Teammates who spend all their time picking fights with spectators are only helpful for the other team, writes Madeleine Chapman.

Anyone who has ever played a team sport competitively, particularly as a child and particularly, for some reason, basketball, will know that there’s a lot of politics involved. While there are some rare cases of a dozen teenagers putting aside their personal differences in service of a win, there will always be some personal drama that makes its way onto the court. This typically presents itself in a player being lazy on defence, or “not seeing” their frenemy wide open for a shot, or when there’s real beef, “accidentally” firing a pass way too hard for the other person to safely catch. It’s always the same players who can’t control their emotions and it results in arguments, pleading, and eventually a resigned acceptance that some teammates care more about their own feelings than the team’s success.

Winston Peters and David Seymour are those team mates. We might have all fooled ourselves into thinking that their individualistic tendencies would wane while in a coalition government but five months in, it’s clear that Christopher Luxon is in government with National while five parties act in opposition.

Despite being the two deputy prime ministers (Peters is technically the deputy until May 2025 and the Seymour takes over, which in itself is such a luggage teammates thing to demand), both have spent much of the past month yelling at everyone, accusing people of being biased and criticising the (previous) Labour government for doing anything.

First it was Seymour, taking the proposed closure of Newshub as a chance to deliver some strangely petty remarks about journalists, then posting online a screengrab of a 1News opinion piece with a suggestion (I guess?) that the state-owned broadcaster was favouring Labour by hyperlinking to a left-wing blog.

Even if he weren’t the self-proclaimed champion of free speech, questioning the editorial decisions of TVNZ in the middle of major industry cuts would be immature at best. But immature is exactly what Seymour has proven himself to be, because mere days later, he was posting seven-year-old screenshots of tweets from the co-chair of Health Coalition Aotearoa after HCA criticised Seymour’s proposal to scrap the free school lunches programme. The tweets were not kind to Seymour but they were also posted on a personal account as a private citizen, one tweet from 2017. Seymour, as a government minister, chose to share them publicly as a way to (I guess?) suggest that she should not be allowed to… freely speak… on political matters. Surely a man with a suite of portfolios to manage should not be concerned with a lone citizen’s Twitter account? It’s like when you see (to keep with the metaphor) NBA players getting into scraps with spectators. Embarrassing, immature, but easier to accept from a person paid to run around on a court than a man paid to soon be the deputy leader of the country.

Seymour has spent far too long as a political loner, thinking he needs to yell constantly in order to be noticed, scrapping for every possession. But when you’re part of a winning team and you have the ball, constantly yelling and picking fights with spectators just makes you look like you can’t handle the spotlight.

Not to be outdone, over the weekend Peters entered the fray with his state of the nation address. In it, he veered from even his own embargoed script and compared co-governance to Nazi Germany (he’s since doubled down on his choice of comparison and rolled out some of his usual tired insults and anti-trans rhetoric). That meant in a week where the Green Party revealed a third MP scandal in 12 months with Darleen Tana being stood down after allegations of migrant exploitation against her husband’s company, all of Sunday and most of Monday’s news coverage was instead dedicated to Peters essentially talking shit. Any reasonable person would say this was a foolish move from the government, but Peters and Seymour are only part of the government on paper. In reality, they throw the ball to whoever they like, whenever they like.

Separately, why have the two coalition minor party leaders delivered state of the nation addresses when Luxon delivered one on behalf of the government? Because they’re luggage teammates, that’s why. Seymour hasn’t experienced having a higher-ranked colleague in a decade and is evidently struggling to adjust to being both in power and not in charge, and Peters has never once worked well with others.

All this is simply the art of distraction, and on Monday afternoon while announcing a crackdown on “anti-social” Kainga Ora tenants, Luxon was asked about his deputy prime minister’s own anti-social behaviour in citing Nazi Germany when talking about the previous government. “There is a need for everyone to be very careful with their language… I don’t agree with those comments, it’s not the way I would have expressed it,” he said. He also said he would be speaking to Peters about it, though I can’t imagine how fruitful such a discussion would be were it ever to happen. Meanwhile, a report for corporate clients from pollster Talbot Mills suggests Luxon is struggling to connect with voters. He’s certainly committed plenty of his own fumbles in recent months but despite Peters and Seymour acting as if they’re independents, Luxon will never escape their trails of destruction.

I spent three years in a basketball team that had players who put their own emotions before the team. They were all technically excellent and when we worked well together, we were stronger than any team in the country. But they never did figure out how to be good team players, and as a result we never won when it mattered.