New Zealand’s a place where comments that raise eyebrows tend to be forgiven if they also raise a smile

By Chris Trotter*

Bad behaviour by politicians would appear to be enjoying a resurgence. The past seven days have seen incivility enhance the career of one politician and end the career of another.

Incivility’s power to both boost and retard political careers is what makes it so difficult to suppress. The question, as always in politics, is: “Can I get away with this? And if it turns out that I can’t, are the consequences likely to be career ending?”

These are both high-stakes calls. Perhaps that’s why, until recently, opting for public civility was by far the safest political course.

Public civility does not, of course, require pallid conventionality from our politicians: grey is not an exciting colour in any profession. Successive Speakers of New Zealand’s House of Representatives have long tolerated interjections from Members provided they are rare, reasonable, relevant, and if possible witty.

The parliamentary website even offers some examples. In 1974 Mike Moore (whose wit often veered dangerously towards the savage) said of National’s Rob Muldoon:

“[He] could go down the Mount Eden sewer and come up cleaner than he went in.”

Both men would go on to serve as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, confirming for posterity that cruel words are seldom fatal if they raise a smile.

Certainly posterity has continued to smile at the exchange between Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman to occupy a seat in the House of Commons, and Winston Churchill:

Nancy: “If you were my husband, Mr Churchill, I would put poison in your coffee.”

Winston: “If you were my wife Lady Astor, I would drink it.”

New Zealand’s own Winston has steadfastly declined to rein-in his NZ First deputy-leader, Shane Jones, whose words have repeatedly raised eyebrows both in and out of Parliament. Why? Because Jones’ verbal sallies also raise smiles.

There is a big difference between suggesting that New Zealand is about to be overwhelmed by thousands of Indian migrants, and warning Kiwis of a “butter chicken tsunami”. The former calls to mind Nigel Farage; the second is vintage “Matua Shane”.

Winston Peters, himself, does with his teeth what Shane Jones does with his wit. That smile of his has always been able to blunt the most pointed of remarks.

Jones is also adept at laying verbal traps for his opponents. His quip about the sycophancy displayed by New Zealand politicians to visiting foreign leaders having reached a level where kneepads might be in order, allowed for at least two interpretations.

The first, made by most New Zealanders, was that Jones was accusing his political colleagues of being too prone to kneeling like medieval supplicants before these pompous potentates – hence the need for kneepads.

The second interpretation, the one put forward by NZ First’s left-wing opponents, was that Jones was associating his colleagues’ welcome of foreign dignitaries with oral sex acts.

How Jones must have chortled – rightly intuiting that the immediate response of the average Kiwi would be to wonder just how much pornography Labour MPs were watching these days.

A twofer and no mistake: casting the Prime Minister as a sycophant; and Labour as a party where getting ahead involves getting down on your knees.

Either way, Jones is still standing.

The same cannot be said of Stuart Nash, whose derogatory observations about Napier’s National MP Katie Nimon’s use of parliamentary maternity leave rightly brought his injudicious political career to a sudden and, this time, irrevocable, end.

It wasn’t just that criticising a female colleague for availing herself of her rights as a mother was, in 2026, the behaviour of someone who needs to, in the words of Chris Bishop, “get into the 21st century”, but that it was also (and this would have clinched the matter for the leader of the party Nash had hoped to represent) it wasn’t the first time he had unnecessarily offended New Zealand women.

As the Platform’s editor, Sean Plunket, explained to his listeners, Winston Peters is a fervent believer in giving people – even his errant political celebrities – a shot at redemption.

One shot.

That Nash had exercised poor judgement and damaged NZ First in the eyes of women for the second time in barely a year was not something he could hope to walk away from.

As “The Godfather’s” Don Corleone might say: “That I do not forgive.”

Older New Zealanders, the Right’s most reliable demographic, will be asking themselves why their country’s politicians now feel so free to cast aside the decorum expected of sitting and aspirant Members of Parliament. When did the traditions and expectations bequeathed to them by the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster cease to hold New Zealand’s politicians in thrall?

The explanation is encapsulated in a single word: “Democracy”.

The House of Commons only very slowly put on the clothing of democracy. For most of Britain’s history its members were overawed and overshadowed by their aristocratic masters seated in the hereditary House of Lords. The chamber’s very name, “Commons” reflects its feudal origins. Not until the general election of 1930, when for the first time all British subjects over the age of 21 were eligible to vote, could the House of Commons truly lay claim to being a democratic assembly.

New Zealand’s parliament may have aped its British counterpart, but the trappings and traditions of a thousand-year-old state were always living on borrowed time in a colony famed for its progressive social experimentation: where four parliamentary seats were reserved for the indigenous Māori in 1867; and where women were enfranchised, long before the rest of the world, in 1893.

While the empire of which New Zealand was a part remained strong, the habits of deference and decorum imported from the British Isles endured. The magic of the King-Emperor; the uncontested power of the Governor-General to enlist New Zealand in a war breaking out 12,000 miles away without reference to its parliament; the subaltern’s habit of looking up, rather than around; all of these took more than a century to shake.

In the end, however, the raw power of a unicameral parliament untrammelled by a written constitution (New Zealand’s situation since the 1st January 1951) was bound to shatter the inherited imperial mould.

With only a handful of exceptions New Zealand’s House of Representatives was until the late-Twentieth Century a collection of ordinary men – in many cases very ordinary men.

They tried to live up to the English model of “gentlemen politicians”. But a gentleman elected to represent the home counties is a very different sort person from the gentleman elected to represent Invercargill or Sydenham.

The egalitarianism baked into the New Zealand character ever since Sam Parnell, in the same year that the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, stood firm for the eight-hour day, was bound to act as the solvent of British decorum and reinforce the informality of Kiwi democracy.

When Trevor Mallard dandled infants on his knee while seated in the Speaker’s Chair. When the Prime Minister proudly announced her pregnancy on state TV. When Rawiri Waititi cast aside his tie. Those were the moments when New Zealand’s House of Representatives signalled that it had more in common with its American namesake than it did with “Mother England’s” House of Commons.

New Zealanders are a plain-speaking people with a genuine talent for summoning-up a few well-chosen words. (“We knocked the bastard off!”) We also have a talent for teasing each other, as Shane Jones well knows, but almost no patience for blokes (or blokesses) who act like a dick.

Can our MPs be rude and offensive? Too bloody right! But nine times out of 10 it’s well deserved and/or in a good cause.

And the one time in 10 when its neither? Well, that is the time the person responsible should start looking for a new job.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.