Red peak or dead peak stalemate continues
It was a weekof flags, songs and scouts in the newspaper, writes PHILIP MATTHEWS.
Flagged out
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges famously described the Falklands War as two bald men fighting over a comb. The New Zealand flag change debate felt like that this week as the question over whether the ‘‘red peak’’ design should be included in the referendum, along with the four, dull, official selections, turned into a childish stand-off between Prime Minister John Key and Labour leader Andrew Little. By Wednesday, each man was reduced to releasing letters they had written to the other to the increasingly disbelieving media. In short: Key would add ‘‘red peak’’ to the four choices if Little agreed to support his timeline which is about choosing an alternative first and asking if people even want a change second. Little said he would add ‘‘red peak’’ only if he could have his yes/no question in the first ballot with the five options. By the end of the week, we were still at a stalemate. The public is widely believed to be completely over it.
Brand new leader
John Key may be making a hash of his flag change project but across the Tasman he is venerated as a political mastermind. At a press conference in Canberra on Monday, fresh from rolling Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Australia’s new leader Malcolm Turnbull praised Key’s political skills and savvy: ‘‘My firm belief is that to be a successful leader ... you have to be able to bring people with you by respecting their intelligence in the manner you explain things ... John Key has been able to achieve very significant economic reforms in New Zealand by doing just that.’’ Stability also helps: Turnbull is Australia’s fifth prime
minister since Key became ours in 2008.
Act, naturally
New, young ACT leader and Epsom MP David Seymour has wrestled the mantle of Parliament’s most amusing and unpredictable character from such earlier title-holders as Tau Henare, John Banks and even Maurice Williamson, who has fought hard to keep it. Telling depressed students to ‘‘harden up’’ was a clanger that brought a swift backlash from the mental health community, but the line about the French ‘‘loving the coq’’ was the funniest political blooper in years. And at least Seymour saw the humour in it. Behind the scenes, and unlike some of those other names, he has got on with party business: liberalising drinking hours and putting the everdivisive.
Scout’s honour
What to make of the first week of Mediaworks’ cheap and cheerful gossip site, Scout? Exclusive footage of Mike Hosking tidying up his car seemed like a soft start but no one could have anticipated the publicity bonanza that came when ScoutsNZ publicly objected to the appropriation of their name. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting between ScoutsNZ officials and MediaWorks managers when they discussed ‘‘a potential breach of the Scout Association of New Zealand Amendment Act’’. Were they in uniform?
Songs from the life of Key
You are officially old when you know the classic songs from 1981 that were nominated for the ‘‘lost scroll’’ in the APRA Silver Scrolls this week but not the 2015 songs. For the record, Counting the Beat by the Swingers was the utterly deserving winner from the 1981 list and Multi-Love by Unknown Mortal Orchestra was the 2015 winner. ‘‘It’s great that there’s so much interest in (the 1981 scroll), it was such a fun time to be alive,’’ said Don McGlashan, who was a finalist for the still relevant 1981 protest song, There is No Depression in New Zealand.