While cabinet spends the next month deciding whether to recognise Palestinian statehood, the opposition is more eager to know if New Zealand’s done too little, too late.
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.
The government seemed wholly deflated during Tuesday’s question time. Education minister Erica Stanford let the opposition drown her out with heckles while she tried to boast about receiving positive feedback like “woohoo”, building and construction minister Chris Penk bragged about sheds, and Andy Foster showed up with a big bandage on his head. Why? Foster was “testing out the health system”, as he told The Spinoff.
Speaker Gerry Brownlee seemed particularly fed up with the vibes, which was perhaps a bad omen of troubles to come. When Labour leader Chris Hipkins posed his usual starter question (does he stand by his government’s statements and actions) to prime minister Christopher Luxon, who replied with just a “yes”, Brownlee asked the House, well, what’s the point of that? “What more can there be?” Brownlee wondered, with an air of desperation.
“Well, if you hold your breath, you’ll find out,” Hipkins replied. Give it a go, Brownlee encouraged him, but there are still four more questions on this list that ask the same thing. After Hipkins followed up with a supplementary on whether Luxon stood by finance minister Nicola Willis saying that people who have lost their jobs “shouldn’t take it personally”, Brownlee let him know his work was “skillfully done”.
But Luxon didn’t want to talk about that. He pointed to a recently released Treasury report, highlighted earlier in the session by housing minister Chris Bishop (who wore three different ministerial hats while two of his caucus mates were away), which put the cost of Aotearoa’s Covid-19 response at $66bn. And while Chippy was still keen to chat about employment, Luxon was stuck on the impacts of the Covid hangover, and let Hipkins know everyone should start calling him the “66 billion dollar man!”
“Because when I grew up as a kid, there was a show called The Six Million Dollar Man, and this member is the 66 billion dollar man!” Luxon paused for effect, but when he received very little reaction from his coalition members, Labour’s Kieran McAnulty used the moment to outshine him: “No one laughed!”
Next up was Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, who questioned Luxon over the government’s recent announcement that it would consider recognising Palestinian statehood. His position, as he’s oft repeated, is that Hamas must release their Israeli hostages, but Swarbrick wanted to know whether he was aware of the attempts to release these hostages, and the 10,000 Palestinians living in Israeli prisons.
“That’s not what I’ve been briefed on,” Luxon replied, while NZ First’s Shane Jones was more gung-ho about his point of view on the matter. “Fiction!” Jones cried repeatedly.
And when Swarbrick questioned whether Luxon was aware of Aotearoa’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, he warned her not to throw that “genocide” term around so willy nilly. So, she pressed him on whether he believed that was the appropriate term, but the PM couldn’t quite wrap his lips around it, so he went with “humanitarian catastrophe”.
And then deputy prime minister David Seymour, puffed up on his perch next to Luxon, decided to butt in as usual. “Point of order, Mr Speaker,” Seymour started – this member [aka Swarbrick] has just returned to her seat which is adorned with a Palestinian scarf, and I invite you to consider what this House might look like if everyone took a side in a global conflict and made that visible. “No member should be allowed to do such a thing, particularly when you yourself have forbidden members from wearing tiny pins on their lapels,” he finished, while his caucus colleague Simon Court hastily removed his Act Party pin.
“I think you make a very good point,” Brownlee began, until a defiant Swarbrick swiped the keffiyeh draped over her seat and wore it around her neck instead. “Stay warm,” Brownlee told her. “We’ll move on.” In a House where there are clear favourites in the eyes of the speaker, Swarbrick is indefinitely near the bottom of his list.
Later, Te Pāti Māori’s Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made her own attempt to pull Luxon’s heartstrings over Palestine. But her questions on whether the PM could “justify the targeted killings of journalists in Gaza” were shot down by Brownlee and Luxon, who told her that the prime minister of New Zealand is only responsible for New Zealand, and Seymour let her know she was “slow on the rules”.
Fair (not from Seymour), as question time is the opportunity to hold ministers to account on the issues that fall within their ministerial responsibilities. But a humanitarian catastrophe, as described earlier, can understandably leave a lot of people looking for leadership, and the barracking from the opposition showed that the government’s pussyfooting around Israel has made them look, in their eyes, kinda pussy. “Surely you can condemn that?” cried the Greens’ Steve Abel, also adorned in a keffiyeh. “Genocide apologist!”
And when Luxon tried to remind the House the government had already committed $37m in humanitarian aid, the opposition simply wanted to know “how much of it got in?”, but Luxon didn’t seem to be briefed on that. Eventually, the heckling from the opposition turned into roars for Luxon to “grow a spine”, “show some spine” and not be “spineless” – it’s just ironic that the quietest person, who is usually the loudest, was the one later reprimanded for bringing any spine into the conversation at all.
