KEY INDICATORS

Inconvenient truths about the former New Zealand Prime Minister

Aotearoa is a strange and changeable lady. In her youth, she didn’t take herself too seriously. New Zealand satirists A. K. Grant and Tom Scott, in their superb early 80s mock history of New Zealand The Paua and the Glory: the story of New Zealand's rise to international insignificance, amusingly speculated on the origin of “Aotearoa” …without being cancelled. (Their thesis was that, on arrival of the first Polynesian canoe on New Zealand shores, one of the Tānes instructed one of the Wāhines, “Out eh Aroha”.)

Nowadays unfortunately, Woke Aotearoa takes herself pathetically seriously and points her accusatory finger at all sorts of citizens who in the halcyon days of New Zealand would have been perfectly acceptable (and still should be).

Over the years I’ve voted Labour, ACT, NZ First, Greens and probably also National (I can’t remember). But now, in the eyes of Aotearoa’s Woke Orthodoxy, I’m an ult-right racist.

While most of us don’t change that much, we have in our midst more ephemeral individuals. I’ve previously covered former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern’s weird transformations from Mormon to Communist to Authoritarian Wokester.

Another ex-Prime Minister with no obvious core convictions is Sir John Key. It’s difficult to discern solid content behind those dead eyes of the gent who’s currently manifesting as Race Unifier of Aotearoa.

Smiling Assassin

Key, with his degree in bean counting, cut his adult corporate teeth at investment bank Merrill Lynch, climbing to head of its global foreign exchange division in 1995. When that division, under Key’s helmsmanship, lost millions in the 1998 Russian financial crisis, co-workers labelled him "the smiling assassin" for maintaining his cheerfulness while firing scores of his own staff.

Sinophile

Key is a fervent supporter and friend of the Chinese Communist Party. He even went so far as to recruit Chinese spy Jian Yang into the National Party. Yang entered Parliament as a National Party list MP in 2011 and was only managed out of Parliament in 2020 after Winston Peters belaboured the obvious awkwardness of New Zealand tolerating a Chinese spook in its Government and Parliament. (Not to be outdone, Labour had its own Chinese spy, Raymond Huo, who was also managed out of Parliament, at the same time as Yang.)

As reward for his loyalty, a mysterious Mr Lianzhong Chen purchased Key’s Auckland mansion for $23.5 million in 2017. The mansion remained vacant until it was re-sold in 2022 - after 5 years of a booming property market - for $16.3 million. Go figure.

The Key Circle

Key likes to schmooze with New Zealand’s cozy clique of supposedly rich, famous and influential people. People like Dame Patsy Reddy, who Prime Minister Key appointed Governor General.

But in his relentless pursuit of a dollar, Key will gleefully mix with decidedly dicey characters, including the Chow Brothers. For those uninitiated in New Zealand’s prostitution industry, the Chow Brothers kicked off as brothel owners. And Key has now joined them in their business ventures. Perhaps he sees exiting opportunities to further indulge his penchant for pulling young women’s hair.

Key loves to have his photo taken with prominent world leaders and celebrities. He covers the walls of his houses with photos of himself with as many notables as he can get snapped with.

Key Conflicts

Where normal people see disqualifying conflicts of interest, Key sees exciting angles and opportunities.

After stepping down as Prime Minister in 2017, Key joined the board of directors of ANZ Bank’s New Zealand subsidiary (becoming chair of that board In 2018), as well as the board of the ANZ parent company.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the conflict of interest inherent in Key being on the boards of both ANZ’s New Zealand subsidiary and the Australian ANZ parent company is as follows…

As a director (and the chair) of ANZ NZ, Key’s legal director’s duty was to act solely in the best interests of the ANZ NZ. Properly discharging that duty required him to ensure that ANZ NZ retained enough money to foster its enduring best interests (continual systems upgrades, plenty of money to lend etc.). On the other hand, as a director of the ANZ parent company, Key’s sole interest was in maximizing the dividends paid by ANZ NZ to its ANZ parent company. Naturally, derelict Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr did precisely zip about this conflict (he could have required Key to choose which ANZ company he wanted to be a director of).

It took Winston Peters to bring this transparent conflict to a head and precipitate Shonky’s resignation from both ANZ boards on 14 March 2024.

Then there’s the awkward and apparently unresolved insider trading case…

Economic Wizard?

Bringing to bear all his accumulated business world nous, Prime Minister Key’s strategy for the New Zealand economy was simple. Wonky’s economic recipe was to inflate the hell out of house prices by getting New Zealanders to manically sell their houses to each other, combining this with uncontrolled overseas purchasing of Auckland houses (mainly by, you guessed it….Chinese people). From when Key took office until he left, average house prices had more than doubled. Whoop whoop!

Key’s Flagging Legacy

Having done virtually nothing useful during his tenure as Prime Minister, Key became anxious to secure a majestic and transformative legacy. In the 2014 general election campaign, Key promised referenda on changing New Zealand’s flag.

Following National’s election win, Key convened a “Flag Consideration Panel”. The Panel considered over 10,000 suggestions received from the general public and put a shortlist of five alternative flags to a first referendum. The “winning” alternative was then put up against the current flag, in a second referendum…and duly lost.

Astute political commentator Bryce Edwards correctly distilled the collective consensus that the referenda had been "a bewildering process that seems to have satisfied few". A UK newspaper condemned the whole exercise as a "wasteful vanity project by John Key".

Years later, Key described not changing the flag as his biggest failure (really?) and admitted that, if he had his time again, he would simply have changed New Zealand’s flag - without a referendum - to a flag of his choice. Lost on Little John in the flag debacle is that generating a new national flag is not amenable to his amateur whims or those of the general public. Engaging expert graphic designers would have been a nice idea.

Race Relations Keyciliator

Key now backs himself as Aotearoa’s Race Peace Maker.

In 2010, he signed New Zealand up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and committed Aotearoa to developing a plan to ingrain UNDRIP in Aotearoa’s societal fabric and constitutional arrangements. (Helen Clark's Labour government had rejected UNDRIP, along with Australia, the United States, and Canada.)

UNDRIP prompted the “He Puapua” report, commissioned by the Labour-led Government in 2019. He Puapua advocates for “decolonizing” and dismantling New Zealand and creating two separate nations, one for Maori (governed by a Maori Parliament) and another for non-Maori.

He Puapua’s vision has understandably generated robust and occasionally vitriolic debate about how race should be treated in New Zealand. Voila, up steps Race Sage Key at the National Party’s August 2024 annual conference, where he called on people to “take the temperature down a wee bit” in the debate around race issues, warning that the current government needs to “tread carefully”, and adding for good measure “Māori are the indigenous population of New Zealand and Treaty partners”.

You’ll discern that Key wasn’t telling the Māori Party (Te Pati Māori ) to tone it down. Indeed, from his “Treaty party”  line it’s apparent that he was in fact promoting the Māori Party’s radically divisive and subversive views on race. Nice work, Donkey.

Much of a muchness

In truth, John Key is cut of the same cloth as Jacinda Ardern and Helen Clark and, for that matter, Christopher Luxon. They may not like Paua, but they absolutely crave the Power and the Glory…and the Money.