D-day for the government

The government's Treaty Principles Bill is up for its first reading today - bought forward in a rush in a desperate effort to avoid the hikoi which is currently marching on Wellington. But the Prime Minister won’t be there for it – he’s literally running away to Peru! But he took the opportunity to denounce his bill as he was fleeing:

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has given a scathing appraisal of the Treaty Principles Bill on the day of its first reading, saying the legislation has been unhelpful to his mission of getting the country back on track.

[...]

Luxon will miss the parliamentary debate - enroute to Peru for the APEC summit instead - but he called a morning media conference where he criticised the legislation in perhaps his strongest words yet.

"You do not go negate, with a single stroke of a pen, 184 years of debate and discussion, with a bill that I think is very simplistic."

Luxon is clearly unhappy with his bill sucking all the oxygen out of his government. But he knows the solution to that: he can vote it down today - or just encourage 6 National MPs to "rebel" and do so. Either would be nuclear for his coalition - but so clearly is supporting the bill. National is going to bleed and bleed over this, and even if Rimmer lets them vote it down when it gets out of committee in six months, the stench of having supported it in the first place isn't going to go away. National will bear the taint of being the racist party which tried to destroy our constitutional foundations. And that's something which is going to be impossible to live down.

Luxon could end all that today. But he won't, because he's a chickenshit, too cowardly even to face up to what he has agreed to. As for the National Party, by supporting this they will make it clear that there is no such thing as a "good Nat" - they're all racists, all the way down. And we should not let them escape that judgement.

(And for people who want to nitpick and say that this isn’t Luxon’s bill: he agreed to it, so he owns it. MMP may mean coalitions, but it does not mean you can escape responsibility for your choices.)