Luxon’s new role: applying fire retardant to Peters’ claims

Can you help Christopher Luxon to be crystal clear? He so very much wants to be. He tells us every day. I want to be crystal clear, he says. Let me be crystal clear. And then, invariably, he is not.

He is like the man who has a car to sell you. He has a bright shining vision of a better vehicle for your future. He is excited to get you behind the wheel. He is ambitious for your driving experience.

Then, when the paperwork is inked and the questions come – Weren’t these included in the price? Wasn’t this covered by the warranty? – suddenly nothing is crystal clear. Everywhere there is more fudge than a Wonka factory.

Consider the case of Winston Peters, the Travis Bickle of the New Zealand political landscape, the loose unit staring down his reflection as he practises the day’s run-in with media. “You talkin’ to me? You talkin to me?”

Peters says the Public Interest Journalism Fund is “$55 million of bribery”. It’s worth quoting him exactly because somehow this man is deputy prime minister and foreign minister. He represents New Zealand on the world stage, even if when he does so the world stage seems to shrink in size and stature to a tatty one-man Punch and Judy show. Despite this, and because he represents New Zealand, what he says matters.

For the record, of course, Mr Peters’ bribery claim is grade-A exportmushroom-growing quality manure. The actual facts about the Public Interest Journalism Fund have been well traversed in the last few days. But as the old saying goes, grade-A exportmushroom-growing quality manure is halfway around the world before the truth gets its trousers on.

Mr Peters’ allegation that a New Zealand government took part in what amounts to high-level corruption is out in the wild, and like a fart in an elevator it can’t be put back from whence it came.

Again, just for the record, corruption is simply not what New Zealand governments of any stripe do. Incompetence, wilful neglect, balldropping in general – for sure. But in the World Cup of least public sector corruption we’re a solid second, and there’s nothing wrong with second, right team?

Still, Mr Peters remains unflappable by such facts, and baseless allegations suit his current constituency.

“Laser-focused” is another favourite term of Luxon’s, but history shows that it is Mr Peters who is the expert at delivering the precision-guided dog whistle.

In the past his targets have included senior citizens, xenophobes, the bewildered and people who can’t cope with a unisex toilet at work but somehow seem to manage with one at home.

Now it is the conspiracy theorists who get to lap it up.

And so to Luxon who, to be crystal clear, wants to be crystal clear. Mr Luxon was asked about Mr Peters’ bribery claim, and replied that he didn’t think the Public Interest Journalism Fund was a good idea.

Now, you tell me: are “not a good idea” and “$55 million of bribery” the same thing? I think not. Chris Bishop confessing that he had run out of fresh clothes and ended up with Luxon’s shirt is a mental image that it was probably “not a good idea” to share with the world, yet no bribery seemed to be involved.

But Mr Luxon was never asked whether the Public Interest Journalism Fund was a good idea. Mr Luxon was asked about the deputy prime minister alleging government bribery. He chose to conflate, to elide, to muddy the waters.

Ironically, during the election campaign it fell to Nicola Willis to be Luxon’s clarifier-in-chief, often tasked with the job of explaining exactly what her boss really meant. Now Luxon has taken on the opposite role, having to dump an opaque, amorphous blob of foamy verbal fire retardant on whatever highly-flammable words spill from his coalition partner.

Watching, you see a man making a rod for his own back, live in real time. But he knows he has little alternative if he’s to hold this thing together. At least his motives are crystal clear.