Imagine you’re the Prime Minister of this plucky little battler of a country.
Now imagine it’s last week.
What thing are you doing that people will probably notice, if they notice you at all?
Correct! It’s the list you’re working on of all the people who are going to be in your cabinet.
If you’re also imagining a voodoo doll of Chris Bishop with pins in it, you could be imagining a bit too much, although to be fair it does sound like Bishop really did try to get another coup to stand up, but ending up wreathed once more in the odour of sausage rolls and failure. Also there was the unedifying spectacle of Simeon Brown being rewarded once more for his patriarchal 19th century suckup stylings.
But for this exercise all we’re really looking for is an answer to these questions:
How familiar would you be with the names on that list, if that’s what your big job was last week?
and
How hard would it be for you to picture that list in your mind’s eye when Tova O’Brien asks you: how many Māori are in your cabinet?
We are now ready to either shove popcorn in our gobs or cover our eyes with our fingers as we watch a car-crash of a TV interview.
A stricken possum-in-headlights look suggests that… the Prime Minister does not have the answer.
I’m not going to play that game, he flails.
It’s one, isn’t it, prompts Tova, helpfully proffering a phone-a-friend card.
Yes, he says, lunging at the life preserver — that’s right, there’s James Meager.
We now see Tova of the Serengeti momentarily astonished and also licking her lips.
What? James Meager is inside cabinet?
No no, he’s outside, he says.
So, she goes on, padding nearer, nearer — so Tama Potaka isn’t in cabinet now ?
You can see Luxon wordlessly registering it all at once:
Tama Potaka, god that’s who it was!!
and also:
fuck fuck fuck what have I done???
and also:
scowling angrily as it dawns on him that once more, even despite his wife’s dedicated recent efforts to impress upon the media that he’s way more than the impression you’ve all formed from just watching and listening to him for three years, people are failing to grasp how bloody great he is at being the best Prime Minister this little country ever got.
Around the social media goes the video and the response is either:
I almost feel bad for him
or:
How shit at being a Prime Minister do you have to be to get owned like this on breakfast TV?
A space rocket soars out past the surly bonds etc, carrying humans farther away than ever before and it’s breathtaking to behold and serves to underscore how much impossible stuff we might yet achieve if we really tried.
Meanwhile back down here where Old Mate Grabaseat is going fuck fuck Tama Potaka I knew that, and addressing Tova as Tama, it would all be a bit comical if there weren’t real money involved.
We can now see how they would have handled Covid:
Too little to begin with, and then telling us regretfully it’s now too late to do anything.
She’ll be right, no need to get worked up, we’ve got 51 odd days is the messaging they’re going for.
And that’s true, we’ve got all of that. Until we don’t. And then…?
The moment a ship isn’t coming, you don’t start counting from today, you start counting from when it should have left. That number is already weeks old. The calculation doesn’t shift from fine to troubled; it shifts from fine to we were never fine.
And there is more than one calculation running at once: you’ve got the ships through Hormuz, you’ve got the ships from South Korea and Malaysia, our designated albeit rationed suppliers who may or may not be able to get to us in time.
This is one hell of an opportunity to get people thinking seriously about a better and different long term, because it has been so hard to get them to contemplate what the future might look like, and now we have it staring us in the face.
And all they’re offering us is:
She should be alright, no need to sweat it.
They beat their chests proudly and say we’re not afraid to make the hard calls. But in fact all their calls have been the easy ones: simplistic solutions that tend to harm people who aren’t their rich mates and will never give them their vote anyway.
Someone said on Bluesky:
We swapped our competent, hardworking, caring, capable PM Jacinda Ardern for the babbling bloke.
Reader Steve responded:
So many (otherwise sane and lovely) people I know still think that what we have now is better than “all that bloody kindness bullshit”. They also tend to be older, white, reasonably wealthy guys who are largely unaffected by this government’s handling of all the things.
I spent some of Easter reading A Different Kind of Power. It’s a very helpful accounting — on her terms, sure — but a well-substantiated one that counts out the various ways in which they really did get things done, or began laying ground for remaking the world on terms that could be decent for all of us.
A narrative has been happily embraced that they made a lot of noise but did nothing.
A Different Kind of Power steps through meaningful changes or beginnings: measuring wellbeing, tackling child poverty, expanding eligibility for support in various forms, supporting green initiatives, acting on the social harm of the online world, mental health, onsulting smart people and pulling together a coherent vision. There was altogether more purpose to what they were doing than the day-to-day experience might have left you with. There was specificity to the kindness.
This clownshow is all just waffle and he can’t even remember who else is in the car.
John Hastings wrote this about our show last week. Ngā mihi, John.
Write Notes – The Button Factory: April 2, 2026 (13th Floor Arts Review)
