A strange man was spotted in a Tauranga supermarket last week, smiling and waving at babies and old ladies. He got a terrible fright at a $20 price tag on a block of cheddar and fainted. When told the geezer passed out on the floor was Sam Uffindell, National’s local MP, one old lady sniffed and said: “Never heard of him. I wish he’d get out of the way.”
Of course, this never happened, but it might have during one of Uffindell’s now-infamous grocery shopping trips to “give my wife a break”. You can imagine him putting cans of baked beans and jumbo packs of budget bog rolls into his trolley, too, to give him “some good publicity looking like an everyday man doing the chores”.
The everyday man doing the chores wears his National Party jacket to the supermarket. He should be wearing a jacket that reads “Prat”.
His attempt to drum up publicity has certainly got him publicity. Of the very wrong sort. He sounded like a sexist dinosaur. Not fair, he whinged. He can only do his publicity push – sorry, grocery shopping – once a month because he works 80 hours a week.
Somebody should have advised him to just shut up. He is like Auntie Doris in comic novelist David Nobbs’ The Complete Pratt, the wonderful trilogy about another prat, Henry. Doris, too, always makes things worse by going on about them.
Dead rodents
Was there GST on all of those dead rodents Finance Minister Grant Robertson had to swallow last week? Dead rodent No 1 was having to announce Labour’s election promise to remove GST from fresh and frozen fruit and veges. Surprise! You could have knocked the nation down with a fennel frond.
It was a plan that had been pre-announced last month, not by Labour but by National’s finance spokesperson, Nicola Willis, who’d had it leaked to her. The leaker hasn’t been flushed out of whatever rat hole they are hiding in. But we can safely assume that they are not, unlike Robertson, a loyal Labour foot soldier. Robertson had long been firmly agin the idea of removing GST. Then he had a “road to Damascus” moment, he said, and now fully supports the policy. Isn’t Labour the party that banned conversion therapy?
The second dead rodent again came from Willis, who announced yet another of Robertson’s big holes. Labour had buggered up the figures on how much removing the GST would cost. This hole was a $235 million one. It had left out the cost of the first three months of the exemption and undercalculated the cost for the following financial year.
When one buggers something up, one should always blame the IT department. Nobody knows who the IT department is. Nobody knows where the IT department is. You can never get it on the phone. So it is safe to blame any and all bugger-uppery on an “IT malfunction”.
Once again Willis was simply “mischief-making”, according to Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, who left the press conference on the GST policy with the appearance of a man who had swallowed a rat or two himself.
Gone bananas
Labour has made other announcements, including an increase in paid parental leave. How kind.
Not so kind: earlier in the month Labour voted down Willis’s proposed bill to make parental leave more flexible. There was also a cost-of-living plan, and quite possibly some other announcement that nobody has taken the blindest bit of notice of.
Almost all the economists who have cared to comment are far too busy wondering aloud whether the PM has gone bananas. Almost universally, this GST-free fruit and veges stunt is being slagged off as a lemon.
That it benefits only people who can afford asparagus and mangos. If the policy was a fruit it would be a durian, which stinks so badly it is banned from public transport in many Asian countries. Too many fruit gags. Sorry.
But talk about asking for it. Robertson should have done a U-turn on that road to Damascus. He knew the stunt would be about as popular as a durian.
Robertson had previously described the idea of lifting GST from bananas and such as a “boondoggle”. A boondoggle is a wasteful or fraudulent thing. We owe a big thank you to the finance minister for introducing the word boondoggle to the nation’s vernacular. It will come in very handy between now and election day.
Later, in a radio interview, he accused Willis of “lying” for suggesting he and Hipkins had had a row over the timing of the removal of the GST from said stinky fruits.
The only more serious charges one politician could lob at another would be that they were a crook, a murderer or possibly a prat who only did the grocery shopping once a month.
Later the same day, in exchanges in the House, the Minister of Broadcasting, Willie Jackson, added to the depth of debate in the playground by calling National’s spokesperson for housing and infrastructure, Chris Bishop, “thick”. It is good to see some serious debate: “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” “You’re thick.” “No, you’re thick.”
Jackson later told RNZ that Parliament was a “robust” environment and that the public knows what goes on there and therefore didn’t, to paraphrase, give a dead rat’s arse what went on in the House.
Willis’s response to being called a liar was that Robertson needed “a cup of tea and a lie-down”. Could she have been more condescending? Oh yes, easily. She said that he’d been “under a lot of pressure” and that she had compassion for him. Was she lying? Of course not. She really cares. “He needs a break and I’m happy to give him one.” She should send him a GST-free fruit basket.
One reason Robertson has finally agreed to the boondoggle is that the government now has a “grocery commissioner”, whose role, presumably, includes helping the tax man to decide on such gnomic issues as whether frozen minted peas qualify as unprocessed veges. Robertson could probably do it himself. His first job was in a supermarket fruit and vege department.
Unmasked
And so it ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Labour’s other big, big announcement last week was that all Covid mandates have been finally unmasked. Welcome to the free-for-all: we no longer have to wear masks to medical centres or hospitals; you can go to work if you have Covid; we can sneeze all over our colleagues. Anti-vaxxers everywhere will be cheering the news and probably voting for the anti-vaxxers’ friend, New Zealand First.
One question, do we still have to be kind?
