Luxon's artificial sweetener is Chippy's bitter pill
But what about Winston's X factor?
The Luxonian promise that the new government ‘will grow the economy’ reminds me of Robert Muldoon’s Think Big strategy of the early eighties – except that Luxon’s government will administer artificial sweeteners to keep his business-class passengers happy: tax-breaks for landlords (including himself), easy immigration rules to ‘deliver’ cheap labour, and lax environmental regulations so developers can build soulless suburbs and drive around in SUVs.
National/ACT won’t use the tools at government’s disposal to enhance the productivity of the people and the natural resources that the country already possesses. An example of something worthwhile would be a policy to boost skill levels through tertiary education – a sector that Labour has left in a complete mess.
As education minister, Chris Hipkins oversaw a disastrous centralisation of institutes of technology and polytechs (ITPs) while deliberately leaving the universities to stew in their own juice. The consequent meltdown of tertiary education institutions made headlines, with phrases like ‘death spiral’ in some accounts, but this didn’t become a big election issue.
National and ACT have never been friends of tertiary education, and their voters despise academics, so those right-wing parties have little credibility in this field. Consequently, Luxon didn’t use ailing polytechs as a major attack line against Hipkins. And Chippy was no doubt relieved that this embarrassing subject didn’t feature much.
There’s been plenty of good analysis in the press about the reasons for Labour’s humiliating loss, but not enough yet on why National failed to wipe the floor with them.
Hipkins got the better of Luxon in debates, National had little to offer by way of strong policy alternatives, and Luxon didn’t rate highly in polls. He’s now cobbling together a majority from a base of only 38% of the party vote following his underwhelming campaign. National reached that mediocre result partly thanks to reduced voter turnout. Many who did vote for National or ACT just wanted rid of Labour.
Those who voted for change may not have thought hard enough about what kind of change they were punting on.
Getting back to skills and productivity, though, what’s next for tertiary education policy? To their credit, National proposed building a new medical school in Hamilton. The universities of Auckland and Otago, which house the two existing schools, may not like the idea, but it’s intended to turn out more GPs who’ll work mainly outside of the big cities.
National also plans to disestablish Te Pūkenga, thus reversing Hipkins’s centralisation of ITPs. This, however, only inverts Labour’s fundamental error: it mistakes structural change for policy progress. National has no vision or policy strategy for tertiary education.
Luxon’s other idea is to boost ‘export education’ by letting in more international students. These students are easy money for the institutions and they spend their families’ savings in New Zealand on food and rent. But this supposed ‘solution’ to institutional decline is merely another artificial sweetener. It does nothing to build the productivity of the people and resources that we already have onshore; it offers no strategy for building better institutions of higher learning and skills development. Instead, export education is a boom and bust industry that forces universities to lower their academic standards to accommodate fee-paying students who speak hardly any English.
Nothing will be done to make it easier for young Kiwis to get into tertiary education – without more debt – let alone to reskill mature workers.
What about a BA then? As a holder of arts degrees, none of this talk about skills and productivity questions the value of advanced learning in the humanities and social sciences. We see, however, that many arts majors are under threat and BA degrees are suffering from declining enrolments. I’d like to come back to this issue another time.
Winston goes rogue on X
In case you didn’t follow Winston’s social-media misadventure last week, here’s how it unfolded:
After the first day of the coroner’s inquest into the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch in March 2019, Winston Peters tweeted:
“We waited until today to find out, for the first time, that the Prime Minister's Office received information about the March 15 terrorist attack before the massacre took place. Jacinda Ardern should be called to the hearing and asked to explain this appalling lack of transparency…”.
He claimed that information had been “hidden”.
This was factually incorrect. Ardern told the whole world soon after the event that the shooter had emailed a lengthy manifesto a few minutes before he entered the first mosque and started shooting. That email went to the PM’s office, among others. No one hid this, although the manifesto itself was later banned by the Censor as objectionable.
Following a barrage of ridicule and disgust, Winston then tweeted:
“For those political apologists and feckless media, there is an existing transcript of a phone call made by the Prime Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister at the vital time of a crisis when a terrorist had just massacred innocent people. Not once were we transparently informed of this information…”.
He wasn’t doubling down so much as choosing a new target. The accusation turned into: “we” weren’t told about it by the PM when she called. If it’s true that the PM didn’t mention the emailed manifesto in that phone call, I’d suggest that she may have had more urgent information to relay at the time.
Instead of backing down, though, Peters then dug himself in even deeper with his next tweet.
“The gaslighting media can’t defend the facts out today that vital information of the locations of the terrorist attacks were known by the Prime Minister’s Office before it happened - yet the PM the next day said the police couldn’t act because they didn’t have that detail. The mosques weren’t even warned. This was my point about critical information not being passed on.”
The email from the shooter did get reported to the police. But his manifesto doesn’t warn the reader on page 1 about an imminent attack. The locations are buried a few pages into the 74-page rant. The people who handled that information in the moment only had a few minutes to assess it and react before the shooting began. There’s no convincing allegation that vital information was covered up or that anyone withheld warnings of an attack.
The shooter had deliberately sent his email only eight minutes before opening fire. Presumably he wanted to ensure insufficient time for authorities to react, and yet get his vile ideas out there, aware that he risked dying that day himself. Everything had been meticulously planned. (Credit goes to X for adding contextual comments to Winnie’s erroneous statements.)
As the former Deputy PM, Winston Peters should have recalled the facts before going off on social media. I have two hypotheses about what may have been going on in his mind:
Not much was going on in his mind at all: it was just a cock-up. He or a staffer got it wrong and then he tried desperately to save face rather than back down and apologise.
He knew what he was doing: he’d seen another opportunity to explain away his coalition with Ardern – this time by accusing her of a cover-up. This would pander to those conspiracy theorists who now support him and who like nothing more than a good cover-up story.
Winston Peters’ insensitive and misguided effort to intervene in the inquiry (and to demand that Ardern appear before it) did nothing to assist the coroner – let alone the many victims of those horrific crimes. It made me wonder if parliament’s sub judice rule (which bars MPs from referring to matters under adjudication in any New Zealand court) shouldn’t also apply to coroners’ inquiries, as it does in the UK. Section 3 of the Coroners Act refers to ‘an independent coronial system’. Shouldn’t coroners be free from political pressure as much as judges are?
Peters was Deputy PM at the time of the mosque shootings, and he may be angling to hold ministerial office again under a Luxon-led government. I’ll let you be the judge.
Peters is nothing less than a blatant liar.
No one should be surprised as he also holds the award for being our greatest political charlatan ever.
Hopefully, both he and his party sycophants will not be part of the National/ACT coalition.
Thank you for this fine analysis Grant. May I question one thing: you write about Luxon - "He’s now cobbling together a majority from a base of only 38% of the party vote." This is an incomplete figure as it's based on the vote tally on election night, and disregards the 20% of the entire vote (the special votes) still to come. One statistic that has been under-reported is that on election night, with 20% of the regular vote to go, National sat at 43.3%. When those last 20% were counted National had slipped to 38.1% - a drop of over three per cent in just a few hours. The 20% of the vote still to be counted is a bigger number, being a proportion of a greater total. The specials tend to favour a more progressive vote. If the declining trend of National continues at just this rate (even it if doesn't accelerate), National could wind up with around 35% of the vote. And so would lead a very-much minority government after receiving its lowest party vote percentage since 2005. Hardly the 'mandate' that so many political pundits have been punting. Luxon and National have always wanted to go into coalition with ACT. In the context of the Christchurch massacre, let's remember that in the immediate aftermath, David Seymour and some ACT party MPs were willing to vote for the machine guns. And now Winston Peters have done this despicable thing on the same subject - turning the massacre notice period into a political football. And Luxon and National are prepared to negotiate with this unholy alliance, just to keep out of government the good people who would never do such awful things. Add into this volatile mix Seymour's insistence on a referendum that is predicted to produce street violence in this country. Perhaps a cleaner, more stable, more experienced two-party coalition (which would have a clear majority) with Labour and National should be considered for the good of everyone in the country. After all, Labour and National are not that far apart - both with fiscal policies resolutely based on free-market neo-liberal capitalism. Both opposing a capital gains tax. They only differ on the nuances of social welfare investment as a parallel to this overarching economic system. And at least we will have some honourable, experienced cabinet minsters in government. Remember the Luxon-Peters-Seymour leadership team will have none.