Ardern up, Kiwis
A new PM, ratbags, rain and beef with Eminem. Paddles, we hardly knew ye. Looking back on the year in New Zealand, with cartoons by Rod Emmerson.
On March 7, 37-year-old Jacinda Ardern was elected deputy leader of the faded political force that was the New Zealand Labour Party. Five months later, with the party’s polling threatening to make it more or less irrelevant, she was elected leader. Seven weeks after that, she led the resurgent party in the country’s general election, and a month after that she was Prime Minister.
The shape of the government and her position at its head were decided in coalition negotiations and announced on various live media streams, to the two major parties at the same time as to the rest of the country, by Winston Peters, the 72-year-old leader of NZ First, a small, odd party of a vaguely nationalist, vaguely populist nature, which had gained 7.2 percent of the nationwide party vote.
It was the first time since the introduction of proportional representation in 1996 that the party with the largest share of the party vote was not in government. National got 44.4 percent of the party vote; Labour, 36.9 percent.
Outgoing Prime Minister and National leader Bill English made much of that fact in his subsequent media appearances, but Eva Allan’s excellent and widely shared Facebook post explained the result by way of an analogy: a number of people, none of whom has $5 by themselves, are trying to buy a $5 pie. The post’s final line read, “Bill gets no pie because he needed 50c but didn’t have any friends to help him pay for the pie.”
More endings: Mondelez International, the owners of Cadbury, decided to close the company’s Dunedin factory, where iconic Kiwi sweets Pineapple Lumps and Jaffas are made, and to move production to Australia. A crowdfunding campaign raised $5 million to try and keep the factory open but in the end it had no more effect than the public eruption of grief and anger, which was driven partly by the loss of 350 jobs in a community that needs them, and partly by the idea that Australians will soon be making our most cherished junk food.
The Commerce Commission rejected the potentially industry-shaking merger of Vodafone and pay-TV monolith Sky, and followed up a couple of months later by rejecting the merger of Fairfax and NZME, publishers of the country’s two biggest collections of newspapers and owners of its two biggest online news sites. Vodafone and Sky took it on the chin, while NZME and Fairfax took it to the High Court. Their appeal was heard in October, but there was no news by press time.
The year’s grottiest public event took place in a courtroom where the founder and former leader of New Zealand’s Conservative party, who had previously confidentially settled a case of sexual harassment brought by his press secretary in 2014, represented himself in a case involving a man once known as New Zealand’s leading right wing attack blogger.
They were suing each other for defamation in a trial that effectively became one enormous, ongoing, public act of defamation, particularly during the thrilling cross examinations. The high point came when Craig asked Slater if he’d called him a “ratbag and scumbag”. Slater replied: “Well you are both.”
The judge reserved his decision, then presumably went directly to scrub himself clean in the shower. He is yet to emerge.
It felt like it rained all year–a feeling backed up by the leading meteorologist who described it as, “The year it didn’t stop raining.” Some parts of the country got more rain than any other year in recorded history. The town of Edgecumbe, wrecked in a major earthquake 30 years ago, ended up underwater in April. Most of the town was evacuated, 15 houses were destroyed and hundreds more were extensively damaged.
The endless wet stuffed the vege growing season and therefore grocery budgets. A kilo of kumara, $3.23 in August last year, hit $8 a year later and is showing no signs of dropping. Pumpkin and potato prices were also notably escalatory. Perhaps unrelated to the weather, but nevertheless unpleasant, the price of a block of butter went from its traditional spot in the $3s to a new normal deep into the $5s.
The Auckland housing market, the one place typically relied upon for astonishing price rises, astonishingly started to slow down. Economists gave various reasons, few of which were that no ordinary person can afford to buy a house anymore.
The day before Jacinda Ardern was sworn in as Prime Minister, the National Party was in the throes of relinquishing its nine-year hold on power, helpfully providing passive aggressive public commentary about the country’s electoral system. Then it was found guilty in a long-running court case of infringing the copyright of Eminem in a song, called “Eminem Esque”, which it had commissioned during campaigning for the last election it won, in 2014. The party was ordered to pay $600,000 plus interest, but it was the timing that really hurt.
Max Key, an impressively-cheekboned vlogger and the son of the Prime Minister at the time the track was produced, wrote a post on Facebook threatening to produce a “diss track” against Eminem if his post was liked 10,000 times. That number was reached but Eminem is still waiting, as are we all. Poor Paddles the cat didn’t live to see it happen — Ardern’s ginger moggie died shortly after she took office, and a day after Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford wrote about Paddles, and life as the PM’s spouse, for the Guardian.
Greg Bruce is a feature writer for The New Zealand Herald.
Rod Emmerson is the editorial cartoonist for The New Zealand Herald.
