Someone once made a film called The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. I don’t remember what it was about but I always thought it was a great phrase, very useful for describing so many situations in life. It very aptly describes any round of golf I play. I usually come home after nine holes to tell my wife about the amazing three shots I played, conveniently omitting the other fifty four. The phrase used to be, until just last Saturday, the perfect descriptor of the Blues rugby season for decades on end. Happily, that changed on Saturday to The Sublime, The Sublimer And The Sublimest. But it is also useful for describing how the current government is performing. My readers will know that I am a very unbiased, dispassionate observer of politics and accordingly I shall start with the good things about the government.
Good: by far the best thing this government has done is to have appointed Winston Peters as Minister of Foreign Affairs. This means he is out of the country a great deal, which is a great relief to many of us. It also means the Cheshire Cat1 doesn’t have its main competitor here most of the time, although Smuggy Seymour and Jester Jones do try hard. Astoundingly, I’ve even found myself agreeing with Mr Peters as far as his comments on Ukraine and Gaza are concerned. I fully expect to agree with him again on something in another thirty years when he’ll probably still be in parliament.
Bad: communication hasn’t been the best from the government. Scrapping the plans for replacing the Cook St ferries didn’t look so good when the Aratere went aground and although Nicola Willis was quite correct in saying the ferry would have broken down even if the plans hadn’t been scrapped, it still seemed the decision to scrap them was just part of the government’s Destroy Anything Associated With Labour without coming up with a replacement idea. On another matter, Mr Luxon admitted, “We didn’t communicate properly.” I wonder if he was like that when he was CEO of Air New Zealand. “Ok, guys, all you have to do is fly the planes to the right destination and preferably on time. Those are the important things. No, no, don’t worry about the passengers, they’ll be fine. If they miss the plane, there’s always Jetstar.”
Also bad: Mr Luxon was waxing lyrically (a cliche2 but still a goodie) about Matariki yesterday, how it was all about family, remembering the past and looking to the future, great for the country, blah, blah, blah but he conveniently forgot to mention that the government had slashed its contribution to Matariki funding by 45%. Maybe he was getting too excited about the hāngī somebody else had prepared for him.
Ugly: it’s always difficult dealing with a difficult but sadly too common a subject like cancer. My wife and I have both been fortunate enough to have recovered from our respective experiences with it and maybe that’s why the government’s announcement this week about increased funding for Pharmac, to obtain and subsidise cancer treatment drugs for NZers, was hard to deal with. On the one hand, it’s great that such drugs become readily available and that so many won’t have to spend their own life savings to prolong their lives. On the other hand, the announcement seems to smack of political expediency. The money for the drugs is obviously available, hence the announcement, but that it wasn’t in the Budget suggests the government was hoping people wouldn’t notice it hadn’t kept its pre-election promise and could spend the money on more important things, like frightening Kim Jong Un with our entire naval fleet of one frigate. But even worse, even uglier, is that the government made such a big issue of its dedication to cancer treatment while refusing to acknowledge that one of its first actions in government was to kowtow to the tobacco industry and reverse previous decisions made to ultimately ban the sale of cigarettes in NZ. Even the Minister of Health, Dr Shane Reti, will be aware that the single biggest cause of lung cancer is smoking - yet he was perfectly happy to endorse and indeed celebrate the government’s pro-smoking stance. My understanding is that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath at the start of their career, to put their patients first and to do no harm. I guess Dr Reti just misread it and took the Hypocritic Oath instead.
1. Does anyone ever read about the Cheshire Cat these days?
2. I so wanted to add the accent to cliché but I couldn’t work out to do it in Google Docs
So good, Chris.