Friday: National MP stood down after behaviour finds him in contempt
Last week’s column touched on National’s long-running problems with the badly behaved men in its caucus and speculated that they’ll continue to haunt the party. As if on cue, Parliament’s privileges committee found National MP Tim van de Molen in contempt of Parliament for his threatening behaviour towards Labour MP Shanan Halbert. Leader Christopher Luxon stood van de Molen down from all his portfolios.
In recent years, National has struggled with candidate and MP selection: the party often shows poor judgment when choosing the people it wants in Parliament, who tend to reveal themselves as louts and bullies. And this has had terrible consequences for National, which keeps promising it’ll do better, but never quite succeeds. The calibre of MPs across most parties can be questionable, but no other party has as many walking-and-talking liabilities as National.
Sunday: Chris Hipkins rules out working with NZ First in ‘negative’ speech
Chris Hipkins delivered a cleverly written and astonishingly negative speech entitled “Working with Others” that deftly accomplished a number of political goals simultaneously.
- It rules out New Zealand First as a coalition partner. Hipkins is shocked – SHOCKED! – to observe that Winston Peters is engaging in populist xenophobic politics, a tactic that’s been a routine feature of Peters’s career since the mid-1990s, including stints as deputy prime minister in two previous governments. But now that Peters has ruled Labour out, these long-standing flaws have suddenly become intolerable. Any remaining NZ First voters who support Labour now know they’re voting for a National government.
- This lets Hipkins frame Peters as a problem for National leader Luxon, who refuses to rule NZ First out and has spent much of his media time this week clumsily dodging questions on this subject. (Like so many before him, Luxon deludes himself that he can manage Peters if they form a government together. He can’t, and a National-Act-NZ First government would simply lurch from one tantrum, scandal, and self-inflicted crisis to another, just as all the other NZ First coalition governments have done.)
- Hipkins then fuses NZ First’s new-found opposition to transgender rights with Luxon’s religious beliefs, Act’s radical treaty policies and National’s conservative faction. Instead of defending his government’s rather patchy record or its even patchier plans for a third term, Hipkins can focus on denouncing the alleged racism, misogyny and transphobia of his political opponents.
- Trans rights have become one of the defining issues of the Left – it’s more important to many progressives than climate or inequality. So far this year, Hipkins has presented himself as a deeply centrist, even conservative figure, and by foregrounding trans rights, he’ll reassure left-wing commentators, activists and potential donors that he’s a reliable member of their tribe.
- And all of this allows Labour to conduct a highly negative campaign while taking the moral high ground. It’s the exact opposite of Jacinda Ardern’s relentless positivity, but far more suited to Hipkins’ combative nature.
Monday: National leader interrupted during press conference
Two weeks ago, a candidate from the anti-vax coalition party Freedoms NZ heckled Hipkins at the Ōtara Market. On Monday, he heckled Luxon at a press conference in Pakuranga, resulting in an instantly iconic photograph that’s launched a thousand memes.
"Can I have my ball back please??"
— Craig (@KiwiCraig74) August 28, 2023
"Sorry we've already sold it" pic.twitter.com/eUd85kKIqG
Labour announced a “savings and efficiency” package: it will trim $4 billion from the public service, on top of the $4 billion in public-sector cutbacks Finance Minister Grant Robertson announced just a few months ago in the budget. Apparently, none of this will impact frontline services, suggesting there may have been something to all those allegations of public-sector waste.
It is hard to believe Labour will really reduce spending by such a large amount, especially if the economy slows over the next year. The general consensus among political commentators is that this was a political trap.
National released its tax plan two days later, and Finance Minister Robertson wanted to force National’s deputy leader, Nicola Willis, to recalculate her costings at the last minute. But Willis seems to have a spy somewhere in the Beehive or Treasury– she leaked Robertson’s GST policy weeks before it was launched – and her package seemed to prepare for this very eventuality: it relied on new sources of revenue and cutting other streaming spends that Robertson’s announcement today left untouched.
Tuesday: Te Pāti Māori Leader suspended amid court suppression order breach
Parliament voted to name and suspend Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi from Parliament today, as punishment for intentionally breaching a court suppression order last week. It’s seen as very serious in political circles – he loses a day’s salary! – although it’s pretty trivial compared with what happens to non-MPs if we deliberately disobey court orders.
Waititi wasn’t at Parliament to hear the decision. He was busy modelling at New Zealand Fashion Week. It’s not impossible that this was all a campaign tactic: Te Pāti Māori does not attend Parliament very regularly – it is, after all, a colonial power structure. They’re often more interested in protesting it or disrupting its proceedings, and this has been a very successful strategy for them, with many of the recent polls showing the party at around the 5% mark. They don’t have to worry about the threshold, since they’ll almost certainly capture at least one seat, but on these numbers, they’ll bring in a respectable number of list MPs.
Wednesday: National unveils ‘clever’ tax package while Labour announces mental health rollout
National finally released its grand tax package. There’s more substantive analysis here, but the top-level take is that it’s politically clever but a lot of the financial assumptions are probably nonsense.
Labour released a very good policy today: a nationwide rollout of delivering mental health “co-response teams” for emergency services. Many of the people encountered by police and ambulance responders are in a state of mental stress, and initial trials indicate that these patients attended to by co-response teams are less likely to present to an ED or require hospitalisation.
Here’s the bad news. The pilot was originally launched by the previous National government, and when the government changed, new Health Minister David Clark cancelled the funding. So, a very promising policy was delayed for six years for no evident reason. This is one of the worst things that happens in our politics, and there should be more of a stigma to it. Clark was demoted for going on a bike ride during a Covid lockdown, and obviously that wasn’t great, but killing a promising project that helps the most vulnerable to spite his political opponents feels quite a lot worse.
Thursday: New Zealand Parliament nears end as election campaign looms
It’s the final session of Parliament today. At the end of it, the House will adjourn and next Friday, the Governor-General will stand on the steps of Parliament and formally dissolve the 53rd Parliament of New Zealand. Three weeks after that, advance voting begins. About 60% of the electorate cast an advance vote in 2020, and this figure is predicted to be even higher this year.
Towards the end of the last campaign, Ardern and Robertson came to my university and delivered two electrifying speeches to the vast sea of people filling the courtyard. At the end of it all, Ardern asked, “How many of you have already voted?” Every hand in the courtyard went up and the politicians visibly sagged with exhaustion. It’s already been a long election campaign, and the official campaign hasn’t even started yet.
