Denis Welch: Where there is no vision, the people perish
Three Amigos: David Seymour, Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters.
Watching the performance of the government so far, I keep coming back in my mind to the 1980s movie Three Amigos, in which a trio of silent-movie stars turn up in a small Mexican town. They think they’re there to do a show, but the locals have mistaken them for real western gunfighters who, they hope, can save them from a villainous bandit. So when our heroes are supposed to go in with all guns blazing, they do a song-and-dance routine instead.
All too often over the past eight months, Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters and David Seymour have resembled those amigos.
Politically, there’s no shortage of villains to aim their policies at – poverty, homelessness and climate change spring to mind, for a start – but they generally seem to be looking in another direction altogether: mainly, backwards. Devotion to rolling back the clock is rapidly becoming the hallmark of this government. We are all losing count of the number of things they’ve repealed, retracted, removed, reduced, repurposed.
There seems to be a curious reluctance to engage fully with the 21st century; rather, the impulse is towards recreating a time somewhere in the middle of last century when Chaps Got Things Done without any fuss or new-fangled nonsense like climate change or co-governance – a time when real men never used public transport, ate hot coal for breakfast and kids didn’t need pampering with a free school lunch.
Hence, a barrage of box-ticking “action plans” loud with the cracking of whips and exhortations from chief amigo Luxon. It’s like shooting tin cans off the top of a fence instead of confronting the real baddies.
It makes an impressive show, but, meanwhile, the boys from El Rancho Global Warming are heading for town and 102,000 homeless New Zealanders are on the train pulling in at high noon.
True, the chances of Luxon, Peters and Seymour being able to successfully govern the country were never great. Not so much three amigos, perhaps, as the three horsemen of the improbalypse.
Lined up together, they look ill at ease. Luxon is so bland he makes John Key look like Freddie Mercury; Peters is, well, Peters; and Seymour, who seemed to acquire some stature in opposition, now comes across as slightly manic, with the light of a zealot in his eye.
For the moment, however, the government is getting away with it, masking its potential for disunity with ceaseless activity. Tick! There goes another box. Zing! Another tin can down. They’re busy doing things to us, not with us – no time for that sort of palaver. It’s all very well, and it may indeed achieve the sacred trinity of Growing the Economy, Boosting Productivity and Lowering the Cost of Living, but wait a minute, isn’t there a day after tomorrow? And some years after that? That thing we used to call the future?
The future is cancelled
The coalition’s general disregard for the long-term consequences of its actions is striking. So striking that you wouldn’t put it past them to introduce a bill abolishing the future (on the basis, of course, that the future “doesn’t align with our strategic priorities”). There’s a hint of this approach in Act MP Mark Cameron’s bill seeking to stop regional councils from considering the negative impacts of climate change in consenting decisions.