Yeah no minister

Luxon shows who’s boss, stands firm, makes decision

A fortnight ago, NZ’s most popular prime minister for the week ending a fortnight ago Chris Luxon defended his broadcasting minister’s performance despite her inability to persuade the Deputy PM and Minister of baubles, horses and cigarettes to read the executive summary of her master plan to reform television, radio and community singalongs.

But, as anyone who’s had to sit through Shane Jones refusing to comment on any matter knows, a fortnight is a long time.  And just two weeks later, Melissa is no longer broadcasting minister, the Disabilities Minister has been moved sideways and Brains from Thunderbirds, jokingly referred to by his colleagues as Paul Goldsmith, is parachuting to the rescue.  It’s been, all in all, one of the more stable periods in the term so far.

Overseas but unfortunately still within reach of a news crew, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Media Relations was in Gallipoli where his statesmanlike speech went down rather well* – presumably because the airlines lost, along with the army band’s instruments and three metres of fuselage, the last twelve minutes of autocue script including the bit about how the grit and determination of the Turks meant their country would never have anything as useless as a Waitangi Tribunal.

* not surprising really, they’d heard it somewhere before: Peters borrows from Abe

Elsewhere, the Density Church is doing its bit to keep the kids of Aotearoa safe, by embarking on a burns prevention scheme.  “We’ll going to make sure our children are safe,” “spokesbishop Barry Tumeke said.  “By getting drag queens banned from libraries, we’ve ensured kids won’t be anywhere near those institutions, and out of harms way, when we start burning all the books.”

And in entertainment news, former Newshub stalwart Duncan Garner told anyone who could afford the Listener sub that he was concerned that the new Stuff television news programme on 3 might not be able to compete with the state-owned broadcaster.  The rest of us, who only get the first three lines of the articule for free, have to assume Garner had then noted that competing with the state broadcaster was something that Newshub, including his own programme, had never managed to do either.