With several key players away, parliament’s B team put on a confusing and unorganised performance at yesterday’s question time.
Prime minister Chris Luxon missed Wednesday’s question time because he was in Auckland preparing for his big international investment summit. Several other senior ministers were also absent, practising their speeches and reviewing their game plans for schmoozing foreign money managers.
Meanwhile, Labour’s front bench is still adjusting to new roles after a recent shakeup. The result was an hour of MPs awkwardly playing out of position. Questions were repeatedly directed to ministers who were acting on behalf of the absent ministers, so they had to respond to questions about the opinions and actions of people they weren’t.
Deputy prime minister Winston Peters stood in as prime minister and reality immediately got wobbly. Chris Hipkins asked the prime minister (Winston Peters) whether the minister of foreign affairs (Winston Peters) was barred from speaking at the international investor summit because of his position on foreign investment. “The minister of foreign affairs (Winston Peters) will be here tomorrow, ensuring that the government maintains control of this House. Then, in the evening, he will be on a plane to the United States,” Peters replied, referring to himself in the third person.
Hipkins asked whether the prime minister (Chris Luxon) would tell investors the government was open to the privatisation of school and hospital buildings. “That should be asked of the prime minister,” Peters said. “I just did,” Hipkins yelled from his seat.
The case of confused identity rose its head again when Willlow-Jean Prime repeatedly asked education minister Erica Stanford about issues with the school lunch programme. Stanford thrice insisted that she could not answer the questions as it was David Seymour’s problem. Louise Upston became the unlikely centre of attention, answering questions on behalf of the minister for Whānau Ora (Tama Potaka) and the minister for science, innovation and technology (Shane Reti). She gave a valiant performance, dead-batting each question with uncontroversial half-answers.
Chlöe Swarbrick, who is pushing a bill to pass sanctions against Israel for its military presence in Palestine, asked the prime minister (Winston Peters) whether the prime minister (Chris Luxon) had taken a “good look” at her bill, as he had promised in December. “I believe the prime minister has kept his word on that matter,” Peters said.
As foreign minister, Peters has made statements saying, “Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful.” When he’s at home, however, he can’t resist turning it into a culture war. Rather than offering support for the bill, he demanded Swarbrick create a “petition regarding the terrorist atrocity that happened in October”.
Swarbrick followed up: “Does the prime minister stand by Aotearoa’s vote at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, which called on all states to implement sanctions in response to Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory?” It was an obvious bait, given Peters’ intense aversion to the word Aotearoa. “No such vote at the United Nations in that country’s name has ever been given,” he grumbled. Even after Swarbrick appealed to speaker Gerry Brownlee, who recently ruled that Aotearoa and New Zealand could be used interchangeably, Peters refused to back down. “If we go to the record of the United Nations, no such country was recorded as casting a vote.”
The debate turned to an excruciating series of patsy questions from Act’s Laura McClure to Act’s Andrew Hoggard, which unfortunately included the words “cat-tastrophe” and “paws-itive”. Chris Hipkins and Winston Peters continued to yell incomprehensibly at each other across the chamber until they got a telling-off from the speaker. “There are two members having a conversation that would be better carried out out of the House, and I will facilitate that for them if it continues,” Brownlee scolded.
One for the record
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer asked Louise Upston (Tama Potaka) a series of questions about the government’s recently announced shakeup of Whānau Ora commissioning contracts. David Seymour raised a point of order asking if Te Pāti Māori needed to declare a conflict of interest because “one of the major losers appears to be a prominent member of her own political party”. He was referring to John Tamihere, the chief executive of the North Island-based Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency, who is also the president of Te Pāti Māori.
From across the room, Chris Hipkins yelled: “Do you want to talk about party presidents, David?”