There’s even more seating than they need for the hundred or so people here today, but, concerningly for a bridge club, the insulation appears to be nonexistent. Just like the welcoming, well-mannered greeters at the door, the audience here are practically all old. The National team stand out: they’re clearly the youngest people in the room.
Matt Doocey, Waimakariri MP, is a warm presence with his bald jokes. Wigram’s Tracy is dedicated, respectable; Ilam’s Hamish talks about investing in good services for kids like his so they can get a fair shot at life; Vanessa takes pride in her doorknocking across the Banks Peninsula. Matt of Christchurch East searches for attention with an audience engagement stunt, fishing for opinions on his tie while people in the back ask him to speak clearly into the mic.
Dale in Christchurch Central also holds the mic a bit too low, and is understated by comparison, but he leaves the best impression of both of us. He speaks to his work in Māori investment companies and EasyStart services, and he discusses how crime arises from socioeconomic issues. And then 20 minutes in, we’re done hearing from the rest of the team and it’s time for the main man.
I didn’t expect to be here.
The other day, Ian told me that we were going to see Chris Bishop. This came as quite the surprise - like most people, he’s not keen to go see political meetings. His mission, he explained, was to come along and tell a high-up from National that they needed to get on the same page as ACT. He learnt from me that Bishop was, in fact, holding a meeting specifically about housing. Twenty seconds before we arrived. There had been some slight miscommunication.
I know more of Chris Bishop than most MPs, mainly because we both did debating. And goodness me, is he debatery. Occasionally, that tendency to present like he’s speaking to an impartial judge instead of an interested audience leads him occasionally into weird wording, where only the seasoned listener might be able to divine his meaning. Saying “the economy has decreased” doesn’t sound like a convincing message from a future third-in-command of the government, it sounds muddy and schoolboyish. (And should be enough to prove anybody can manage public speaking with effort, however you may stumble.)
Turns of phrase like saying he’s “a little hardass” don’t really fit the tastes of the audience, as does referring to our “own credit cards”. You’d hope this room was surviving on savings, or the cost of living crisis would be looking really desperate. And, of course, he employs that time-old trick of the politician: saying something nobody would ever reasonably disagree with like it’s a brave stand, and then, if you’re feeling particularly cheeky, socking it to your strawman. “Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done”, he implores us, of the hopes of a better country. Because the government that wants your votes is rushing out to tell you things can’t get better and you should vote for dirty rivers, ram raids et cetera. Right.
Mostly, though, his stump speech delivers a clear elucidation of the financial harm most households are incurring right now. He refers, of course, to that classic cliche - inflation is the “thief in your back pocket” - but he also delivers an attack line you are hearing in various forms from National and ACT candidate across the country, and which will probably prove to be the most simple, successful claim of this election.
Over the last few years, Labour have spent more - the claimed number varies, in this case we run with around 49%. Are your schools 49% better? Your hospitals? Your police? Nobody can claim there has been a proportionate improvement, and any more nuanced defence of the situation (e.g the wage subsidy actively preventing a widespread collapse) will struggle to find traction. This is the Reagan ‘80 debate winner, refreshed for the cost of living crisis.
For a liberal, Chris Bishop is earnest in his outrage on law and order. He tells the story you may have heard, of a vulnerable man being assaulted by gang members in a Hamilton McDonald’s for the sin of wearing a red shirt. He is playing to the room: whereas he gives a strong performance on inflation, debt and crime, he moves speedily through public services. The healthcare plan is essentially a shoutout to midwives. He claims he “can talk about [the three Rs] all day” and then r-r-rushes right on.
He’s clearly got a passion for infrastructure, though he claims us as an audience “probably don’t care”, and he doubles back to shout out fibre expansion in a way I’ve never heard it before: “think about the lockdowns, how grim would they be” if we didn’t have nationwide fast internet. Fair point! He has paced himself well and curtailed his preferred subjects to meet the needs of the meeting; he is done in 20 minutes, too.
This crowd is not straining but certainly has several questions. A few stand out mostly as specific bugbears. The first delivers the latest of the long, rambling kinda-questions, this one about how we could, with social credit-style monetary policy, access debt-free public funding. Chris Bishop begins an explanation of why printing lots more money probably isn’t a good idea. (It’s an especially weird question to receive after COVID and during an inflationary crisis.)
The man isn’t happy - he cuts in, “can't you answer the question, please?” Bish, ever the debater, chortles back: “I’m just rebutting.” And shortly, a commotion arises: the man storms out of the room, leaving a hubbub of startled viewers in his wake. Quietly, Doocey slips out to handle the situation. The crowd appear unimpressed with the disrupter. We continue.
On the far side of the room, a questioner with a rose-tinted view of what the National Party stands for today harkens back to the good old days. He promotes the benefits of reconstituting the Ministry of Works (disbanded in 1988). Reflecting on whether to take a private or public approach to procuring funds for building roads and the like, Bishop insists “it’s both, it’s a balance”. He discusses public-private partnerships, but notes that “that’s the problem, people’s eyes roll over”.
Speaking of which…
I know the person who stands up next and asks a question, and I’m not in the business of naming private individuals. Allow me to substitute in the nickname I heard once or twice - “Mister Moonshine”. His privacy is protected, and if you know, you know. MM is in the field of teaching what might be called creative, back-of-the-napkin financial literacy.
He provides much the same service here to Bishop, engaging in an arcane and roundabout discussion of what it is the kids need to know. Bishop politely asks him to meet and go into more detail later. (Much later, as we make our way out, we can see MM trying to work his way towards Bishop, and Bishop trying his best to speak to anyone else he can put in their path.) Not for the first time, I’m left marvelling at the curious crossovers of personalities you get in Christchurch.
A more grounded question encapsulates what a lot of the discussion at this meeting came down to. A liberal like Chris Bishop presenting on housing inevitably presents tensions. You can build up or you can build out in New Zealand. Especially in Christchurch, Canterbury, each poses their own problems.
A man asks about greenfield development - essentially, building out into the countryside - to which Bishop reassures him that they already plan to rule out productive farmland. That’s a relief to hear, though his side-on answers through the day as to how they’ll overcome the huge infrastructure gap to support new suburbs and satellite towns (think transport, pipes, power et cetera) are less compelling.
And then it’s time for my question. Kia ora. I start with what is needed to get me in the door: I shout out him going on How To Lose A Girl In Ten Days (now rebranded to Governmentality, still dropping episodes, go listen) and, for good measure, brand myself a fellow Vic Debsoc alumni. I never expected to have Chris Bishop crack a smile and go “ayy” at something I said, but there you are.
My goal here, as I say, is to get at the heart of the discussion that the housing meeting has danced around. Here’s what I said, pretty much verbatim:
“You listened to pushback, you’ll replace the MDRS. How can we trust that new law, and you as the Housing Minister, to make the long term tough choices to benefit those without homes, even if that wouldn’t be the first choice of homeowners, because if supply goes up, prices fall, that’s just how it works, but if everybody can veto new housing next to them nothing will ever get built. Can we trust you to make those tough choices?”
I finish and there’s a few claps. Ian reckons they approve of the substance, I reckon it’s probably more just that boomers like to see articulate young people participating in their spaces. (This is probably a statement heavily qualified by who the young person is doing the talking.) Matt Doocey comes over to take the mic from me. If you’ve hung around me long enough you might notice that my hands tremble sometimes, and they’re shaking badly at this time: I handle debating pressure okay, but trying to get a question right in front of a crowd like this is a different prospect. Well done, he says.
As I adjust to handing the mic off and sitting down, feeling hot under the collar, I tune back in to Bish’s response. Naturally, he laughs a bit about the prospect of whether he can be trusted, to which he says of course he’s going to say yes. But he understands the assignment and puts in the work to prove it: he speaks to how reprehensible the housing situation is, for those at the short end of it, and is willing to specifically condemn how expensive our housing is.
From there, he goes to promoting and quickly restating their set of policies, and without the details a substantive assessment on whether these housing plans will work is hard to say. But I believe Chris Bishop, who will probably be our next housing minister, thinks our housing market needs to work for those who cannot afford housing. That’s good to know.
Doocey comes to our mate at the table, hands him the mic, and away he goes. The moment I hear the word “fluoride” drop, I know we’re in for a treat, even as I’m slightly unnerved to be sitting right there, watching the catastrophe unfold. He draws comparisons to East Germany. Delivers an Eisenhower quote about defending our freedoms. Praises the Free Speech Coalition in their fight against a government Superregulator coming for the blogs. It’s a nightmare to end on, the farce heightened by Matt Doocey slowly, slowly, inching closer, asking him to wrap up his question soon, saying it’s time to give the microphone back, pleading, begging.
Bishop doesn’t exactly help matters when he says he’s a free speech absolutist - a position you can hold while, at the same time, gently suggesting that maybe no New Zealand government is planning to set up the Southland Stasi and lead Sean Plunket away in chains. He talks about a growing culture of silencing dissent, and all I can think is, dawg, get off of Twitter. To me, this represents the fact that a growing portion of people have gotten sucked into fixating on others being online without recognising it’s because they’re too online themselves. He had an honest to god conspiracy theorist in front of him, and he was less concerned with trying to actually assuage this guy’s fears than he was with stoking them because Young Greens pick fights in his replies sometimes.
And then we’re done. Somebody introduces themselves and we realise we know each other from the Manji event, but I’m still too flooded with adrenalin to make a proper convo of it. (Apologies to whoever that was; if you somehow come across this article, please get in touch and let me know how the election is going for you!) Now I can fulfil my real objective: we’ve got the goodwill built with Bishop, and I can shepherd Ian up front (stopping for some photos I didn’t want to take by the big posters of Luxon and Willis).
We say hi to Bishop, and he’s clearly warm and chatty in person. I think he’s a little bemused by my reticence - I’m not nervous to talk but I just don’t have much to say, and I suspect when an articulate young person shows up to a public meeting, he’s probably expecting them to say the words “Young Nats” within about ten seconds. No matter.
In line with what I’ve touched on in my blog bias article, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to report on the specifics of what we discussed. What Bish says in front of a crowd is his job; what he says to any individual is chit-chat that a journalist could reasonably be expected to write down, but which anybody else wouldn’t be expected to treat like a journalist. All I will say is that I thought his response to Ian’s message was very, very telling. And speaking of tension, I wonder how the future of housing will play out with the people in this room. The next Housing Minister appears to be on a collision course with many of his own voters.
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