Politics
NZ First may have inadvertently saved Labour from an election gaffe.
Diplomacy is often mordantly described as the art of letting someone else have your way. As the transtasman Prime Ministers have just proven, it can be even more perverse than that.
Many onlookers would be shocked to know that although Jacinda Ardern and Scott Morrison didn’t quite clink champagne flutes and do a sweet highfive after their tense-seeming joint press conference this week, both walked away quietly happy. It was pure theatre, and even though Morrison’s countenance developed the pallor of an unbaked scone during his earbashing, he was fully expecting it.
Ardern’s invective against Australia’s continued deportation of errant New Zealanders who have been in Australia since childhood was, she knew, utterly pointless in a “having one’s way” sense. The policy, though iniquitous and senseless, is unlikely to change under any stripe of Australian government. It’s popular enough with our neighbouring voters that not even a PM uncomfortable with its illogicality would lightly consider changing it. Remember, this is a country with a living-memory heritage of “White Australia” immigration. Many Australians resent even law-abiding immigrants from New Zealand. Any means of downsizing the influx is fine by them.
So Ardern’s steely lecture will have done Morrison as much good domestically as it did her on this side of the Tasman. Sure enough, there was much Aussie public and media snarling about our PM mouthing off to their PM – as there would be if Morrison came here and told her how to suck eggs.
We have differences, some sincere, such as our varying defence and foreign-affairs stances, and some disingenuous, such as their largely fictional objection to our apple exports and our insistence that Russell Crowe is a Kiwi. Domestic politics trumps all, though, and far from being a grave diplomatic rift, this was pure
win-win.
BROWN SHIELDS
In any case, Ardern doesn’t need to go looking abroad for fights to pick. She has a finger now on auto-wag with respect to New Zealand First’s Shane Jones who, in insulting immigrants, has swapped his dog whistle for a megaphone. Daringly, he is using two brown shields. One is “I cannot be racist because I’m Māori”. The other is that his slagging off of Indian immigrants is powered by complaints from the Indian community itself; therefore, it can’t be racist, times-two.
This is no mutual backscratch. It may win NZ First some conservative rump votes – though it would be nice to think not – but it doesn’t flatter Ardern to constantly have to chastise Jones without being able to visit consequences upon him.
For all his obnoxious rhetoric, he’s a valuable member of the Cabinet. His provincial growth strategy and the upscaling of forestry are substantive planks of the Government’s policy.
However, his vainglorious swaggering at each Provincial Growth Fund bestowal and his blatant efforts to prioritise Northland – the poorest region but also the one whose seat NZ First badly needs to win – are generating a rotten smell. As for blackguarding Indians just as his leader, Winston Peters, returned from a trip to court a trade deal with India … a teeny bit sackable, one would have thought.
How long until the Government’s polling shows Jones is a net liability? If he’s not engineering a coalition rift with the tacit agreement of the rest of his caucus, it’s time someone dosed his tea. His mannered articulacy does not discount his flagrant disrespect of Ardern.
A managed split with NZ First has always been in her bottom drawer, though Jones could obviate this by detonating the “I will not be
How long until the Government’s polling shows Shane Jones is a net liability?
silenced!” martyr bomb and backbenching himself. Either way, his shtick can’t continue.
VOTE CLEARASIL
But Ardern also needs to reflect on what NZ First may have done to save the Government from a catastrophic electoral gaffe over the electric vehicle (EV) feebate scheme. At first glance, it looked as though the party’s sheer bloody-mindedness had spiked the Greens’ cherished policy. Lots of voters will have been looking forward to EVs becoming more affordable, in tandem with a punitive new impost on gas guzzlers. But as National has rejoiced in protesting, farmers and others reliant on grunty utes would be seriously out of pocket as no EV yet invented could be substituted; as would lower-income folk who can afford only old used petrol cars. And there’s the Treasury’s point that the people most likely to buy EVs for the next few years are those most likely to be able to afford them anyway, subsidised or not. So wealthy townies would tootle their leafy lanes in their Leafs at the expense of farmers – already under the cosh on many other policy fronts – and the poor.
This is would be to votes what Clearasil claims to be to pimples.
NZ First’s answer was exemptions for farmers and rural folk who can demonstrate they need serious torque for their work or properties. The Greens then insisted on a strict limit to those exemptions, understood to be of about 4000.
If there really are only 4000 New Zealanders who regularly need to tow stuff for their work, then our economy is on a secret, hurtling trajectory towards de-agriculturalisation and we really should be told.
NZ First has probably saved the Greens from a slight on a continuum with that of which Jones is guilty against the Indian community. To say only a very few thousand rural toilers deserve to be protected against unfair penalties would have been divisive and confrontational.
National will be so disappointed. The mere impression that this might be happening is paying it dividends already, according to its polling.
The Greens, despite having done an understandable amount of brow-smiting about NZ First’s intransigence, will need to give more ground before the EV feebate can be added to the Budget list. They’re still smarting from the Government’s prioritisation of roads in its infrastructure spending plans and the continuing indications that the $6 billion Let’s Get Wellington Moving programme is already redundant.
Remembering that 2019 was a “mega mast” year for the bush tucker on which rodents feed, the Greens are only too well aware of the size of the policy dead rats they’re now having to swallow. A failure on feebates, however, would equate rodentially to digesting a 50kg capybara. Surely the feebate exemptions can be negotiated down to a middling Central
American agouti?
The Greens are only too well aware of the size of the policy dead rats they’re now having to swallow.