OPINION: Go forth and multiply. So commandeth the leader of the National Party, Christopher Luxon. Your country needs you to breed. “We need people,” he said.
“Here is the deal. Essentially New Zealand stopped replacing itself in 2016. I encourage all of you to go out there and have more babies if you wish. That would be helpful.”
He wasn’t really suggesting that those citizens of breeding age partake in a country-wide bonkathon. It was a joke, he had to explain. If you have to explain that you have made a joke, you haven’t made a joke. You’ve made a failed attempt at a joke.
As is widely known, Luxon is anti-abortion. As stupid failed jokes go, then, this one was more risky than risqué. He really should stay away from jokes involving reproduction. But that is not the real problem with his lame attempt at humour. The real problem is that he didn’t know it was a crap joke, and that he really should stay away from jokes involving reproduction.
As a first-term politician, he still has the training wheels on, and he’s still learning to ride his bike without wobbling madly.
He was on a roll. Down the slippery slope he went, on his wobbly way. Later in the week, he managed to get a gumboot stuck in his gob while chatting up farmers in Helensville. He was auditioning for the role of prime minister, or perhaps minister of tourism. The country he wanted to run was a “very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country”. Got that, you whiny lot? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Take a spoonful of concrete and harden the fuck up.
But hang on. Doesn’t complaining about negative whiners make you a negative whiner?
Luxon is an amateur when it comes to slagging off his own team. The All Blacks legend and Canterbury coach Grizz Wyllie is said, possibly apocryphally, to have stormed into the Canterbury shed one half-time to give his losing side a pep talk: “You’re all bloody useless,” he said.
Laugh out loud
Andrew Little, Labour’s Defence Minister, made a joke. He was a ring-in at a Wellington event for another MP who couldn’t make it. He said: “When the call went out, I was the only MP not rewriting their pecuniary interests.” It’s not a bad joke, more like a poke at his colleague, the currently suspended Minister of Transport, Michael Wood, who might not appreciate either joke or poke.
Never have so many shares caused so much silly fuss. Well, not until the interminable Auckland Council meeting about whether to sell its shares in Auckland Airport. Initially, Mayor Wayne Brown tried to browbeat his councillors into selling all of the city’s 18% holding. A compromise was, eventually, tediously, reached: a 7% stake would be flicked.
Presumably not to Wood. Wood has finally got rid of his shares after dithering, incomprehensibly, for aeons, despite being advised 12 times to get shot of the bloody things.
It might be too late to save his political career. He looks as much of a wobbler as Luxon on his trainer bike. If you look wobbly and indecisive you are pretty much forcing your party leader to look decisive. And looking decisive means sharpening your sword and severing the heads of ministers who do idiotic things.
Wood’s explanations for not divesting himself of the shares in a timely fashion have been as dithery as his inaction on the shares themselves: He didn’t get around to it. He was busy. It was an error of “perception”.
Wood’s error of “perception” could have him carted off to the privileges committee to have his head cut off. Getting hauled before that committee is the political equivalent of being hauled into the headmaster’s office to explain why you were caught smoking behind the bike shed.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to have one of your MPs hauled before the privileges committee may be regarded as a misfortune; two looks like carelessness.
National had another head on a platter gifted to it when Education Minister Jan Tinetti appeared before the committee to grovel for taking too long to correct her homework – aka making an inaccurate statement in the House.
She was asked during the hearing to speak up. She said she would use her “teacher voice”. To which National MP and committee member Michael Woodhouse responded: “Good girl.” Good one. Woodhouse apologised. Good boy.
Can of GE worms
We need more people. Just not more wet, whiny people. Perhaps we could make some nice, positive, non-whiny people. If National wins in October perhaps it could genetically modify babies.
National’s science, innovation, and technology spokesperson, Judith Collins, has announced a “Harnessing Biotech Plan”, which sounds a bit like a scheme for recreating Jurassic Park, but with tame T-rexes in the Auckland Domain.
National would end what is pretty much a blanket ban on the use of genetic engineering and genetically modified biotechnologies. The party argues our regulations put us at a disadvantage to most of the rest of the world.
To explain why New Zealand should end the genetic equivalent of our nuclear-free policy, Collins was too wily to offer as an example anything like a genetically modified tomato. Nobody really wants their tomatoes mucked about with. Remember the Frankenfoods fuss during Helen Clark’s reign?
Instead, National is arguing we’re missing out on “immense economic benefits”, and benefits in science, particularly the medical kind. Labour, meanwhile, contends being GE-free is a selling point for the country, but says it could be open to changes.
Instead of tomatoes, Collins’ example of the wonders of genetic engineering was a British teen being “cured” of cancer. The 13-year-old girl’s cancer went into remission after she became the first person in the world to undergo a new form of gene editing.
National’s opening up the GE debate opens a can of genetically modified worms.
The Green Party opened its own can last week – of modified tax worms. Its big policy announcement was the introduction of, on one hand, a tax cut, and on the other, a tax hike. The former is a tax cut for all earnings under $125,000 via a $10,000 tax-free threshold.
This would be paid for by new wealth taxes. The party wants a higher company tax rate and to supercharge the highest-income tax bracket. Earners on more than $180 grand would pay 45c for every dollar over that amount.
There would also be a guaranteed minimum income of $385 a week per person in or out of work.
Really? We live in a country where the recommended guaranteed minimum income ought to be $385 a week? The Greens will gripe about any changes to biotech laws. But it is likely people are more worried about whether they can afford a tomato, be it genetically engineered or not. And here endeth this week’s negative, whiny lesson.
