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Four people are speaking against a green background featuring question marks and a large event name tag labeled "#Spinoff Echo Chamber." The individuals are formally dressed, and one is speaking at a podium.
Carl Bates, Paulo Garcia, Jamie Arbuckle and Laure McClure present their finest patsies

PoliticsFebruary 19, 2025

Echo Chamber: Can someone please teach these MPs to use Google?

Four people are speaking against a green background featuring question marks and a large event name tag labeled "#Spinoff Echo Chamber." The individuals are formally dressed, and one is speaking at a podium.
Carl Bates, Paulo Garcia, Jamie Arbuckle and Laure McClure present their finest patsies

Backbench MPs reached new levels of patsy questions in an extraordinarily dull question time on Tuesday.

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.

“MPs ask questions to explore key issues and hold the government to account – it’s a crucial part of our democracy.” That’s how the parliament website describes question time. It’s a rare opportunity to ask direct questions to ministers of the Crown, a privilege afforded only to those who have been duly elected by their fellow citizens.

Take National MP for Whanganui Carl Bates, for example. He spent years building to this moment. He founded a global business but sold it to put his time and energy towards being a member of parliament. It’s a good thing he did, because how else would the New Zealand people have known the answers to important questions like: “What recent announcements has [tourism minister Louise Upston] made about increasing visitor numbers to New Zealand?”

A person wearing glasses, a dark checkered suit, a white shirt, and a mustard tie stands at a lectern, holding a glass of water. The background features wooden paneling.
Carl Bates’ big moment

Unless they watched the evening news, or read a news site, or checked social media at least once in the past 24 hours, how would they know about the new “Everyone must go” tourism campaign? That’s the power of question time in action. But Bates wasn’t done. He extracted more important answers with follow-up questions like “How will targeting Australians improve overall visitor numbers?” (it turns out Australians count as visitors) and “What benefits does she expect to see as a result of this campaign?” (tourists spend money).

MP for New Lynn Paulo Garcia, who previously ran his own law firm, used his legal experience to cross-examine Nicola Willis with a barrage of questions only the finance minister would be equipped to answer, such as “When is the next major economic release?” and “What recent reports has she seen on the economy?”

Bay of Plenty MP Tom Rutherford grilled justice minister Paul Goldsmith with a tough one: “How is the government progressing with its plan to restore stronger consequences for crime?” Goldsmith droned an impressively boring answer back at him. MPs checked their phones and chatted among themselves. Garcia scratched his chin, Chris Hipkins scrolled Stuff, and Andrew Bayly appeared to pick his nose with his middle finger. Rutherford, undeterred, continued: “What other actions is the government doing to restore stronger consequences for crime?” and “Why is it important to restore stronger consequences for crime?”

As he finished his questions, Rutherford sat down with a satisfied slump, as if he had just finished doing a real job. In their chairs at the back of parliament, he and Bates had an animated conversation. They looked excited. Their questions were starting to bear fruit. Surely, some day soon, they will figure out how to access the official list of government announcements.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

They weren’t the only MPs who seemed unable to find the webpage www.beehive.govt.nz/releases.

Act’s Laura McClure asked workplace relations minister Brooke van Velden, “What announcements has she made about restoring balance in employment relations?” NZ First MP Jamie Arbuckle asked regional development minister Shane Jones, “What recent announcements has he made regarding steps the government is taking to support regional development?” When Jones cited a motorway interchange in Te Puke, Arbuckle wanted to get to the bottom of the issue: “Why was the government’s funding to support this interchange so critical?” No one paid any attention to the answer.

Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick joined the government MPs in using question time as a convenient alternative to Google, asking prime minister Christopher Luxon, “Is coal a mineral?” and “Does extracting and burning coal make climate change better or worse?” Unfortunately, she was unable to get to an answer, though Luxon did confirm coal was “actually really important for our mining industry”. Act leader David Seymour butted in with a point of order, asking whether “commuting to work by aeroplane every week contributes to climate change”. Unfortunately, the New Zealand people will never know the answer to this important question, because speaker Gerry Brownlee ruled it irrelevant.

One fun moment

Mere days after the prime minister was roasted by menswear expert Derek Guy, health minister Simeon Brown arrived in the debating chamber with a fashion crime of his own. What is going on with this tie?

Simeon Brown wearing a regular-length tie.
Keep going!
The creation of Doge in the Beehive Oval Office. Photomontage: Jason Stretch
The creation of Doge in the Beehive Oval Office. Photomontage: Jason Stretch

OPINIONPoliticsFebruary 18, 2025

Brian Tamaki, disruptive force and super-genius

The creation of Doge in the Beehive Oval Office. Photomontage: Jason Stretch
The creation of Doge in the Beehive Oval Office. Photomontage: Jason Stretch

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 crossingsIt 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.

Tamaki on the Facebook livestream, 2023.

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? 

Politics