In the muck at Fieldays

Now that the charade of the follicle-a-deux summit is over, and the leader of the free world has announced he has denuked the situation, we can all breathe a tremendous sigh of relief.

The boys have promised to put their rockets away and stop playing war games at the end of the rug, leaving us to turn our thoughts to more pressing matters at home.

Big with child, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern barely had time to lay a hand on a layette before the prime minister-in-waiting, Winston Peters, scuppered the three-strikes plans of her justice minister, Andrew Little. Shortly after that brutal reminder that, in NZ First’s top drawer, three strikes is the bottom liner, the coalition party prematurely carpe diem-ed with Shane Jones doing his block over Fonterra at Fieldays.

For the last two weeks, the media has prefaced any show from the prime minister with suggestions that this would be one of her last, or the last, before knocking off work to prepare for the birth of her child.

Good-naturedly, the expectant mother had to grin and bear it as mounds of onesies were presented to her, while media went on endless fishing expeditions to discover the sex of the child, and Rumpelstiltskin its name.

By Thursday, Ardern was still very much the prime minister at large, carrying all before her (and carrying it low) at Fieldays and getting rather snippy about having to defend Jones’ attack on Fonterra. That was Jones’ personal opinion, rather than Government policy – end of story, Ardern repeatedly said during her walkabout.

The PM was having difficulty presenting her relentlessly positive sunny self. If Jones had suddenly materialised by her side, she looked as if she could have cheerfully slapped him in a onesie, laid him in a cowpat, and run a tractor over him a couple of times.

Talk about kicking a man when she’s down and about to have a baby. Even though it’s still baby steps for the coalition Government, and Peters has always maintained that he doesn’t give a fig for the polls, his party has been polling abysmally. It’s all very well hooking up with Labour to form a government, but it doesn’t mean that you have to get eaten up for your effort.

Peters’ fans were beginning to wonder if the old war horse still had it in him. Speculation was rife that his being missing in action was due to going all soft and avuncular over making Jacinda his legacy, when really he had been busy grooming Jonesie.

By Friday, Jones’ attack on Fonterra and calls for the sacking of its chairman (heartily endorsed by Peters) had produced a counter-attack from Lloyd Dowling, a mad-as-hell Waikato dairy farmer. Dowling described Jones’ comments as disgraceful, that if any head should roll it should be his, and that Peters and Jones should butt out of dairy business. Cowpat landed in, tractors rolled.

No comfort then for the PM that, in her absence, she has left the Government in a farm-calmed, safe pair of hands. But Peters and Jones fared better than Labour deputy leader and Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis, who has looked decidedly shaky, as in downright terrified, when he didn’t know the number of double bunks at the new Waikeria prison.

Davis has admitted that he suffers from preperformance nerves before public speaking, a condition that seems to have worsened with his elevation up the Labour Party ladder. Perhaps media trainer Brian Edwards should be rushed in to perform a corrective King’s Speech number on him. Either that or Davis and Jones should be immediately incarcerated and double-bunked to undergo an emergency confidence transfusion.

I got a genuine thrill seeing te reo Ma¯ori atop the front page. It was beautiful.

Let’s be honest, Baby Boomers will always be bigger and better than us. They soaked up the decency and fortitude of their parents, then dynamited them. They were pirates, adventurers, discoverers, and they were still really only kids when the smoke cleared on their new world.

Generation X could never do that. Gen X is what happens when pirates eventually have kids of their own. We were smaller somehow, unable or unwilling to supplant our elders, left with nothing but a weird name. Essentially, we are the me of the overlapping generations.

Until recently, I thought the big social and environmental battles had bloomed and faded while I was still a kid; the new ones, I thought, would be fought mostly by Millennials. The middlers like me just get persistently chafed.

I mention all this because, for once, it appears the post-Boomer generation is finding its voice.

Wellington City Council, under Gen X mayor Justin Lester, has launched a new policy, Te Tauihu, which will look to make it a te reo Ma¯ori city by 2040. I’m not sure how they picked the date for bilingual totality: maybe it was decided with an eye to gently farewelling the pirates and adventurers into the sweet comfort of rest homes and cemeteries. (Good luck with that.)

I’m also not entirely sure what this Wellington of the future will look like. But the first changes will include welcome signs in te reo Ma¯ori, new dual names for some of the city’s landmarks (such as the beautiful Te Nga¯kau for the toothnumbingly dull Civic Square), and a preference for Ma¯ori names for new streets.

Te reo Pa¯keha¯ is everywhere. It’s an inescapable fact that I even have to employ te reo Pa¯keha¯ to rail against it.

So, I like the new policy. Obviously. It’s good to see more reo Ma¯ori in the public spaces of the city. I would love it to go further, and faster, but the unanimous decision by councillors is a decent and enlightened pushback against how things were done up until last week.

Another fantastic move came with the unveiling of a reo Ma¯ori masthead – the chunk of real estate at the top of page 1 – for the region’s newspaper, The Dominion Post. (Obvious disclaimer: I write for it.)

The decision to run with the new name, Te Upoko-o-te-Ika, during Matariki and alongside the policy launch is both a small step and a significant one. I got a genuine thrill seeing te reo Ma¯ori atop the front page. It was beautiful: a simple, powerful gesture of inclusiveness for tangata whenua and the decent Pa¯keha¯ of this place.

It means something to many people, and the act itself came with risks that could have been avoided, if wished, by following the safe path of