Beehive Diaries

This week, Beehive Diaries checks Judith Collins’ claim she wouldn’t call anyone a ‘wokester’, and which MP got a donation from John Key in the 2020 election — and which MP turned one down .

Tuesday

Sir John Key puts his money where his mouth is Election returns revealed Sir John Key donated $2000 to his former staffer, National MP Nicola Willis for her campaign in Wellington Central. Willis was once an adviser and speech writer to Key, and Key has tipped her as a potential future leader.

However, no donation was listed from Key to his other pick of leader: Christopher Luxon because,

Key said, Luxon told him he did not need it.

Luxon, now Botany MP, got the fourth highest sum from other donations — $73,000 — although Willis was also fairly high up with just under $51,000.

The only donation PM Jacinda Ardern declared in her Mt Albert campaign was $6540 from a fundraising debate.

Wednesday

Wokey, wokey! National MP Simon Bridges’ claim the Police Commissioner Andrew Coster was a “wokester” resulted in his boss Judith Collins advising him to target ministers rather than public servants, and virtuously claiming

”I wouldn’t call someone that”. Beehive Diaries checked her claim. In July last year, Collins deemed Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern too woke: “Perhaps maybe she should stop being quite so woke and wake up a bit,” she said to Magic Talk. On October 5, she told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking the Reserve Bank Governor (yes, a public servant) needed to be careful of his embrace of “wokeness”.

In the same interview, NCEA was also too woke: “There’s too many photography classes, too much media studies, too much woke stuff.” Farmers, however, were a different story. “Farmers will never be woke,” she declared in Parliament.

In the Stuff election debate , she even defined “woke” as “people who want to talk a lot of nonsense, and never actually do it”.

Who escaped the dog box?

National MP Nick Smith led the charge in trying to draw out the seemingly endless debate in Parliament on Māori wards legislation, speaking time and again as it went through under urgency. One phrase caught the ears of Beehive Diaries.

“And I will say it sticks out like dogs’ balls,” Smith declared. Minister Nanaia Mahuta argued “you shouldn’t be able to refer to dogs’ balls”.

Deputy Speaker Adrian Rurawhe reflected on dogs’ balls before deciding he would not pull Smith up on it.

Thursday

Hipkins gets a present Covid—19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has been taking a disposable plastic water bottle for rehydration during his Covid-19 press conferences — and that clearly did not fit with the PM’s environmentally friendly bent. So she presented him with a NZ Olympics team stainless steel bottle. “I thought a present would be better than just nagging,” she told Beehive Diaries.

It was a present, with an implicit nag in it: but Hipkins proudly displayed his new bottle on its first outing. The bottles sell for $46 on the NZ Olympic merchandise site — although Beehive Diaries is reliably informed Ardern re-gifted.