OPINION: Climate change dodged, child poverty ignored, landlords and gun-owners dignified. I badly wanted to be surprised by our first formal three-party coalition, writes John Campbell, and in a way I really am.
“Let people surprise you”, my boss, Frank Perry, told me, when I was very new to journalism.
It was great advice. See people as they are, not as you expect them to be.
I kept repeating it to myself over the weeks of the coalition negotiations. Hoping to be surprised. Allowing for that precious possibility.
As an aside, I really liked those weeks. They were a dayless blur of small, hypnotic repetitions. It was a bit like The Terminal, that lesser Spielberg movie in which Tom Hanks plays a man (let’s call him Christopher) stranded in an airport because he doesn’t know whether Winston Peters is going to be in Wellington or Auckland. (I think that was the plot? Or something like it.)
I also liked watching the world-famous mergers and acquisitions expert, Christopher Luxon, effortlessly merging and acquiring. (Tomorrow. Tomorrow.) It reminded me of when I was an All Black.
But all good things must come to an end.
And end it did. On Thursday afternoon, when Chris Luxon did a media stand-up in the old Parliament building, singing “it’s a lovely day tomorrow”, and brandishing the phrase “massive alignment around the goals”. Twice.
The goals they were massively aligned around became clear in Parliament’s Banquet Hall, on Friday morning. Although “massive” felt like an overstatement. Miniature, seemed like a better ‘m’ word. Or mean.
The ultimate merger
Out they came to make their announcement, the coalition partners, looking like they’d all just won a car in a National Heart Foundation raffle and had come to collect the keys. As it turns out, Winston Peters and David Seymour are sharing the same car, getting 18 months each. Yes, Luxo the M&A expert was so good to his word that he acquired power by merging two men into the same job.
Woke as.
Aptly, as everyone has pointed out, it was all announced on Black Friday. A two-for-one deal does feel like the kind of thing Aucklanders would entomb themselves in a Westfield carpark for. But David and Winston? Whose shopping list was that?
Winston Peters gets to be Deputy Prime Minister first, of course. Whoever’s responsible for that is either Winston Peters himself, or someone without a particularly robust understanding of our history. Peters campaigns best when he’s in opposition. New Zealand First has never, once, been returned to government after being in a coalition. Any remote chance of retaining his loyal participation in (to use his least favourite phrase) “Cabinet collective responsibility” would have been enhanced by making him deputy at the end of the three years, not at the beginning. It’s harder to go rogue when you’re second in charge. But his bauble time will be over. (This ain’t his first rodeo.)
“We believe in this country. We are ambitious for it”, Christopher Luxon said.
“We went to the wire for our people,” Winston Peters.
Both men appeared to be channelling something rehearsed. As if they didn’t quite trust themselves to give their true feelings expression.
Dignity is coming for landlords
Christopher Luxon, in particular, seemed less triumphant than might have been expected on such a big day. When he tried to explain how National would fund its tax cuts, given their foreign buyers’ tax was neither merged nor acquired by New Zealand First, he stumbled, uncharacteristically and unconvincingly. This is a defeat, not only for Luxon and Nicola Willis, but also, perhaps, for housing developer, Winton, who recently appointed Steven Joyce to their board, and whose CEO has been a significant donor to National.
David Seymour, on the other hand, evoked an almost sacred sense of responsibility. His role, clearly, is to care for people brutalised during the past six years.
“Landlords will, again, be treated with dignity”, Seymour promised. Oh, the dreadful indignities landlords have suffered. Licensed firearm owners? “Respect and dignity” is on the way. Thank the Lord. “We’ll finally see a return to treating rural New Zealand with respect and dignity.”
On it went. Respect and dignity. Like a sermon. Or a sulk made formal.
'Need not race'
Perhaps most striking, in National’s agreement with both ACT and New Zealand First, is the extraordinary attention reserved for Māori.
This is the coalition's heart of darkness.
Sometimes, such is their shared zeal, both agreements use the same words: “Remove co-governance from the delivery of public services."
Both agreements insist, in exactly the same words: “Issue a Cabinet Office circular to all central government organisations that it is the Government’s expectation that public services should be prioritised on the basis of need, not race.”
ACT get to introduce a “Treaty Principles Bill” whose fate beyond Select Committee is unspecified but will tell us much about the legacy Christopher Luxon desires for himself.
New Zealand First, who, lest we forget, won all the Māori electorates in 1996, almost seem fuelled by a kind of fervour, or animus.
- “Stop all work on He Puapua.”
- “Confirm that the Coalition Government does not recognise the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as having any binding legal effect on New Zealand.”
- “Conduct a comprehensive review of all legislation (except when it is related to, or substantive to, existing full and final Treaty settlements) that includes “The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”.
- Ensure all public service departments have their primary name in English, except for those specifically related to Māori.
And on…
The idea that a single human life will be improved by demanding that Waka Kotahi be called the New Zealand Transport Agency is the strangest fancy. This is frontier country stuff. The late-night ravings of a man alone in a bar. Except Winston’s not alone. Christopher has agreed to it.
In the New Zealand First agreement, some of this is listed under the heading “Equal Citizenship”, which seems outrageous in a country in which Māori die an average of seven years younger than non-Māori, experience persistent inequities in health, are more likely to leave school with low or no qualifications, and are over-represented in the criminal justice system to such a great extent that they make up 52 percent of the prison population.
There is a kind of re-colonising here. The net effect seems deeply regressive. “I’m really proud of the negotiations,” Chris Luxon said on Thursday afternoon. But is he proud of this? Really?
Yes, the lines in the sand that aren’t there. The dearth of decent and transformative hope. The best sense of who we are, or who we could be, that we no longer seem to want to hold on to.
And the wilful omissions.
A climate of denial
Incredibly, as parts of Tairāwhiti, Hawke's Bay and the South Island’s West Coast face what Hekia Parata has called an “existential crisis” at the hands of climate change, there is so little about climate change that someone must have dropped those sections on the way to the Banquet Hall.
National’s coalition agreement with ACT contains no reference to climate change at all.
National’s coalition agreement with New Zealand First contains the insistence that climate change policies “do not undermine national energy security”.
It’s as if we can do nothing and we’ll be fine.
In this respect, the agreements feel like they come from a time before we knew better. Before the science. Before the floods and the cyclones. As if they were messages in a bottle, tossed onto lower and less erosive tides decades ago. Christopher Luxon has talked, repeatedly, of getting the “country moving forward”. But this doesn’t feel forward, at all. Much of it feels deeply and nostalgically conservative. A winding back of the clock.
Child poverty not a priority
Aspiration? Not for the poor. There are no poverty reduction targets (or discussion of them) in either agreement.
Last week, “six groups working at the front line of child poverty” wrote an open letter to the incoming Government urging a meeting “before Christmas”, “so they understand how serious the problem of childhood poverty in New Zealand is.”
“Mr Luxon has committed to keeping the Child Poverty Reduction Act (2018) and halving child poverty by 2028”, the six groups, including Child Poverty Action (CPAG) wrote. “But the groups say this will take a concerted effort in several areas, and none of the parties about to take power have revealed exactly how they plan to do this.”
Nothing in the collation agreements reveals that. Nothing in the coalition agreements suggests the plight of children in poverty is even seen.
The open letter quotes the Dunedin Study’s Professor Richie Poulton, from the last interview he ever gave. “You can't really undo what happens during childhood. So the experience of intense or regular poverty is long-lasting… What do we need to address really importantly, really importantly? Poverty.”
It may be that today’s most substantive announcements about responding to poverty come in the form of punishing the criminality that’s disproportionately likely to arise from profound childhood disadvantage. “Three strikes will be back”, David Seymour said. “Prison capacity for adult and youth offenders will be expanded.”
Proud.
We should have known this was coming, I suppose. But the part of me that’s open to surprises did dare to hope that Christopher Luxon’s aspirations would be sufficiently inclusive, sufficiently heartfelt, sufficiently Christian (in the best sense of that word) to reach out beyond the anti-woke, beyond the scab picking, beyond the political equivalent of road rage, and beyond the dreary orthodoxy of his pitch at the “squeezed middle”, to something that would lift us all.
Perhaps he still will. Labour did less than they promised. Maybe National will do more?
“I’ve spoken with the Governor General to inform her that I can form a government,” Christopher Luxon tweeted (or X’d, or whatever the hell it’s called) on Friday afternoon. “On Monday I look forward to being sworn in as New Zealand’s 42nd Prime Minister alongside ministers from National, ACT and New Zealand First who are ready to get to work to make this great country even better.”
Better.
The empty table
“The government you elect is the government you deserve,” said Thomas Jefferson. And this is the government we elected.
I keep returning to that photo they posted, the first time they all met together.
Winston Peters, Chris Luxon and David Seymour. Look at them.
It was art imitating life. Everything in that photo is empty. The room. The walls. The table. The glasses (which are still upturned because Winston hasn’t yet given Chris and David permission to use them). And the men, too, as it turned out. Empty of ideas.
Dreams?
Not really.
But what peculiar obsessions they’ve revealed.
"Refocus the curriculum on academic achievement and not ideology, including the removal and replacement of the gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines,” New Zealand First’s agreement with National demands, in the six lines it devotes to “Education”.
Dear old Winston. At the beginning of September, as it became increasingly apparent that the old bastard, or the old master (or both), depending on your point of view, was ascending towards the five percent threshold, I wrote about how he has, and hasn’t, used his brilliance for good. His precocious ability to articulate the discontent of those for whom establishment politics has an almost condescending disregard, but which he frequently squanders by various forms of dog whistling. What a terrible waste.
It all feels like such a waste. The first formal, three-party coalition Government in our country’s history, and it somehow manages to seem small.
“We cannot wait to get stuck in”, Christopher Luxon said, as he looked up from this narrow, limp vision of our future.
Get “stuck in” to what?
And to whom?
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