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New Zealand First is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Especially when you need to use the loo.
In that strange 20th-century place, known to all who live there as the Land of Winston, a man’s dunny is a man’s dunny and a woman’s powder room is a woman’s powder room. Under no circumstances should that immutable law be broken, unless you find yourself in one of the new- fangled unisex bogs, in which case for the duration of the visit it will be deemed either a man’s dunny and only a man’s dunny, or a woman’s powder room and only a woman’s powder room, depending on whether it is a bloke or a sheila answering the call of nature.
This is as God intended. And obviously He uses the dunny.
Back here in the 21st century, we shouldn’t be too judgmental. These are just the sorts of quaint customs you expect to find in foreign countries, especially ones with postlapsarian obsessions with sin, sex and the human body.
The trouble comes when Johnny Foreigner tries to inflict his rules on others when he finds himself in another country — which is certainly one reading of NZ First’s bonkers Fair Access to Bathrooms Bill, a proposed law that is the solution to a problem that exists only in the minds of those in the Land of Winston.
The bill is claimed to be a response to what the NZ First press release announcing it called “the growing trend of mixed-sex toilet spaces”, a claim that neither the release nor the party supports with a shred of evidence that there is, in fact, a “trend”, or that, if there is such a “trend”, it is causing provable harm.
No matter. To stop this spurious-but-ungodly “trend” continuing to ruin no one’s life, new non-domestic, publicly accessible buildings will be required to provide “separate, clearly demarcated, unisex and single-sex bathrooms”.
That is the least pernicious part of the bill. It is also not its main purpose.
Its primary concern is criminalising the use of male and female single-sex toilets by a “person not of designated sex”, fining them up to $2000 unless they had “reasonable grounds” for doing so. Desperately needing a pee is presumably not one of them.
Let no one be fooled by the use of the word “person” in “person not of designated sex”. This is NZ First and its leader, the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, a man who likes to see himself as an elder statesman, dressing up a shameful attack on the already harassed transgender community as a concern for protecting women’s spaces.
Adding further to the ludicrousness if it were ever passed, such a law would be totally unenforceable unless the government intends hiring thousands of toilet monitors to peer at us while we’re having said pee.
But then enforceability is beside NZ First’s point — and so, too, is the reality that, if the bill ever makes it out of the famous biscuit tin and into the ballot, it is very unlikely to succeed in the House.
The bill’s purpose is this: by existing at all, it does its job for NZ First by sating, now and at the next election and beyond, those in Peters’ base who are obsessed with a chimera called “wokeness”.
For the rest of us, the Fair Access to Bathrooms Bill — a title completely at odds with its content — might be easy enough to flush away as nonsense. The cynicism of it is another matter.
It’s official: PM a loser (at rugby)
Our Prime Minister, the down-to-earth millionaire, Christopher “Luxe” Luxon, is a man of many parts, at least some of them working.
This week we learned he is a man of brainy parts, or least literature parts, when he turned up to the annual Ockham Book Awards, only to be lectured by a winner that he and his government mates need to read more books, presumably meaning something other than the political and business biographies Luxon favours.
We also learned this week that the PM is a man of lesser parts, too, of boofhead parts, a man who makes silly bets to prove he’s a man’s man. It seems that the Luxe bet that his favourite rugby team would beat someone else’s favourite rugby team. The Luxe lost.
This doesn’t reflect well on his powers of prophecy, and frankly calls into question his constant prediction that he will get “New Zealand back on track”.
Anyway, Luxon lost this silly bet to some bloke who produces Mike Hosking’s radio programme — I believe it’s called The Morning Vent — on Newstalk ZB.
As a result of losing the bet, our size XL PM was made to wear a size XS jersey of the winning team which, on the photographic evidence, found him looking not unlike the Tellytubby, Tinky Winky.
Hilarious or what? Not really.
It’s surely only a matter of time before Luxon goes full boofhead and tells a radio audience what he does in the bathroom, something Luxon’s hero, former PM and fellow boofhead John Key, did on Radio Hauraki back in 2015 when he revealed to the world he had peed in the shower — a pee that really should have attracted a $2000 fine.
