Hey, you! Yes, you. We can see you cowering in the shower. We are watching you. You have now been in that shower for five minutes and 25 seconds, which is 25 seconds over your maximum prescribed shower time. Get. Out. Right. Now.
Having less-than-five-minute showers is an idea in a government “initiative” called, weirdly, Find Money in Weird Places, which offers “free and easy-to-implement tips” on how households could save up to $500 on their yearly power bills. Listen up. As well as short showers, we are encouraged to switch appliances off at the wall and use cold-water cycles to do our laundry. And check down the back of the couch for loose change. That last free tip might have been made up but it’s all yours. Gratis. The announcement was made with gusto by Energy Minister Megan Woods and went down pretty much universally like a cup of the proverbial cold stuff.
It is reminiscent of the Helen Clark government scheme in which the Electricity Commission planned to spend up to $3.5 million promoting energy-efficient light bulbs. There was, predictably, the most tremendous fuss. Ditto in the same year was the 2008 Labour proposal to restrict the use of high-flow shower heads. You’d think they’d have learnt from those lessons. We really don’t like politicians lurking about in our bathrooms. It’s a bit pervy, for one thing.
Woods later admitted, “We’ve got the tone a bit off in terms of … how it conveys those messages – particularly at the moment when households are under a lot of financial pressure.” Er, no kidding. It came across as patronising.
And the last thing the Labour government wants to wear, once again, is the Nanny State label. Even if the National Party has avoided actually using the term, it is implied in its response. Although, as a snide swipe, people who carry on about nanny states tend to be those who employ nannies. If nannies are such a bad thing, why do many people who can afford them have them?
Supping from that cup of the proverbial cold stuff, anti-poverty campaigners thundered that the weirdo, money-saving scheme was a “profoundly immoral” approach to the cost-of-living crisis and amounted to slapping a band-aid on the real issues of poverty.
Act leader David Seymour said Finance Minister Grant Robertson had cost families with $500,000 mortgages another $2500 over the next two years, while Woods was now handing out tips on how to save $500. Seymour, who has never met a one-liner he has failed to deliver with relish, added, “It’s like a burglar coming back to a house they’ve robbed to tell their victim how to stay safe.”
Opposition leader Christopher Luxon, presumably unintentionally, recreated the scene from The Simpsons in which a fist-shaking Grandpa Simpson features in the local newspaper under the headline “Old man yells at clouds”, when he scoffed at the “genius idea of five-minute showers and washing machines on cold wash”. Luxon came across more as “Old man slaps clouds with a wet bus ticket”. His tone was a bit off.
When you are the Leader of the Opposition, it is tricky getting the tone right. When your role is opposing everything, it is all too easy to come across as that grumpy geezer who writes letters to the newspapers which begin: “Dear Sir, I wish to complain about everything.”
Nanny Nicola
Luxon’s deputy, Nicola Willis, has about her the air of one of those uniformed nannies that the royals love to employ, who have been trained at Britain’s Norland College. She could play a decent Mary Poppins in an am-dram production. She can be rather crisp. You wonder what her tone was with her leader after he announced that National “had got MDRS wrong”.
MDRS is Labour’s drearily named Medium Density Residential Standards plan that, in a startling piece of bi-partisanship, National agreed to back in 2021. Willis appeared alongside then-housing minister Woods and then-National leader Judith Collins announcing they would all hold hands to support housing intensification. National then supported legislation that meant councils would have a much tougher job of objecting to the building of higher-density housing.
But late last month, at one of those dreary meetings with club sammies and cups of well-stewed tea that are obligatory for politicians – this one in Auckland’s Birkenhead – Luxon responded to a question about this plan by doing something of a motorway U-turn in a Hummer, managing to mow down Mary Poppins in the process. Had Luxon had too many cups of well-stewed tea? Too many cups of well-stewed tea are well known to cause rushes to the toilet. Who knew they caused cavalier rushes of blood to the head, too.
Any speculation that this was payback for suggestions that business bods have been talking to Willis about whether Luxon was up to the job of leader would be mischief. When asked about the rumours, Willis responded with Norland nanny-worthy disdain. Any implication of a rolling was out of the question. Still, being hit by a Hummer must hurt.
Name game
What’s in a name? The annual Labour Party conference isn’t a conference in an election year, it’s a congress. Congress is, presumably, intended to invoke gravitas and importance. Or bonking. Chance would be a fine thing.
Images of the gathering of party loyalists looked as enticing as one of those bun fights in windy local halls. You hope they were at least rewarded with cups of well-stewed tea.
What’s in a name? If it’s Māori names for things that once had perfectly good English ones then names are a pain.
If Winston Peters and New Zealand First make it back into Parliament, he and Luxon could bi-partisan-up and decree to take a toki to Māori names for government departments. “When I have older people in particular who can’t tell the difference between Te Whatu Ora, Waka Kotahi or Te Pūkenga, that’s a problem,” Luxon says.
Peters says, if elected, NZ First will remove Māori names from government departments, not as an attack on te reo but on “the elite virtue-signallers who have hijacked the language for their own socialist means”. His shtick– as old as his Grey Power groupies – is that there are socialists lurking under your bed wanting to “woke” you in the night.
His father was Māori. His mother is of Scottish descent. He delights in being enigmatic. So who knows whether he speaks any reo?
What’s in a name? It was said on RNZ National last month that Luxon (Christopher) was now styling himself Chris. Imagine focus-grouping that. Is Chris more a man-of-the-people moniker than Christopher? Would farmers be more responsive to a Chris? Would Chris encounter a backlash from the National loyalists of Remmers? Would it benefit a Chris to go up against the other Chris in the preferred-prime-minister stakes?
Even if only tomfoolery, as name games go it is fun to play. And Chris has the right number of letters to qualify as a Wordle answer.
