A dear friend was startled recently when he mentioned that a Mr Whippy ice cream van had attended their first political meeting of the 2026 electoral cycle and his usually mild-mannered reporter friend turned into an incoherent virago.
Two years ago, politicians eating ice creams on camera were the leitmotif of election strategy, calling up all the desperate frustration of endlessly reiterated Back-on-Track mantras, policy soundbites and every sign that populism and scapegoating, rather than social cohesion and a measured place at the world’s counsels, were the order of the day.
The intervening years are now history and I am left, with eight months to go to the spring election, with a distaste for news cycles of grown men eating junk food in public while crowding out public debate and recklessly hacking away at the nation’s wealth, citizen wellbeing and reputation.
Legislation mandating austerity and extractive economics are still spewing out without mercy, 104 bills being passed under urgency and without any public scrutiny over the Christmas period alone. And things are only getting stickier for the coalition government.
“Just days after disagreements within the coalition over the India Free Trade Agreement, New Zealanders have learned that senior minister Shane Jones has unilaterally stopped New Zealand from signing an agreement aimed at phasing out fossil fuels,” Labour leader Chris Hipkins said this week.
“The Prime Minister said this morning he hadn’t been briefed on a decision made by Shane Jones to block joining the agreement, showing again how his coalition partners are running rings around him. It’s now so bad that Shane Jones is making calls internationally without bothering to take them to Cabinet.
“Shane Jones’ decision to reject the fossil fuel phase-out agreement at the climate change conference in Brazil was not a minor procedural issue – it contradicts New Zealand’s longstanding international position on fossil fuels and sends a clear signal that ministers are now freelancing,” Hipkins said.
“New Zealand’s commitment to tackling climate change lies in tatters. Almost all meaningful measures to speed up our emissions reduction have been abandoned and Ministers are declaring to the world that we have given up.”
Now coalition partners are openly contradicting one another on one of New Zealand’s most significant relationships and Winston Peters and Christopher Luxon are basically on record calling each other liars. “If they don’t believe each other, why should the public believe either of them?”
Now New Zealand is in talks with the United States about the supply of rare and critical minerals, with our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirming officials are working through analysis, targeted consultation and providing advice to relevant ministers. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon dismissed the early reporting as, “frankly, probably a bit frothy and a bit ahead of itself” and went on to say he “wanted a critical minerals sector, that New Zealand had critical minerals and that critical minerals were “critical” to evolving technologies like AI superconductors.
“Are we going to develop in our own brutal self-interest? Yes we will,” he said.
Josie Vidal, CEO of the Minerals Council that represents mining in New Zealand, told Midday Report New Zealand could and should scale up mining, arguing it can be done responsibly.
“We believe that we should mine what we can here because of the high standards that we have when it comes to looking after people and the environment.
“There are some parts of the world that can’t claim that and we can claim responsible mining.
“We have some of the strictest environmental conditions in the world and that’s evidenced every day in responsible mining here and that will become an important part of the significance of our minerals because we can really back the provenance, whereas some jurisdictions can’t do that,” she said.
“A lot of people in supply chains for expensive tech do want to know that they’re not using child labour and things like that so with all of our primary production, we’ve got a really good story to tell.”
Good grief! Not only does the extractive global monster want our national resources to play ducks and drakes with but also to flog off a dishonest version of our reputation as well. Apparently Ms Vidal was not familiar with Papamoa 16 years ago; the Pike River Mine tragedy was the end of any safety complacency in New Zealand.
And why, since royalties for mining have never brought the country tax royalties commensurate with the national asset in the ground or seabed, would we dig it up now? When AI is far from comfortable or necessarily even benign.
Our grandchildren’s adult lives will be marked enough by stagnant wages, inflation, broken political institutions and a sense of national decline. Small wonder, then, that they feel cynical about our country and pessimistic about the mean and small future they are being handed.
With conviction and numbers, young voters can make the difference. If enough do so, the ‘youth vote’ could make a name for itself as a powerful component of government focus and a motivator for better and more inclusive behaviour all round. Until then, at least hold with the ice cream •
Liz Waters
