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OPINIONPoliticsAugust 11, 2020

Memebers of parliament: it’s the Covid election, baby

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Welcome to the third edition of Memebers of parliament, a politics column for people who just want the memes.

Let’s just get to it, shall we?

Buses – YES

Buses. They’re back. Winston Peters has had his giant face on a big ol’ bus for a while now, but he surely won’t be the only one to unveil a large campaign vehicle. In my humble opinion, buses are good for politicians. They’re bold, fun, and make people think of professional athletes arriving at a stadium, which is usually the antithesis of politicians.

The New Zealand First bus is disproportionately large for the size of the party, which makes it the perfect embodiment of New Zealand First’s presence in parliament. It certainly makes you turn your head, even just to wonder if this will be the last time a New Zealand First bus will exist.

The Act ‘bus’ – NO

This is not a bus. This is a tall van. Nothing grinds my gears more than liars but there’s something almost impressive (in a terrifying way) about people who lie when the truth is in plain sight.

David Seymour standing in front of what is clearly a van and announcing the unveiling of his campaign “bus” is gaslighting on a national scale and I almost have to respect it. It reminds me of my favourite TV blooper of all time. Look. At. That. Bus.

The Act ‘genderless humanoid doll’ – YES

Nothing to say about Act’s election mascot except that the phrase “genderless humanoid doll” is somehow the most poetic and perfect sequence of words to come out of 2020.

Gerry Brownlee (Guy Montgomery) – YES

For three glorious days, comedian Guy Montgomery changed his Twitter display name to Gerry Brownlee and shared some thoughts as the deputy leader of the National party. Montgomery’s short stint (he’s now changed his name back) as Brownlee is the exception that proves the rule that all parody accounts are bad.

Let this be a timely reminder to all aspiring online comedians who yearn for the extremely short-lived glory of a one-note parody account: don’t do it. It’s not worth it and everyone will turn on you. Montgomery has started and finished the one acceptable parody account of the 2020 election. Please, just let it be.

Gerry Brownlee (Gerry Brownlee) – NO

The real Gerry Brownlee was equally busy ejaculating nonsense last week. And if you think using the word “ejaculating” is gross, go read some old books and see how often it appears as a synonym for outburst (a lot but yes it’s still gross, sorry).

Dr Ashley Bloomfield warned New Zealand that a second wave of Covid-19 was not a matter of if, but when. The announcement was disheartening but given the recent second outbreaks in Hong Kong, Victoria, and Vietnam, it wasn’t exactly surprising. Except to Brownlee, who issued a statement questioning Bloomfield’s motives. “It doesn’t add up. Why announce this now when there are few cases?” Brownlee asked, with the innocence of a baby wondering where its parent has gone during a game of peek-a-boo.

“What do these guys know that they are not telling us?” Whatever it is, Brownlee is about to find out and I for one cannot wait.

Shane Jones – NO

Shane Jones better enjoy that big bus because his chances of winning back Northland for NZ First are looking slim as hell. Jones’ terrible numbers in Sunday’s Colmar Brunton poll for Q+A suggest that despite his prominent placing in the current government, Jones’s individual appeal is close to nil. I know how Jones must feel. I was once the second best player on a basketball team where the best player did 80% of the work, singlehandedly making us a winning team. One time she was late to a game and suddenly I was in charge. It went about as badly as this poll but thankfully it was a girls’ basketball game so only 20 people were watching and not the whole country.

Now that I think about it, Jones may actually be the third most popular NZ First stalwart …

Covid-19 – YES

Jacinda Ardern launched Labour’s campaign at the Auckland town hall on Saturday and declared this the “Covid election”. Of course it is, but it’s still funny to come right out and say it. Labour will be campaigning on their track record in responding to the pandemic and National will be campaigning on, I guess, how they would have responded?

Focusing on Covid will work in Labour’s favour and they’re leaning into it. No more Mr Nice Labour, this is serious.

Jacinda Ardern – HUH?

Nobody is safe from that awkward few seconds at the end of a live video when you’re trying to figure out how to end it, not even the master of social media politics.

Keep going!
A man with a stern expression is wearing a black hat and riding a horse. Green paper bills are scattered in the air around him against a dark background.
Shane Jones, regional New Zealand’s saviour. (Design: Tina Tiller)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 11, 2020

The sorry stench of NZ First’s horse-race politics

A man with a stern expression is wearing a black hat and riding a horse. Green paper bills are scattered in the air around him against a dark background.
Shane Jones, regional New Zealand’s saviour. (Design: Tina Tiller)

The Provincial Growth Fund is meant to fund… growth… in the provinces. So why is it building a huge new racetrack in one of New Zealand’s biggest cities? Because the racing industry seems to get whatever it wants, argues Duncan Greive. 

Yesterday morning saw a blazing RNZ report that the Provincial Growth Fund has allocated $10.5m for the creation of an all-weather racecourse at Riccarton. This is humdrum in a way, because we’re long-numb to tawdry or questionable application of funding from the PGF and New Zealand First’s proud championing of the racing industry, an industry that has by coincidence donated tens of thousands of dollars to the New Zealand First Foundation over the past few years.

But even by NZ First and PGF standards, this was a particularly eye-watering example. 

The PGF had previously declined to fund the racecourse, chiefly because of its location. Riccarton is not in some poverty-stricken province in dire need of investment, but instead in the middle of Christchurch, New Zealand’s second (or third, depending who you’re talking to) biggest city. Officials assessing the bid, which was initially turned down in 2018, noted that it was quite a strange place to be spending PGF money.

“The proposed Riccarton Park synthetic racing track is located in Christchurch City, which is ineligible for PGF funding,” assessors from the Provincial Development Unit wrote, according to documents obtained by RNZ.

All that somehow still doesn’t capture the true surreality of what we have just witnessed. Because horse-racing is not a sport in any conventional sense. It exists largely as a vector for gambling. Without gambling, the sport would not exist – aside from a vanishingly small number of marquee races, its stands are near empty. Its races play only on a channel owned by the TAB, New Zealand’s statutory monopoly supplier of bets on its races. This is not to suggest there aren’t many wonderful people involved in the broader equine world – but that its racing subset is almost entirely about facilitating hundreds of short, sharp opportunities to gamble. 

Other areas of our society that facilitate gambling, like casinos and pokie machines operators, are forced to operate under (relatively) onerous restrictions, and give back to the community through grants to arts foundations or sports clubs. The Lotteries Commission, which operates Lotto and Instant Kiwi, distributes tens of millions in grants to entities like Creative NZ and Sports NZ. 

This is a recognition that gambling causes social harm, and only the offsetting of social harm with social good can justify its existence. (And that by making gambling illegal, you simply drive it underground and ensure that it is purely a social harm.)

Gambling on professional sports was introduced as a way of helping to fund its grassroots amateur ecosystems, and a slice of the profit goes back to those roots – though only after it has helped fund the TAB, which is run and controlled by the racing industry.

Which is to say that all New Zealand’s legal gambling is offset by its returning some of its proceeds to a relevant community, and even those who find gambling unpleasant or immoral would at least take some solace in knowing that everything from club rugby to opera gains from its existence.

The one confounding exception is racing. Unlike all other legal gambling in New Zealand, it doesn’t have to give back to any unambiguously good community activity – because, under our bizarre laws, it is a good community activity.

Horse racing is essentially a charitable purpose unto itself, for reasons surely only Shane Jones could explain with a straight face, meaning that money raised through gambling on the product is ploughed back into creating more of the same product for people to gamble on. The proceeds of gambling on horse racing can be spent on promoting more horse racing and even on prizes for horse races, and that’s a charitable purpose in this upside-down world.

This would be bad enough if it were solely a self-perpetuating gambling universe. But for many years horse racing has been suffering a fast-ageing audience. Somehow, despite having spry young influencers like Winston Peters turning out to extol its many virtues, its most fervent bettors are well past 50. Where once it was able to carry its own weight, it now requires increasingly significant public subsidy. 

This is where the most recent term of government has been truly appalling. Peters secured himself the minister of racing portfolio, and set about initiating industry-approved reforms of the racing board that happily consolidated power over the TAB. Then came a $72.5m bailout for the industry during Covid-19 lockdown, well before yesterday’s revelations about Riccarton. The two all-weather racecourses (the second is at Awapuni in the Manawatū) exist because, to the industry, one of the problems that bedevils it is that rain sometimes means meets are cancelled, and thus people have to delay their gambling. Now, thanks to tens of millions in government funding, the gambling will go on regardless of the weather. Jones himself told RNZ that “the need for all-weather tracks was highlighted in an independent review of the racing industry”.

There are plenty more scandalising elements to the story of horse racing. The animal welfare concerns (though Jones claims these are partly addressed by all-weather tracks). The opacity of the industry’s donations to the New Zealand First Foundation, the activities of which are currently under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. The fact that the PGF, which is meant to be first and foremost about reviving the economies of the regions through jobs, is funding a racetrack in a large city, with long-term jobs listed as “unknown”.

At this point, though, does anyone seriously believe that there is any case for racing industry support outside of NZ First and the industry itself? The bigger question is what the next government will do about it. On current polling, NZ First is a long way out of parliament. That race ends on September 19. Whether horse racing remains New Zealand’s least-deserving winner after that date is still an open question.

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