TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN

Diary of the last 8 hours and 51 years

7.15am

The rules are such that members must wear business attire, Trevor Mallard Mister Speaker is saying on the radio.

What we are learning this morning, and I am making wild guesses but I bet I’m right is: Trevor Mallard Mister Speaker has in front of him next to his gavel a notepad with two columns, that he fills in when it gets boring, one headed HOT and one NOT. 

Under HOT he has: rugby cricket volleyball football kickboxing, America's cup, stadiums, lycra. 

Under NOT he has: ties. 

This is being discussed because of all the public debates you can have, the easiest one to hang from the rafter and give an absolute piñata thrashing is the subject that requires no specialist knowledge and about which you can hold a strong subjective opinion.

Feliz Navidad everybody, line up and get your stick ready. Today’s subject is should you have to wear a tie in parliament?

This is happening because yesterday James Shaw asked Mister Speaker if we could take a look at the rule that requires gentlemen to wear ties?

What is a gentleman, really? The definition I like most is: someone who knows how to play the bagpipes and doesn’t.

Leading the debating charge on behalf of youngish fogies everywhere is Simon Bridges 

Is old mate Simon leaving his freewheeling yak days behind him? He seems lately to be embracing the past and all its storied traditions. Earlier in the week he relived the 1984 glory of defeated National MP Pat Hunt who sneered at incoming Social Credit MP Neil Morrison that his kind was the crimplene suit and Skoda brigade. 

Blow me down, nearly forty years later and even after the brand has been truly transformed by VW, here’s Simon giving it another lap.

I am at ease (to a possibly antisocial degree) with not getting dressed up, especially if I'm strolling down to Hammer Hardware in my painting clothes. But I do think you can greatly overdo the fussiness about standards of dress. Never mind what politicians wear. It’s what they say that really matters.

Someone tweets:

Forget changing the tie rule in parliament, how about apologising for the way Metiria was bullied by National for every outfit decision she made.

A few months ago this Twitter thread gave me an altogether better understanding of the shitstorm of 2014 when Judith Collins and colleagues unloaded on Metiria Turei for having the temerity to buy some fancy clothes and Jesus it’s an unedifying picture of MPs behaving badly. 

Here’s a cool fun story about Judith Collins: Once in 2014 I was in the Parliament gym changing rooms and another staffer started making small talk with me. She asked me who I worked for, and I said Metiria Turei. She said “She’s got some lovely clothes recently, hasn’t she?”

And went on further to ask if they were by the designer Adrienne Winkelmann (they were). I asked who she worked for, and she said Judith Collins. She said Judith had some Adrienne Winkelmann clothes and weren’t they lovely yada yada.

Quite honestly, the next day, Judith Collins told the media and other members of National (notably Tolley and Finlayson) that this uppity grassroots Greens activist had the audacity to buy expensive clothes, and Metiria started getting media calls about it.

….Metiria was constantly given crap for not being professional enough or fitting in with all the starch and buttons of Parliament. So, 10 years in the House she caved & got some fancy Tory clothes.

They were expensive, but they were also quite literally required of her. But, being someone who advocated for action on poverty, she literally couldn’t win - if she didn’t look the part of a Party leader, she wasn’t taken seriously, and if she did, she was a sell out.

...Judith Collins knew that, and chose to quite literally make the wardrobe choices of another woman a focus of attack

Metiria Turei was treated shabbily and unjustly for that. And she was treated shabbily and unjustly for speaking truths about what people may do when there just isn't enough.

I mean to run some numbers at some point so that I can challenge the next person who raises that whole you're living on my taxes and I’m going to tell you how I think you should live schtick.

Take the tax many of us pay and tot up how much is going directly to superannuation for family members, and schooling of our kids, and free health care for our family members, and …..well, you can probably see where I’m going. My guess is that there might not be all that much left over to begrudge. Maybe none at all. 

But sure, have your say, incensed taxpayer. Go off.

8.20am

Out on the maunga, topping up the rodent bait. Great success! In several of the bait stations, rats have been at the pellets like beavers at a tree trunk. 

There was big news last night. Someone reported or complained - not quite sure which - to one of the local board members that out walking they had come upon a dead rat on the path. That would be our doing. That would be our bait. Great success. 

This morning my life has meaning, even if it requires that something else loses theirs. 

11.45am

There are things that happen when you're a kid that register as a big deal, but you have little or no context to place it in. So you just carry that factoid along with you. 

I can remember the fuss just after the 1969 election when Tom Shand died and there was a by-election. For some reason that 9 year old me did not really grasp, it was a big deal that Tom Shand had died. 

Five short decades later I have finally come back to the story to learn some more. It's pretty impressive. I say that, as a lefty, about a man whose biography includes the epithet red-baiter. (Greetings, More Than A Feilding reader Fleur Templeton! Your Dad (edit: Uncle!) wrote the excellent short biography from which I am drawing the entirety of this information.)

Tom Shand’s early life was country and town: he’s a shepherd on his family’s farm, then two years in the freezing works and flax mills, active in union affairs. Gets his commerce degree in 1942, then volunteers for the Air Force, ends up flying Hudson bombers and Catalinas in the South Pacific campaign. 

1946 election, he’s elected National MP for Marlborough. Airman Shand is given roles in civil aviation and rehabilitation, development of aerial top-dressing, the airport at Rongotai, getting more land for returned servicemen.

He’s energetic and able. Before long he’s a senior minister in the Holyoake administration, chiefly Minister of Labour. He plays a major role reorganising government administration. He builds close relations with the New Zealand Federation of Labour leadership. His directness and courage earns unionists’ trust and admiration. 

Hugh Templeton writes:

He constantly emphasised the importance of productivity, and oversaw the introduction of container shipping and industry training. His understanding of the importance of investment made him an early advocate of New Zealand membership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and of the calling of a national development conference. He carried through the Woodhouse Commission of 1966, with its proposals for a revolutionary no-fault accident compensation system. 

He was the driving force behind a whole bunch of hydroelectric schemes and the Cook Strait cable. He worked to a philosophy that political leaders had to take a lead in planning and investing for the future of a soundly based economy, while providing strong defences against the threat of communism.

He was seen as National Party leader in waiting, 1969. But lung cancer took him at the end of that year at the age of 60.

Muldoon was a force of nature. But with Shand still in the picture, things could have been very different. Muldoon’s options for advancement could have been much reduced. 

I wonder: how might things have run if a man like Tom Shand had been prime minister rather than Muldoon? Would the planning and investment have taken a different direction? 

What about the superannuation scheme the labour government set up and Muldoon scrapped? Would we have got something better? 

Would the whole fabric of political engagement have been different? Would New Zealand have grown in different ways and directions?

And is someone like Tom Shand the kind of leader Simon Bridges’ New Zealand National Party of New Zealand could use right now?

Answers please on the back of a crimplene tie.

1.45 pm

I’m no longer drinking but I still love a drinking song. After all, it’s the weekend. Here’s Alison Moorer.