Ghosts of the past present as parliamentary year kicks off
It was hardly auspicious that the day after a demoralising poll, the Opposition began the new year of Parliament by bungling the drafting of the traditional motion of no confidence in the Government.
This is not the way any Opposition wishes to make history. It must also have discomforted leader Simon Bridges that watching from the public gallery, like the Ghost of Oppositions Past, was Labour’s leader-beforelast-before-last, David Cunliffe.
There is no figure in politics more ex- than an ex-Opposition leader, but it’s a growing category as successive Oppositions have had to work their way through several leaders before finding one who could lead them back across the aisle to Government. The stats are not on Bridges’ side, as he’s only leader number two.
Government MPs had fun loudly congratulating as No 3 Bridges’ colleague Judith Collins, who scored 6 per cent to her leader’s 5 per cent as preferred prime minister in the new poll.
She couldn’t be accused of looking disloyally smug about this – though she did - because it’s the duty of every MP whose party has just had a bad poll to blaze with feigned unconcern. Even the notoriously irascible Opposition House Leader Gerry Brownlee looked as though he’d had his Happy Face botoxed in place – though his features resumed their normal scrunch of irritation when teased about the botched notice of motion.
Bridges was hearty and convincing as he affected to laugh in the face of fickle public opinion, reminding the House of the Government’s many failures, including KiwiBuild and the glacial progress of the Provincial Growth Fund, which he noted took twice as many bureaucrats to administer than it had created new jobs.
He excelled at No Confidence-aerobics, snarling, drawling, scoffing, arm-flinging and doing much accusatory pointing across the aisle. Despite the prime minister’s lectures about kindness, life for New Zealanders was ‘‘not all beer and roses’’, Bridges said. The Government was ‘‘building houses no-one wants, houses that people can’t afford – houses that aren’t even being built.’’
He basked in the hilarity greeting his line, about fisheries conservation, that Green coleader Marama Davidson was ‘‘too concerned about the C-word and not enough about the sea food’’. Alas, he got an even bigger laugh for, ‘‘The National Government that I lead . . .’’
Bridges discovered that, at 5 per cent himself, to mock the Greens’ and NZ First’s flagging support was to paste a bullseye on his own backside. ‘‘It’s not us you need to worry about, it’s them,’’ Finance Minister Grant Robertson interjected, pointing to Bridges’ backbench.
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters followed Bridges’ speech with his customary, ‘‘Listen up, sonny!’’ lecture, belittling his legal career – though to be fair, Peters belittles every other person with a law degree as having a vastly inferior legal mind to his own. Bridges, he said, had inanely decried Labour’s tertiary policy as being ‘‘free fees. I’ll say this slowly: you can’t have ‘free’ fees. The term is fees-free!’’
As Peters hurtled through global electoral instability – ‘‘V’nzuel-lection-Mid-least’lectionF’ganstan-Stralia-Can’dalection’’and machine-gunned through ‘‘pettifoggery’’, ‘‘neoliberal twit-ism’’ and ‘‘bulldust’’, Brownlee called for Parliament’s interpreter.
But Peters’ message was summarisable in the one short sentence he did manage to say one word at a time, after National’s Nick Smith needled him about his party’s low poll rating. ‘‘Here’s a visual poll for you: I’m here and he (Smith) is there.’’