Public figures would do well to remember that when you’ve got to go, it’s best to do it quietly.
When is a resignation not a resignation? When it is only possibly a resignation. Or when it is possibly not a resignation at all.
Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon resigned. Then he wasn’t sure whether he had resigned. He had sent an email to the Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins. He hadn’t sent the requisite resignation letter to the Associate Minister of Justice. He wasn’t quite sure how to.
Or an email bounced back. Or … something. Then he seemed to be hinting that despite the resignation, or lack thereof, he might just un-resign from resigning. He might refuse to come out from behind, or possibly from under, his presumably rather impressive commissioner’s desk. It is all impossibly confusing.
A situation this farcical could be an episode of Seinfeld. In fact it pretty much is the one where George Costanza quits his job after being banned from the executive bathroom. He then realises his chances of getting another job are slender at best.
Jerry suggests he just turn up at the office the next day and carry on as though he hadn’t quit. This turned out as well as could be expected.
Still, it might have been worth a go. Foon could have handcuffed himself to his commissioner’s desk and swallowed the key. Why not? It would only be as bonkers as the whole chaotic real-life episode.
Eventually he did decide he had resigned. He was finally, you might say, resigned to being resigned. Not quite.
He is accused of failing to adequately disclose a conflict of interest relating to more than $2 million of government money paid to MY Gold Investments, a company of which he is a director and which is an emergency-housing provider. He said it isn’t accurate to extrapolate from this figure that his company had made about $2 million – there are pesky things like overheads and so on. He did not reveal just how much his company had made.
Resigned to being resigned? He had been “thrown under the bus”, he said. And if he’s going to be thrown under the bus, every other bugger should go under with him.
Especially Michael Wood, in disgrace for holding Auckland Airport shares while transport minister. Wood has since quit Cabinet. He held other shares incompatible with his other roles. He threw himself under the bus before a clearly furious Hipkins did it for him.
Foon was like a six-year-old caught snapping crayons in class. He was to be sent to the naughty room. “But. Miss. Miss. Micky snapped crayons too. He should be sent to the naughty room. It’s not fair.”
So, another week, another foggy fiasco. A “shambles”, said the now-former race relations commissioner. No kidding. But it’s at least partly of his own making, surely.
Should a government employee be a director of a company doing business with the state? If something smells stinky it is usually because it stinks. If you are going into politics, the first lesson to learn is perception is almost all.
“I’m not an idiot,” Foon told TVNZ 1′s Breakfast. But he was mayor of Gisborne for 18 years. He knows how politics works.
More pong
Another day, another pong. Newshub discovered National Party leader Christopher Luxon’s whānau appeared to have applied for the government’s $8625 electric-car subsidy for a shiny new Tesla. This was a subsidy Luxon had previously slagged off.
But never fear, it wasn’t hypocrisy: the Tesla was his wife’s car and “it’s not any of your business”, he said, looking like something caught in the headlights of his wife’s new car. Estimates of how much he’s worth begin at about $30 million. Not that it’s any of your business.
With all this stink about, we need some air freshener. Or preferably, some clever political satire. Clever political satire is in lamentably short supply (with some notable exceptions).
The farming sector’s protest wing, Groundswell, had a go. At Fieldays it was selling sets of golf balls decorated with the faces of certain Labour MPs, including Hipkins. The accompanying slogan: “The golf balls you won’t mind putting in the bunker.” As satire goes, it belonged in the bunker.
Grant Duncan, an associate professor at Massey University, said the golf balls were out of the bounds of acceptable political satire. “If you hit someone with a golf club you would kill them. You can argue freedom of speech, but you have to accept the consequences of what you are expressing.”
You can buy a Donald Trump toilet brush online. Arguably, you could hit somebody with a Trump toilet brush and kill them, but you’d have to have a bloody good aim. Weirdly, Luxon, the politician whose head most resembles a golf ball, wasn’t included in the Groundswell collection.
Lawn order
If it’s election year, sure as eggs the right will get ever more exercised over law and order. Ram raiders and the gangs must be sent to the gulag to do hard labour, preferably for life. Those crims affiliated with gangs would, under a Luxon-led government, be subject to sterner sentences. Pah, said Labour, already happens; not so much a policy as a feeble tweak; nothing to see here.
In response to the voluntary closure of two schools in Ōpōtiki because of the massed arrival of patched gang members for the tangi of Mongrel Mob Barbarians president Steven Taiatini, Luxon and Hipkins seemed to be in agreement: children should feel safe going to school.
How bleeding obvious. But in an election year, the leader of the Labour Party and the Leader of the Opposition can’t be seen to be singing harmoniously. There has to be a niggle. There was. Luxon said Hipkins should be taking action.
So far as we know, the Prime Minister doesn’t have a sheriff’s badge, or the power to run varmints out of town. What a pity former House Speaker Trevor Mallard is off being the ambassador to Ireland. He could have popped into Ōpōtiki with his water hoses and collection of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits and blasted the hell out of the gangs. What action might Luxon take? Perhaps he could mow the varmints down with his wife’s Tesla.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi told Luxon and Hipkins where to go. “[They] need to stop using our iwi as a political football ... they’ve no business whatsoever commenting on matters they know nothing about. Keep my iwi out of your mouth.”
None of this is helpful. National’s Rob Muldoon, prime minister from 1975 to 1984, for all his sins, took another approach to gangs. He talked to them. It was no doubt patriarchal and there was obviously mutual admiration for the art of intimidation. But Muldoon understood the usefulness of keeping enemies close.
We’ve somehow ended up in a land ruled by what a character in Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies calls the new authoritarians. “They hate any fact that doesn’t confirm what they already believe to be true.”
The new authoritarians’ weapon of choice is shouting on social media. There was once an alternative to this. It was called civilised debate. Remember that? l
