Michele Hewitson: Government’s cost of living ‘initiative’ invites Nanny State label

Having less-than-five-minute showers is an idea in a government “initiative” called, weirdly, Find Money in Weird Places, which offers “free and easy-to-implement tips” on how households could save up to $500 on their yearly power bills. Listen up. As well as short showers, we are encouraged to switch appliances off at the wall and use cold-water cycles to do our laundry. And check down the back of the couch for loose change. That last free tip might have been made up but it’s all yours. Gratis. The announcement was made with gusto by Energy Minister Megan Woods and went down pretty much universally like a cup of the proverbial cold stuff.

It is reminiscent of the Helen Clark government scheme in which the Electricity Commission planned to spend up to $3.5 million promoting energy-­efficient light bulbs. There was, predictably, the most tremendous fuss. Ditto in the same year was the 2008 Labour proposal to restrict the use of high-flow shower heads. You’d think they’d have learnt from those lessons. We really don’t like politicians lurking about in our bathrooms. It’s a bit pervy, for one thing.

Woods later admitted, “We’ve got the tone a bit off in terms of … how it conveys those messages – particularly at the moment when households are under a lot of financial pressure.” Er, no kidding. It came across as patronising.

And the last thing the Labour government wants to wear, once again, is the Nanny State label. Even if the National Party has avoided actually using the term, it is implied in its response. Although, as a snide swipe, people who carry on about nanny states tend to be those who employ nannies. If nannies are such a bad thing, why do many people who can afford them have them?

Supping from that cup of the proverbial cold stuff, anti-poverty campaigners thundered that the weirdo, money-saving scheme was a “profoundly immoral” approach to the cost-of-living crisis and amounted to slapping a band-aid on the real issues of poverty.

Act leader David Seymour said Finance Minister Grant Robertson had cost families with $500,000 mortgages another $2500 over the next two years, while Woods was now handing out tips on how to save $500. Seymour, who has never met a one-liner he has failed to deliver with relish, added, “It’s like a burglar coming back to a house they’ve robbed to tell their victim how to stay safe.”

Opposition leader Christopher Luxon, presumably unintentionally, recreated the scene from The Simpsons in which a fist-shaking Grandpa Simpson features in the local newspaper under the headline “Old man yells at clouds”, when he scoffed at the “genius idea of five-minute showers and washing machines on cold wash”. Luxon came across more as “Old man slaps clouds with a wet bus ticket”. His tone was a bit off.

When you are the Leader of the Opposition, it is tricky getting the tone right. When your role is opposing everything, it is all too easy to come across as that grumpy geezer who writes letters to the newspapers which begin: “Dear Sir, I wish to complain about everything.”

Luxon’s deputy, Nicola Willis, has about her the air of one of those uniformed nannies that the royals love to employ, who have been trained at Britain’s Norland College. She could play a decent Mary Poppins in an am-dram production. She can be rather crisp. You wonder what her tone was with her leader after he announced that National “had got MDRS wrong”.