Michele Hewitson: Christopher Luxon’s failed ‘baby-making’ joke more risky than risqué

“Here is the deal. Essentially New Zealand stopped replacing itself in 2016. I encourage all of you to go out there and have more babies if you wish. That would be helpful.”

He wasn’t really suggesting that those citizens of breeding age partake in a country-wide bonkathon. It was a joke, he had to explain. If you have to explain that you have made a joke, you haven’t made a joke. You’ve made a failed attempt at a joke.

As is widely known, Luxon is anti-abortion. As stupid failed jokes go, then, this one was more risky than risqué. He really should stay away from jokes involving reproduction. But that is not the real problem with his lame attempt at humour. The real problem is that he didn’t know it was a crap joke, and that he really should stay away from jokes involving reproduction.

As a first-term politician, he still has the training wheels on, and he’s still learning to ride his bike without wobbling madly.

He was on a roll. Down the slippery slope he went, on his wobbly way. Later in the week, he managed to get a gumboot stuck in his gob while chatting up farmers in Helensville. He was auditioning for the role of prime minister, or perhaps minister of tourism. The country he wanted to run was a “very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country”. Got that, you whiny lot? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Take a spoonful of concrete and harden the fuck up.

But hang on. Doesn’t complaining about negative whiners make you a negative whiner?

Luxon is an amateur when it comes to slagging off his own team. The All Blacks legend and Canterbury coach Grizz Wyllie is said, possibly apocryphally, to have stormed into the Canterbury shed one half-time to give his losing side a pep talk: “You’re all bloody useless,” he said.

Andrew Little, Labour’s Defence Minister, made a joke. He was a ring-in at a Wellington event for another MP who couldn’t make it. He said: “When the call went out, I was the only MP not rewriting their pecuniary interests.” It’s not a bad joke, more like a poke at his colleague, the currently suspended Minister of Transport, Michael Wood, who might not appreciate either joke or poke.

Never have so many shares caused so much silly fuss. Well, not until the interminable Auckland Council meeting about whether to sell its shares in Auckland Airport. Initially, Mayor Wayne Brown tried to browbeat his councillors into selling all of the city’s 18% holding. A compromise was, eventually, tediously, reached: a 7% stake would be flicked.