The self-appointed apostle says he could be to Christopher Luxon what Elon Musk is to Donald Trump, and his track record speaks for itself.

Who is New Zealand’s answer to Elon Musk? The Herald’s tech insider, Chris Keall, put the question to his LinkedIn acolytes the other day. “If Luxon was to appoint a Doge-style taskforce in NZ, who should lead it?” Half the respondents told him it was a dumb idea. Among the remaining 50%, the frontrunner was Nick Mowbray, followed by Rob Fyfe and then Peter Beck. 

Keall must be kicking himself today, however, for leaving out of his survey the only towering, true and most deserving would-be Elonesque consigliere to the court of the New Zealand prime minister. Having dispatched his “Man Up” troops to  protest at a Pride parade and to “storm” a library where a drag artist was leading a presentation for children on the science of rainbows, Brian Tamaki told 1News he was volunteering to “be the Elon Musk to Luxon’s Donald Trump”. 

The plucky bishop / reborn messiah called Brian / Very Naughty Boy elaborated on the idea on social media. “Well, guess what? If Luxon had the guts to give me a shot, I’d have National back on top faster than Musk launches rockets” – a reference, presumably, to the January SpaceX test flight of the Starship rocket, which exploded catastrophically within nine minutes of launch, showering debris across the Caribbean. 

The parallels are uncanny. Elon Musk has been a founder across numerous startup enterprises; Brian Tamaki is the founder of a startup church. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man. Brian Tamaki is also a man. Elon Musk has countless weird obsessions. Brian Tamaki has a thing for horses.

Just as Musk surfs the internet looking for scores to settle and causes to champion, going so far as to purchase multibillion-dollar companies in an attempt to get people to like his jokes, Tamaki is on a crusade of his own, courageously shining a light into many of the most dangerous corners of New Zealand. Not just libraries, but also the scourge of pedestrian crossings. In Auckland and in Gisborne, Tamaki has encouraged his followers to paint over rainbow crossings. It takes a brave, disruptive and frankly very brainy social justice warrior to lead the charge against these frightening arrangements of paint. Independent research undertaken by the Spinoff suggests a significant number of people have successfully attended libraries for edification and fun, while pedestrian crossings are routinely used – sickeningly – to facilitate the safe passage of pedestrians from one side of a road to the other. 

Elon Musk is at the vanguard of space technology, robotics, neurotechnology, AI and large batteries on wheels. Brian Tamaki is – well, let’s put this in a local context. In 1918, Ernest Rutherford bombarded nitrogen gas with alpha particles and split the atom. In 2023, Brian Tamaki searched the Pornhub website which he absolutely didn’t want to do but he did because he was looking for The Truth and duly arrived at a “revelation”: Cyclone Gabrielle had devastated the Tairawhiti region because a lot of people there had looked at porn.

That wasn’t Tamaki’s first scientific breakthrough. In 2016, he unshackled himself from the chains of entry-level intelligence and basic human decency to use deep thought and geophysics in deducing that the Canterbury earthquake was a consequence of homosexuality. A few years later he applied his disruptive, guru-level methodology (“revelation is more important than education”) once again, concluding that the Covid-19 outbreak had been caused by airborne Satanic demons and the drinking of bat’s blood. 

But back to the business of politics. “The government,” Tamaki counselled on Sunday, “needs to have some balls”. 

And Luxon, when you think about it, has much to learn from Tamaki’s extensive testicle-powered political back catalogue. In 2004, Tamaki confidently predicted that within five years Destiny Church would be “ruling the nation”. In 2005, the Destiny NZ political party scored 0.62% of the national vote. In 2020, Vision NZ, led by Brian’s wife, Hannah Tamaki, finished on 0.1%. In the 2023 general election, Freedoms NZ, of which Tamaki was co-leader alongside Sue Grey, received 0.33% – a whopping one third of one per cent. 

Given that track record it is hard to understand why Christopher Luxon’s advisers have not been falling over themselves to court Tamaki and install him in Luxon’s Oval Office, as leader of New Zealand DOGE (Department of Grift Energy). Is it envy? Are they wokesters? Or are they slaves to very obvious evidence, rainbow defenders, library apologists and pedestrian crossing enablers? 

The same councillors who decry excessive spending on pet projects just voted to pump millions of dollars into a greenhouse for flowers.

On Thursday last week, Wellington City Council voted to consult on repairing Begonia House, the greenhouse for exotic flowers in Wellington Botanic Garden. The options for repairs range from $11 million to $20 million. Mayor Tory Whanau initially left the repairs out of the council’s long-term plan, deeming them non-essential spending. However, a public campaign by Friends of the Wellington Botanic Garden, supported by conservative councillors, showed there was significant support for the greenhouse among some parts of the community. Whanau agreed to introduce an amendment to consult the public on repair options, which passed with majority support. 

I have no take on Begonia House. I’ve been there once. It was nice. It’s a building full of flowers. Is it worth the cost to fix it? I guess it depends how much you like flowers. To some people, it’s a core part of their lives. Others might prefer the money be spent on libraries or playgrounds or simply not spent at all. The balance of whether it is worth saving is a judgment call based on your personal and community values. But there’s one thing that is worth pointing out: Begonia House is not an essential service. It’s a house for flowers. It is quite literally a nice-to-have.

The term “nice-to-have” has been tossed around a lot recently in the context of council spending, mostly by the same people who led the charge to save the Begonia House.

Diane Calvert, a strong supporter of Begonia house, who introduced an (unsuccessful) amendment to take the option of demolition off the table, told the NZ Herald last year that Wellington should cut back on “nice to haves”. Even in Thursday’s meeting, she said the council needed to “start looking at where we can save some money because people are doing it tough”.

Tony Randle, who seconded Calvert’s amendment, told Michael Laws in a recent interview on The Platform that “we should be focusing all our resources towards fixing our pipes”. In the same interview, he admitted Begonia House was “not a key service”.

Nicola Young, who supported the amendment, said this while responding to a questionnaire from the Oriental Bay Residents Association: “Sadly, there is little political will to have a hard look at some of the ‘nice-to-haves’ at a time when council’s income has dropped.”

Ray Chung, in an interview with The Post, said, “The city must get the infrastructure right before they look at spending money on nice to haves.” And yet, when given the chance to cut spending on a flower house, he called it “an affront to Wellingtonians”.

Calvert, Young, Randle and Chung are going to campaign by complaining about rate rises and council spending on “nice-to-haves” but the reality is, they’re happy to spend money on nice-to-haves when it matters to them. And that’s OK. They should do that.

It’s nice that Wellington has a greenhouse for flowers. It’s also nice that the city has libraries, playgrounds, paved roads, rubbish collection and sewerage. When the early British settlers arrived in Te Whanganui a Tara, none of that existed. The township’s Board of Works, the precursor to Wellington City Council, had to decide which stuff to prioritise and which was less important.

For all their flaws, Wellington’s colonial founders were quite forward-thinking when it came to urban design, as demonstrated in the original instructions from the New Zealand Company to town planner William Mein Smith:

“You should make ample reserves for all public purposes, such as a cemetery, a marketplace, wharfage, probable public buildings, a botanical garden, a park and extensive boulevards. It is indeed desirable that the whole outside of the town, inland, should be separated from the country sections by a broad belt of land which you will declare that the company intends to be public property on condition that buildings be never erected upon it.”

The Botanic Garden itself could easily be described as a “nice-to-have”. The city would still function perfectly well without it. And yet, Wellington has always acknowledged that “nice-to-haves” are an essential part of urban design, because nice things improve the quality of life and make people want to live in a city. Sometimes nice things can be provided by the private sector, but sometimes the public sector is the only option. It would be great if we could quantify every council investment with a cost-benefit ratio or an expected quality of life increase, but most of the time that is impossible. How can you calculate the net benefit of a playground? Or a water fountain? Or, indeed, a glasshouse for flowers?

Despite some politicians believing that councils should be a mere rubbish collection and pipe repair service, the Begonia House debate shows there is a clear expectation from the public that councils should do more than that. Wellingtonians want their city to have nice things.