On Radio New Zealand’s website last week there was a picture of a geezer standing on a footpath in Auckland. He was looking into a pothole in a very serious sort of way. What had the pothole done to deserve this? It merely existed.
Potholes, it seems, are the enemies of the people. For one thing they make motorists say rude words when they drive into them and end up in China. The photograph was hilarious. It might be the worst news photo of a politician ever taken – bar those ones of MPs doing tours of fascinating factories while wearing hair nets and pretending they really don’t mind looking like Coronation Street’s Ena Sharples. Oh, the glamour of politics.
The seriously worried-looking geezer was National Party leader Christopher Luxon, who, given he wasn’t doing anything about the pothole, might as well have been a pothole worker. And now he sort of is. National has promised $500 million to a pothole repair fund, if it is elected to the government benches in October. So Luxon, who obviously wants to be the next prime minister, has become pretty much the political equivalent of prime pothole filler-inner.
There was another joker in the photo standing on Luxon’s right. This was National transport spokesperson Simeon Brown. He was asked by RNZ whether the promised pothole-fixing plan was a “political gimmick”. He said it wasn’t. “This is a reality of our roads being in the worst state they’ve ever been and the need for us to be investing in making sure that they are safe to drive on so we can keep our economy moving.”
If it is a gimmick, it’s a dud. A pothole repair fund is about as exciting as the gravel and asphalt needed to fix the things.
In what?
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has announced Labour’s slogan for the election – drum roll – “In it for you.” Snappy, isn’t it? No, it isn’t. And what is it in for us, exactly? The party presumably workshopped this new slogan. It’s hard to believe nobody pointed out that some smart-arse would almost certainly come up with an idea of what it is we’re in for. A smart-arse did. Here it is: we’re “in the poo for you”. It’s certainly snappier, you have to admit.
National’s Luxon said the country didn’t need slogans. He told Stuff: “What New Zealand needs is real, substantive answers to its challenges and its problems.” Down with slogans! And quite right too. Slogans are silly and meaningless. Does anyone vote for a slogan? Of course they don’t. So good for National. Only it seems that it does care about slogans because it had already announced a new one of its own: “Get our country back on track.”
It’s hard to fathom Luxon’s logic. You slag off your opponent for having a slogan … after already announcing a slogan of your own. It’s a mystery. And the Nats’ slogan is a dud, too. It should have gone with “down with potholes”.
Swinging free
Another mystery. Act leader David Seymour seems to have morphed into some sort of self-help guru. While introducing a handful of new list MPs, he said of them that: “They believe in personal freedom for your body and your mind and your money and your property.” Personal freedom for your body? This sounds like an endorsement for, say, tantric sex. Why not? Free sex, even if it happens to be weirdo hippy sex, might reel in a few swinging voters. Or swingers.
We can be fairly certain that Act co-founder Roger Douglas does not belong to the latter category. He does now belong to the former. He is a swing voter for the first time. In a scathing 22-page open letter he says Act has “lost the plot” and now represents only rich buggers. He is not a rich bugger. Many years ago, when I interviewed him at a South Auckland mall, he had a Lotto ticket tucked into his shirt pocket.
Seymour responded to Douglas’ letter with a dismissive shrug. He said: “Roger is 85 years old. I want him to enjoy his retirement.” He might as well have said: “He’s a doddery old geezer and hence irrelevant.”
Finance Minister Grant Robertson asked mock-desperately, “Who does [Douglas] support? Please tell me it’s not me.”
It is a shame for Robertson, and for Labour, that pigs can’t support them. According to Seymour the government has been squandering taxpayer dollars providing free food for pigs. This is on the back of a Treasury finding that $25 million worth of free school lunches were not eaten by kids. According to Seymour, some were sent home with kids who had pigs. Some of the food sounded only fit for hogs. Kaitaia Primary School hit the headlines two years ago when “cold spaghetti and cheese” was dished up to kids as the school buses turned up to take them home.
If it is happening, there must be a lot of fat pigs out there, somewhere, with their snouts in the public trough. Perhaps, too, they are banking all that free food, and so have become very rich pigs – and are perhaps keen to vote for Act.
A little whiffy
Another recent press photo of another geezer, taken at Parliament, in which said geezer is valiantly pretending he hadn’t just had to eat something awful – like cold spaghetti and cheese. The picture was of Robertson, who is not much of an actor. He looked as bleak as a pothole. In the picture, he seemed to be pushing his glasses up. But the position of his fingers made it seem like he wanted to hold his nose. Old spag and cheese can be a bit whiffy.
His boss Hipkins, who was away glad-handing it in Lithuania at the time, waved his magic prime ministerial wand to make things disappear, and – poof – just like that, taxes on wealth and capital gains were gone.
Nobody could blame Robertson if what he really wanted to do was put a peg on his schnozz. Imagine this: you have been beavering away for a good year on your secret-squirrel plot to introduce wealth and capital gains taxes to perform a good old switcheroo: giving most New Zealanders a $20-a-week tax cut paid for by higher taxes for rich buggers. And then along comes the PM with his magic vanishing wand.
Robertson claimed not to be “gutted”. Yes he was.
He said, through gritted teeth, that he was a “team player”. You do wonder for how much longer. Perhaps he could join forces with Douglas. They could wear matching “Eat the Rich” badges.
