Claire Trevett’s Beehive Diaries

The first week back at Parliament after a long recess delivered a poll that gave Labour some mirth, an unfortunate phrase, and a slating for Kris Faafoi.

Tuesday Christopher Luxon’s unfortunate turn of phrase

Many comparisons have been made between Sir John Key and his heir apparent, Christopher Luxon, and this week delivered another.

Key had a sometimes unfortunate tendency to mix words up or create completely new ones. One example was “lewid” — a mix of lurid and lewd.

Luxon has now twice claimed people are getting “jacked off” with the Government.

Anybody with access to the internet can look this up for themselves in the Urban Dictionary, but it is a relatively well-known term for something unseemly.

Much analysis was put into Luxon’s use of it. Was it a combination of “hacked off” and “jerked around”?

Wednesday

Kris Faafoi’s lesson in biting the hand that feeds

National’s broadcasting spokeswoman Melissa Lee picked a bad day to have Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi on about whether government funding for journalism would result in political interference or a biased media.

Faafoi, a former journalist, responded by pointing to the separation of politicians from the fund and the two “glowing” reviews of his own performance a minister, published that very day. By “glowing” he meant in the nuclear radioactive sense.

One was a Newsroom article excoriating Faafoi for failings across his portfolios, the other was NZ Herald deputy political editor Derek Cheng’s feature on the lack of progress Faafoi had made in the justice sector.

In both, the primary criticism was over Faafoi’s refusal to do interviews with the media.

Thursday An FTD for the unit of delivery

The Government released Budget documents setting out Treasury’s advice to the Finance Minister on ministers’ bids for spending in the 2021 Budget. Alas, the one failure to deliver in the document drop was for the Government’s new delivery unit.

The unit was set up this year to monitor and drive the Government delivery of its projects.

It is dubbed the delivery unit, but Labour has something of an aversion to the word delivery after the faceplant of PM Jacinda Ardern’s “Year of Delivery” in 2019. As Labour would prefer to phrase it, the papers for the implementation unit were not implemented on time. They were sent out the next day – so it can at least claim quicker delivery than KiwiBuild.

Judith Collins gets the last laugh — if she does say so herself

In Labour’s Pick on Judith relay race, Transport Minister Michael Wood took the baton from Grant Robertson in laughing at Collins for being overtaken by Act leader David Seymour in the polls. Wood was facing questions about the Newshub Reid Research poll showing only 11.9 per cent of people supported spending $785m on a cycle bridge. Wood responded that the bridge was at least more popular than Judith Collins, who got 8.2 per cent as preferred PM in the same poll. Collins got the last word. When the exchange was tweeted, Collins replied “how popular was Michael Wood?”

She then spoiled it by laughing at her own joke with three laughing emoji faces.