Peters’ Dying Light, Data Debate and Disappearing Commissioners

Hosted by Phil Goff and Chris Finlayson, Cross Party Lines returns with an episode that opens on Winston Peters telling a Green MP to go back to his own country and calling China’s leaders liars — and asks why the Prime Minister is applying a different standard to racism than he did to sexism.

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In this episode:

* Peters goes off the rails — again, and possibly for the last time — Winston Peters told Lawrence Xu-Nan, a Green MP who has lived in New Zealand for most of his life, to go back to his own country. He then labelled China’s leadership — New Zealand’s biggest trading partner — a bunch of liars, prompting a formal rebuke from the Chinese Embassy that neither Phil nor Chris can recall happening before in their combined decades in politics. Chris reaches for Dylan Thomas — do not go gentle into that good night — and reads the whole episode as a career in its dying convulsions: disproportionate, extreme and politically self-destructive.

* Economies of Doubt and Data of Hope — $3.5 billion, 280 megawatts and a debate nobody is having — DataGrid, a Singapore-based company, is planning a data centre near Invercargill that would consume more than twice the power of all 62 existing data centres in New Zealand combined. Both Phil and Chris land cautiously in favour — New Zealand would effectively be exporting sustainable energy in the form of data, worth potentially $50-70 billion in economic benefits according to the Boston Consulting Group — but both are frustrated that neither the government nor the company is making the public case.

* Too many commissioners? — The episode closes on a genuine disagreement: Children’s Commissioner Claire Achmed has been removed halfway through her term after calling out worsening child poverty — 170,000 children now, up from 148,000. Phil defends her forcefully: child poverty in New Zealand is three times the developed-country average, a bipartisan approach is needed. Chris pushes back: we have too many commissioners, the role should sit with the minister responsible, and the Salvation Army, the Child Poverty Action Group and the Catholic Social Justice Commission make the case perfectly well without a separate office. They agree to disagree — and both agree the underlying problem is real, urgent and not being addressed.

Along the way: Jim Bolger yelling “racist” at Peters across the House in 1995 and then sharing a bench with him two months later and Chris’ memorable answer to Michael Cullen on the Iwi Kiwi advertisement (”that was then, this is now”).

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