Echo Chamber is The Spinoff’s dispatch from the press gallery, recapping sessions in the House. Columns are written by politics reporter Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Wellington editor Joel MacManus.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins is on the war path – the path being the overthrowing of Act leader David Seymour, and hopefully (and eventually), the subsequent crowning of a Labour government. Things have been tough for the coalition government this week: there was a Land Rover driven onto the parliament steps on Monday, and as if things couldn’t get worse, Christopher Luxon was ratioed by the menswear meme guy on X. So naturally, Hipkins is stepping in.
At question time yesterday Hipkins did his best to persuade the speaker to put Seymour in the naughty corner, take away his toys and forbid him from speaking to the other kids. Despite his best efforts, however, Brownlee ruled that there would be no referral to the Privileges Committee. The speaker was tired of braying MPs and those contacting him “over the email system” having too high expectations of him.
No, he does not have “all-encompassing powers somewhat similar to Henry VII, and therefore everyone’s head is somewhat in a perilous position” – he had received no letter claiming a privilege had been breached, therefore, he has moved on, and everyone else must too. All the while, Seymour sat with his laptop on his lap, scrolling away. He put it away to swap with his phone, swapped the phone to keep his hand cupped on the bench, and waited for the moment to pounce.
But Hipkins wasn’t done kicking up dust. He questioned whether Seymour’s recent behaviour – namely, that damn Land Rover – met the prime minister’s expectations for his ministers (“yes”) and when it was clear Luxon wouldn’t allow any hint of a Lange-Douglas divide, Hipkins looked to other government ministers for inspiration.
Those being Todd McClay, Winston Peters and Shane Jones, who have all made comments in the chamber on the Mexican heritage of their peers on the opposition benches in the last six months. That’s three times unlucky for Luxon, who received a few jeers after sending his reassurances that Peters, his minister of foreign affairs, “really believes in the Mexico-New Zealand relationship and visited the country and cares deeply about those relationships”. The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March simply smiled.
Sometimes, you should just let the boss do the talking for you. Tired of having his name thrown around but no room to speak, Peters rose from his bench to declare that when you’re in Rome, you must do as the Romans do. “No one can surely be condemned for expecting immigrants to come to this country, to be grateful to the country they’ve come to,” Peters said. There goes the relationships with the migrant NGOs.
It was also a day for Jones, as the minister for resources, to do what he does best: speak in riddles. He rose from his seat with the form of a man patiently waiting through the opening act for his moment to deliver a monologue on the mining sector, announcing that the “economic seeds are germinating, the buds are developing, no longer will this sector be shackled in green tape”.
“Is this Shakespeare?” Hipkins asked. “It’s a tragedy,” his deputy Carmel Sepuloni quipped. Jones waxed so lyrical he made the Greens’ co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick throw her hands in the air, drag them across her face in desperation and cry to the chamber ceiling: “Who needs facts?”
Just before question time wrapped up, Peters had one last thing to say. It came off the back of Labour’s Peeni Henare asking new health minister Simeon Brown about the anonymous “one vanilla-flavoured brown-bag common cheap solution per problem”, as described by health leaders, which the minister of health took well: “I have been called many things in my career in politics and I’m sure that’s probably not the worst.”
Having been reprimanded two weeks ago for calling his peers “sunshine”, perhaps Peters was bitter that others were allowed to get their jabs in. Or maybe he wanted Brown to say something more cutting. “I have looked at parliaments and democracies all over the world, this is the most constrained one,” Peters told the speaker. “Some members here can’t take it when somebody hits back at them. It’s an essential part of this parliament that we have a vigorous debate.” Brownlee, who had told the chambers 10 minutes earlier that he was at risk of erupting, referred back to the standing orders.
Following question time, the parties continued their debate over the prime minister’s statement to parliament. So, “growth” was back in the mouths of all the National ministers left in the chamber, particularly Chris Bishop, who led the debate for the National side.
The Greens? “Official party of degrowth,” Bishop declared. Kieran McAnulty? “Mr Slow,” Bishop called him. Chris Hipkins? “Mr No,” Bishop chided. The Labour benches remained largely unbothered, mostly because everyone was on their phones, Hipkins had already left and McAnulty was too busy chatting away with Sepuloni.
“I’ve seen duller things in the middle of a paddock,” McAnulty jeered. To be fair, being in this debating chamber must feel a bit like you’re constantly wading through shit.