having to eat the corpse, feathers and all.
But really, the party shouldn’t be clutching its vegan pearls about it. This isn’t a case of some ideological bust-up over an important policy, nor is it about a MP having a crisis of conscience and leaving the party under their own volition.
This is about an MP resigning from the party before she was given boot, an MP who has allegedly mislead her leaders, and has allegedly been involved with a business that has allegedly been exploiting workers. What’s more, Tana is just a list MP and therefore nothing more than an easily-scraped barnacle on the bottom of the Greens’ leaky waka.
If all that’s not a good enough reason to invoke the hated waka-jumping act, it’s hard to know what would be.
And whatever kind of hearing you reckon Tana has been given by the Greens — they say it was fair, she views it as rough justice — she needs to realise there is now only one thing she can salvage from this drawn-out affair: what remains of her dignity. And she can only claim that if she gets on her e-bike sooner rather than later.
As for the Greens, it is hard to take the party seriously as a political force after a term that has so far seen them looking less like an effective opposition party, and more like a really bonkers season of Survivor.
Who will leave the island next? Who knows. But for Darleen Tana, the tribe has spoken.
The Truth is Out There
Say what you like about NZ First, but it’s not just a party for anti-vaxxers, wellness zealots and cranks obsessed with legislating who uses what toilet.
As evinced by a tweet on X this week, it is also the party for internet trolls who enjoy winding people up with wild allegations.
This particular tweet asked whether it was true that the Interislander ferry Aratere ran aground last month after someone put the autopilot on, nipped off “for a coffee”, and then “couldn’t turn the autopilot off again in time” to stop the poor ship trying docking with a beach?
“If so,” the tweet thundered, “why haven’t the public been told that?”
KiwiRail responded that the “regulated number of qualified people” were on the ship’s bridge on the night of the grounding, though leaked documents suggest someone did push the wrong button.
NZ First leader Winston Peters, meanwhile, has tried to shift attention away from the bonkers tweet and accused KiwiRail of a cover-up, of what wasn’t exactly clear.
Whatever the actual truth, let it not discourage the truth-seekers at NZ First from asking the questions that need to be asked. *We expect to see these tweets in the coming days:
PM goes to Washington
Another week, another flash overseas jaunt for the Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher Luxon.
This week Captain Air Miles jetted off to Washington to hang about on the margins of the 75th anniversary Nato conference, this despite New Zealand not being a member of the alliance. It was like Luxon was some distant cousin who hadn’t been invited to the wedding but turned up anyway and started helping himself to the buffet.
To avoid looking like one of those awful people who like to “pop in” unannounced, he had organised a bit of speed dating with a series of US senators — most of whom probably couldn’t point to New Zealand on a map — and a couple of other world leaders, including the shelia from Estonia, a country only Estonians can point to on a map.
Despite the sycophantic media coverage it has had, the trip has reeked of productivity theatre, the sort of performative work that makes you look important and busy but achieves very little, not even a sit down with the US President, the lifelike Joe Biden.
What might that conversation have looked like if it had happened?
Luxon: Hi Joe, I’m Christopher Luxon, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Can I have a selfie?
Biden: I’m proud to be the first black woman president of New Zealand, whoopee!
Oval office minion: I’m afraid your time is up, Mr Luncheon.
*These tweet are entirely imaginary, are intended to be humorous and have not been written or posted by NZ First.
