Chris Hipkins announced some policies this week, against all odds.<\/p>\n
All this may remind some on the left that Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori was supposed to reveal some policies last week, but supporters might have to wait for the inter-wh\u0101nau feuding within the party to cool down before they make any meaningful announcements.<\/p>\n
When question time kicked off on Tuesday, there were plenty of stops and starts between Hipkins and Christopher Luxon over the 3.04% rise in inflation<\/a>, because the prime minister\u2019s mind was stuck on the 7.3% increase \u201cthe last lot were at\u201d. And a chirpy Hipkins was still at it three questions later: when housing minister Chris Bishop said he stood by his statement of putting more effort into his Uber Eats order than Labour had in its Future Fund policy, Hipkins let him know \u201cit shows\u201d.<\/p>\n Following question time, two big (and controversial) bills passed after the dinner break on Tuesday: the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Amendment Bill<\/a> (MACA) and the Responding to Abuse in Care Legislation Amendment Bill. The latter amends the Children\u2019s Act 2014, the Crimes Act 1961, the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 and the Public Records Act 2005 in line with some recommendations (such as the repealing of strip searches for children) from the royal commission\u2019s abuse in state care report \u2013 but the opposition cried that making some recommendations really isn\u2019t the same as following them all.<\/p>\n Which clearly ground children\u2019s minister Karen Chhour\u2019s gears, who told the House she couldn\u2019t believe the \u201crubbish\u201d being spouted by the opposition. Specifically, Greens co-leader Marama Davidson, who was told by Chhour to \u201cjust calm it down and allow people to have their own opinions\u201d. A few speeches later, Labour\u2019s Willie Jackson traded blows with Act leader David Seymour, and assistant speaker Greg O\u2019Connor got lost in the crossfire when he thought Jackson\u2019s comment about Seymour being \u201cstupid in the head\u201d were directed at him. \u201cMy apologies, I was calling Mr Seymour stupid,\u201d Jackson explained to the speaker. \u201cAll right? Is that OK?\u201d<\/p>\n And as for MACA, the Greens\u2019 Steve Abel couldn\u2019t help but notice the dissonance between the government of the day and the government led by the late Jim Bolger. Abel shared a moving anecdote from poet Sam Hunt, who had sat next to Bolger and his wife Joan on a plane, the three of them headed to an Anzac memorial service. Hunt recited James K Baxter\u2019s The Gunner\u2019s Lament to the former prime minister: \u201cIn a Viet Cong\u2019s blazing eyes \u2013 we fought for the crops of k\u016bmara, they are fighting for the rice \u2026 And go tell Keith Holyoake, sitting in Wellington, however long he scrubs his hands, he\u2019ll never get them clean.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSam Hunt turned to Jim and Joan Bolger, and both of them had tears streaming down their faces because they are people of empathy, and they understood the meaning of that poem and its context of our colonial history,\u201d Abel told the House. \u201cIf the patterns of colonisation are still present, then how can we say we are in a post-colonial era?\u201d<\/p>\n By Wednesday, speaker Gerry Brownlee found a new issue over which to go to war with Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori. To be fair, co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and MP T\u0101kuta Ferris\u2019s burning of a copy of the MACA bill in front of the parliamentary steps, in high winds, probably is \u201cthe dumbest thing you could possibly do\u201d<\/a>. Although, when you think about other stunts made on the steps this year \u2026<\/p>\n Wednesday was also a wobbly day for the Greens, with co-leader Chl\u00f6e Swarbrick slightly prickly with reporters who dared ask why the party hadn\u2019t organised a press release on climate-related disclosures \u2013 a law championed by her predecessor, James Shaw. And a blip by Davidson, who was 20 seconds too late to answer the call to read her Right to Repair bill<\/a> in the House, meaning it was dropped from the agenda.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a bill which isn\u2019t likely to pass anyway, and when Davidson later tried to get it back on the agenda of the day, she was voted down by the government. Davidson certainly isn\u2019t the first member of parliament to miss their own bill reading, but being the butt of the joke on the government side, alongside dealing with the ramifications of a shrunken communications team, will probably have her and the rest of the Greens feeling particularly grateful to catch a break from this place next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lighting shit on fire isn\u2019t the worst thing that\u2019s happened on the parliamentary steps, but it is a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8133,492,54505,8028,71677,111,43,139,69,135,66953],"class_list":["post-97158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-analysis","tag-comments-enabled","tag-echo-chamber","tag-labour-party","tag-marine-and-coastal-area-act","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-politics","tag-right-to-repair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Karen Chhour gave Marama Davidson some what-for.<\/p>\n
Steve Abel had one of the most moving speeches on MACA.<\/p>\n
Marama Davidson was there, she was just 20 seconds late.<\/p>\n