Uhh, is it normal for quite so many ex-PMs to call out a sitting government?

Geoffrey Palmer joins the chorus with a scathing condemnation for the coalition of chaos and it's wanton disregard for our constitutional conventions.

“Was Don Brash a PM?” I cautiously type into Google. I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but I have this strange paranoia that he might have snuck in somewhere and I’ve just forgotten him.

It’s a sign of the times (and perhaps of the prevalence of ChatGPT) that a simple answer is not provided by a cursory search of the first few results. The excerpts are frustratingly non-concrete, although I’m tickled that IMBD makes the top 3 results, alongside Wikipedia and NATLIB. Weirdly, it’s more helpful than either of them.

Does Parliament TV qualify you for a performance credit?

It is somewhat surprising to me that ex-Nats leader Don Brash has teamed up with former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark to criticise Luxon’s rash change in foreign policy. You don’t expect that sort of move to go unchallenged by other politicians, current and former, and this unlikely pair were both instrumental in forging our current quite successful relationship with China — an economically beneficial relationship that Luxon and his government are putting in jeopardy by pursuing AUKUS Pillar 2, alongside our independent foreign policy and our nuclear-free status.

[National’s] joint press statement “noted the enduring nature of the Anzus Treaty, which continues to underpin the strategic relationship between the two countries”, despite the fact New Zealand was ejected from that treaty in the mid-80s.

They committed the two countries to “joint deterrence efforts”. “Joint deterrence efforts”? Against whom? There is no country to which that phrase could refer but to China.

The four ministers “discussed the Aukus trilateral partnership and agreed it made a positive contribution toward maintaining peace, security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific”, using the term now preferred by the US to refer to what we used to call the Asia-Pacific. Nobody pretends that Aukus is anything but an attempt by the US to contain China.

They also “welcomed the quad’s commitment to an open, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific region”, again referring to an alliance established at the instigation of the United States to push back against China’s growing influence.

The four ministers “committed to Australia and New Zealand deepening their cooperation on security challenges, to sharing information and best practice, and building collective resilience”, thus locking New Zealand into Australian foreign and defence policy – little brother status.

On the face of it, the two New Zealand ministers formally abandoned any attempt to maintain an independent foreign policy, and instead decided to throw in our lot with America’s attempt to slow China’s economic rise and keep it tightly hemmed in by American forces in South Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

Prime Minister, it is imperative that you either reassert New Zealand’s independent foreign policy by making it clear that we want no part of Aukus, or of any other alliance designed to make an enemy of our largest trading partner, or acknowledge that we have indeed abandoned any attempt to maintain that policy.

Clark and Brash were rivals for the Prime Ministership in the 2005 election, so their unity here is noteworthy, but it’s not bringing down the beehive. It does, however, provide a backdrop of concern for the criticism to come, when Sir John Key, another of Clark’s political rivals and her successor as Prime Minister, added his two cents on the government’s recent actions: notably, the government’s rapidly deteriorating relationship with Maori, calling on participants to “take the temperature down” in his verdict on this new National government.

While soft in wording and part of a planned evaluation on Luxon’s performance, there is some sting to the barbs when it comes from the leader he is supposed to be following in the footsteps of.

Key and Clark were joined by Jacinda Adern back in March, bringing her own issues to the fore: the budget had passed, and the prognosis was poor for many.

Former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern hit out at the cynical use of the politics of fear in a speech overnight and made what appeared to be a veiled reference to NZ First leader Winston Peters and remarks he made in the 1990s.

Peters later served as Ardern’s Deputy Prime Minister, after he picked governing with Labour following coalition talks in 2017.

She spoke at the University of Bologna in Italy, where she was awarded the Sigillum Magnum, the university’s highest honour.

The speech touched on 1991′s “Mother of All Budgets”, which was delivered when Ardern was a child, and its social consequences.

“My recollection of this time is not of the political machinations, but the impact on people. I remember the people in my school without shoes as certain industries closed, I remember the spread of illnesses that are associated with poverty, I remember a neighbour’s son taking his own life,” she said.

She said the response from politicians to that Budget was the deployment of a divisive politics of fear. Ardern said she became aware of attacks on what were called “dole bludgers” and hit out at “some political leaders horrifically using terms like ‘Asian invasion’.”

And now, constitutional expert Sir Geoffrey Palmer has written twice about this government and its total disregard for the conventions that hold this democracy together. As well as authoring our Constitution Act, he is responsible for MMP, the RMA, BORA, the Human Rights Act, the Public Finance Act, the Ministry for the Environment and the Department of Conservation, and ACC. Oh, and he was also the politician responsible for extending the Waitangi Tribunal’s purview back to 1840, a crucial aspect of our settlement process that this government want to reverse.

Palmer says of his own tenure:

“I never wanted to be leader of the Labour Party because I had an almost perfect set of portfolios for my interests. There’s a lot of rubbish connected with being the leader, you’ve got to be a sort of entertainer and all sorts of stuff that didn’t interest me. But I felt I had to do it to finish the programme. Because we had a big programme legislatively and we needed to finish it.”

Sir Geoffrey Palmer has criticised the government’s fast-track bill before, but his latest call out of the government is something else entirely.

In it, he outlines the entire agenda of this coalition of chaos, identifying a number of their policies as “unfit for purpose, legally suspect, contrary to the public interest and inappropriate.” The agenda being pursued is where common ground is found; he observes this is having a negative effect on especially on Maori because NZ First and ACT overlap considerably in their views regarding this. This is also where we see the most direction from them, and therefore from this government as it’s so minority driven, in other policies such as the attacks on the environment.

He criticises the lawmaking being driven so heavily by the executive with disregard to the legislature and to the checks and balances that provide scrutiny over our political processes. He identifies the lack of evidence to many of their policies despite their claims to the contrary, and the forced support each party must have for the worst aspects of each of the others in this shoot-em-out style of cowboy governing. (Though he uses more diplomatic terms). He calls out the unprecedented use of urgency, the money wasted on previously drafted policy, legislation and plans that this government has torn up, and adds his voice in support of Judith Collins who is Attorney General and has been the sole politician attempting to show any constitutional restraint. He observes that her warnings have been barely heeded by the rest of the executive, in many cases openly ignored by the party leaders.

He criticises the Fast Track Bill, the targeting of Maori and backwards progress on race relations including the Foreshore and Seabed legislation that also happens to trample over the independence of the Judiciary and identifies that many of the actions this government wishes to take against Maori and the Treaty will be futile due to their lack of constitutional soundness.

But while the actions this government takes will likely be inevitably rolled back in future, either due to popular repeal by future government or by negation by the courts, what can’t be so readily undone is the harm they do to Aotearoa, our people and our mana.

This government’s move yesterday to drop individual minister approval from the fast-track legislation would suggest they are paying attention to the overwhelming criticism. Nevertheless, it is a seemingly small consideration to give in the face of such loud unease coming from our former leaders.

The title of Sir Geoffrey’s article is “Lurching towards constitutional impropriety”, a mildly-worded accusation that belies the seriousness of the charge. In our inherited system held together by constitutional convention and some no. 8 wire, acting un-Britishly ‘improper’ refers to behaviour that can unravel us entirely.

And to answer my original question?

No, I don’t think this is normal at all.