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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.
They were the shots heard around the world. The shots that made people everywhere stop and wonder what the future holds for the United States. But not at the Act Party headquarters in New Zealand.
At Act Party HQ, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last Sunday was an excuse to do a bit of petty point scoring.
The morning after the former-and-possibly-future US president was nearly murdered by a 20-year-old with a gun in Pennsylvania, who shot and killed a rally attendee and injured others, the Act Party decided to tweet a clip from an episode of TVNZ’s Breakfast on the party’s X account.
In the frankly juvenile segment, the programme’s hosts played silly buggers with a “Bug-A-Salt”, a mail-order toy in the shape of a firearm that shoots granules of salt to kill flies and other bugs. Hooting like a bunch of school children, the programme treated viewers to one presenter firing salt at another presenter, then at a small Donald Trump troll doll.
Was this in any way funny? Only if you are an 8-year-old.
Was it the sort of thing that a rational adult would view as advocating for the shooting of a politician rather than a puerile attempt at humour? The Broadcasting Standards Authority didn’t think so.
Oh, and did this incident happen 18 months ago? It certainly did.
None of that mattered to the anonymous keyboard warriors at the Act Party the morning after the most serious development in American politics in two generations.
In an equally puerile tweet, the party posted the clip with the caption: “This segment of Breakfast’s hosts shooting a Trump doll has not aged well. We hope TVNZ will acknowledge that they got it wrong.”
The following day, presumably after the sort of vile social media pile-on Act was intending to generate, TVNZ did exactly that — even though the broadcaster had apologised for the hosts’ antics soon after they were broadcast at the time.
If the attempted assassination of Trump tells us all we need to know about the state of America’s politics right now, Act’s tweet — and NZ First’s recent one about the grounding of the ferry Aratere — tells us plenty about the state of politics in this country.
Here we have two of the three parties forming the coalition government behaving like internet trolls. And Act’s performative outrage over an 18-month-old incident comes with a sick irony, too.
Not many months after the Breakfast nonsense, David Seymour told a radio host that he fantasised about blowing up the Ministry of Pacific Peoples.
“In my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in there,” Seymour said, “and it’d be all over, but we’ll probably have to have a more formal approach than that.”
Was it a joke? Maybe to him, though apparently not to the two men who later that same day walked into the ministry’s offices and scared staff by attempting to interrogate them while also filming them. A complaint was laid to police about that incident.
Was Seymour bothered? Apparently not. The man who has been acting prime minister of NZ this week doubled down, telling Newshub back in August that “people shouldn’t have to apologise for having a laugh”.
Fair enough. Here’s a joke, then: what do you do with a political party that uses the attempted murder of a politician as an excuse for petty, belated point scoring with the media?
Well, in my fantasy, we’d send a guy called Guy Fawkes in there and it’d be all over, but we’ll probably have to have a more formal approach than that. Hilarious, eh?
Matchmaker Luxon makes weird history
A mental image for you: Helen Clark and Don Brash in bed together. No need to thank me, you’re welcome.
Of course, suggesting such an image is what David “I’m Hilarious When I Talk About Blowing People Up” Seymour would call a joke.
Yet it is true that the ex-Labour prime minister and the ex-National Party leader found themselves strange bedfellows this week. He, after all, is now the leader of Hobson’s Pledge, a right-wing lobby group that has been accused of inciting racism, while she is Helen Clark.
Who could bring two such diametrically opposed people together? The answer is the current Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher Luxon.
After Luxon posed as some sort of foreign affairs tough guy in an interview with Britain’s Financial Times newspaper this week, Clark and Brash issued a joint statement saying Luxon has jeopardised New Zealand’s independent foreign policy and its economic security.
In the FT’s report, Luxon said he would increasingly name and shame China for espionage in New Zealand. He then waded into the ugly and increasingly hostile disagreements between China and its neighbours over the South China Sea.
He also made it clear that, despite the economic state of the country, our struggling health and education systems, the poor state of the government’s books and the still high cost-of-living, he will be increasing defence spending.
But he wasn’t finished. The government’s previously stated position on joining pillar two of the anti-China Aukus alliance was that NZ was “exploring” the idea. Luxon announced to the FT that we were “very open” to joining it — quite a shift in language.
Oh, and Luxon said NZ will continue trying to double its exports to China in the next decade, which is a bit like calling someone a bully and a thief and then expecting them to shout you dinner.
All this led to Clark and Brash calling out Luxon, saying the course the government is now taking, “with no electoral mandate for a radical change to foreign policy”, carries huge risks to our country and drags us into becoming “a full-fledged military ally” of the US.
We will have to wait and see whether Luxon playing tough guy has driven a large wedge between NZ and its largest trading partner. But he has already managed the weirdest, most unlikely feat in NZ political history by bringing Clark and Brash together.
On ya e-bike, Darleen
Another joke: what’s not clean and green any more but still thinks it could be recycled? You guessed it. It’s Darleen Tana.
Another week has gone by with the now ex-Green Party MP refusing to confirm whether she will leave Parliament and make way for a new Green list MP, or if she thinks she can recycle herself as an independent.
The release this week of the executive summary of the report into what Tana knew about the alleged exploitation of workers by her husband’s soon-to-be liquidated business makes is pretty plain why Tana should leave.
However, one suspects her reluctance to announce a decision is all about making it as uncomfortable as possible for as long as possible for her former party, which is obviously extremely reluctant to use the so-called “waka jumping” legislation to have Tana thrown out of Parliament.
But there could be another way to get Tana to move on: No, not Guy Fawkes. Green MP Julie Ann Genter. Just like she did to a National MP in the House in May, Genter could yell in Tana’s face while waving a copy of the report about until Tana gets the message and buggers off. It didn’t work the first time. But maybe second time lucky, eh?
