Kicking Around The Habit

The Government is dealing in a lethal cocktail of fags, weed and debt.

To take it from Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters, he tenses whenever his phone rings in case it’s Jacinda Ardern telling him to hang on to her job for a bit longer. He told Parliament this week he’s worried he makes the job look “too easy”, so she might opt to keep her feet up and let him lead us indefinitely.

In further evidence that hubris has got its brogues well and truly under the New Zealand First table, Peters’ colleague Shane Jones now routinely refers to himself as “the provincial champion”, “something of a hero on the West Coast” and “my good self”.

This is all more of a comedy routine to bait the Opposition than genuine conceit. It’s also swaggering fuelled by internal party polling suggesting NZ First is not, as published polls have suggested, on the skids, and that National’s support no longer exceeds Labour’s. But in politics quite as much as in Greek tragedy, hubris is always visited by nemesis. Dare to think you’re doing well even if you are and you will be punished.

A classic example of this is the cigarette tax, a rampantly successful public-health measure that has nevertheless jack-knifed to thwart the best of political intentions. The Government has just announced it’s reluctantly reviewing the longstanding policy of hiking tobacco tax by 10% a year because it’s having perverse consequences. As the rate of dairy owners robbed, bashed and even murdered suggests, tobacco is now a currency of organised crime.

DIE-HARD SMOKERS