NZ

No doubt now that anti-Māori sentiment powered the election result

OPINION: Policies be damned. The coalition deal shows the power of anti-Māori sentiment in deciding the election.

Joel Maxwell, Nov 28 2023

Christopher Luxon announces new government

The incoming prime minister, alongside ACT leader David Seymour and NZ First leader Winston Peters, has unveiled the coalition agreement between the three political parties.

It’s quite a to-do list. In the coming months and years, the Government will have its hands full allowing the removal of already-established Māori wards in councils; deleting the already-established Māori health authority; purging ministries of primarily Māori names and communication; throwing Three Waters out with the co-governance bathwater; throwing co-governance out of public services; rewiring legislation to shake out unworthy Treaty principles; dumping the entire 2022 Ngāi Tahu regional council law; scrutinising initiatives to increase Māori doctors.

All while laying the groundwork for a monumental battle over ACT’s potential Treaty principles referendum.

It is future-averse. It is petty to a fault. It is demoralisingly, agonisingly, indisputably anti-Māori.

I was even more shocked to see this Government will repeal legislation crafted to stop new generations from ever smoking. I used to think this was a non-partisan goal. Something any side might consider worthwhile, with cigarettes killing up to half their victims.

Thankfully, the new coalition arrived just in time to stop our woke youth from evading tobacco.

ROBERT KITCHIN/THE POST
The gravitas of the coalition announcement evaporates as Winston Peters takes the mic.

According to ASH surveys, the smoking rate in 2022 for Year 10 students was at an all-time low of 1.1%! (Down from 15.2% in 2000.)


Now the changes will likely cost thousands of lives (Māori hit hardest), add more than a billion dollars to our nation’s health bill in the coming decades. A new generation will be addicted.

PM Christopher Luxon says smokefree initiatives would – I kid you not – drive up crime. So, his solution to ram raids is more cancer?

It is an extraordinary coup de tobacco. But this is what we wanted, I guess: selling out our kids and grandkids’ future for a bizarre Māori-culture ban, a bad-kupu witch hunt in the public services.

As for Winston Peters (unlike ACT, the NZ First deal specifically mentions dumping the smokefree generation ban) well, at 78, he can just say to hell with the future. The future is for losers.

DAVID UNWIN/STUFF
The new Government is sworn in at Government House.

Peters, I suspect, doesn’t hate journalists because they’re holding him to account. He just hates everyone below the age of 65.

But unlike NZ First, National can’t afford to be all about the past.

You can sense the party dissipating, pinched between its coalition partners, two burger buns, no filling.

Not only did National get its throat cut in negotiations, but worse, it had its ideas stolen, repurposed, enhanced, by the populists, the culture warriors, the hard right-wingers.

National, or as I call it, Not-Labour, only exists as voting muscle memory exercised by a group too lazy, as yet, to tick a different right-leaning box. Why dilute that delicious umami of the dark side when voters can have the real thing elsewhere? No party survives in the airless centre.

Joel Maxwell: Christopher Luxon’s solution to ram raids is cancer?

I guess National has roads. You won’t be able to buy a taco with your tax savings without hitting a road, boulevard or cul-de sac of national significance.

Don't get me wrong, I love the new roads in the lower North Island that National got built. But that was under Steven Joyce, and in another era when they thought inflation no longer existed.

For now, National is lucky. Both ACT and NZ First have the qualities of a virus: powerful in their own way, but uniquely constrained. Just as the virus cannot exist outside its host, neither party in their current form can survive outside their leaders. Without Peters and David Seymour, they would be husks. (Both leaders, I suspect, would be husks without their parties too. But that’s psychology, not biology.)

Luxon is already being eaten alive by his new mates. Any hoped-for gravitas in the coalition announcement evaporated as a delighted Peters – grinning into his mic – opened fire on journalists.

What’s bad for Māori is bad for National. It strengthens its opponents on every side. Unfortunately, what’s good for Māori ain’t a great National vote winner either.

The party came unmoored from the good old days of John Key. I don’t know where we all go from here.

Joel Maxwell is a senior writer with Stuff’s Pou Tiaki team.