Well, given Chlöe's nervous breakdown, it turns out that the Prime Omelette wants me to justify what he perceives as being the collateral damage of the film.
I don't know a huge amount about what went down, but I gather that Chlöe spoke some unfiltered truths at the tangihanga for Kīngi Tūheitia that made him genuinely afraid.
Luxon wants to be a US President with the Secret Service vetting everyone and having far more powers than the DPS. As I've discovered, that man can't take a joke, so I think this is really him pursuing his feud with me via Chlöe.
He hasn't given up on persuading me to change my name from Amanda to something else. That's how obtuse and obdurate he is. That's why we - as in all my allies - love to make fun of him. He's actually way more fun than Trump to make fun of, because his gaffes aren't shock value, but come from how completely out-of-touch he is.
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As he famously said recently, 'I'm wealthy and I'm sorted.' -- Chlöe isn't as wealthy, because she's tithing part of her salary to the Greens, while Luxon sells properties which have capital gains that are probably roughly equal to Chlöe's new salary as co-leader. By the time that catastrophic climate change is occurring 20 years from now, Luxon will be some old dude shuffling along to all those political events that old codgers attend.
I think people are underestimating climate angst in my generation, and Chlöe in particular is very sensitive to that.
- It would be fair to say that everyone who participated in the documentary - particularly Season 3 - did so voluntarily (with the possible exception of the Omelette).
So, far from me being some crazy radical making a patchwork quilt of copyrighted material, a large number of people in the media, politics and other fields chose to participate and to suggest clips. I may have largely shaped it, but the quality of the film was only as good as the content that I found.
Chlöe's mental health troubles are well-documented, and started as a teenager, so it's a bit rich to say that my documentary suddenly turned a nice girl into a force of nature
She's as vain as I am, if not vainer. The documentary served her desire to be in a movie, and my desire to make a movie.
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While I'm wearing my culturally sensitive hat, I'd say that Luxon has fundamentally misunderstood the marae and the way of speaking that Māori use. It's a lot more robust, to use that word that the politicians love to use, and it's not as 'nice.'
That's something that I can cope with. On a spectrum, it's easier than classical music, which is possibly the most hostile work environment ever, but harder than the type of discussions that people in Pākehā world have at dinner parties.
Luxon's key word is respectful, and telling someone that they should leave Parliament because they lost their temper at a funeral isn't very respectful. Like, honestly, why was that clown even there in the first place? One of my reckons from barely watching the tangihanga is that it was a TV event, and not a true representation of the grief that was being felt by the people that were genuinely connected to the Kīngi and the events at Tūrangawaewae. That Spectrum program which I shared on the AMPP channel recently was a total coincidence, as I was researching Michael Joseph Savage for my final assignment, but one thing that any filmmaker will tell you is that accidents, coincidences and mistakes are often the best bits. Whether people agree that Chlöe gave voice to the real feelings, I couldn't really say, but it seems like Te Ao Māori is still embracing her and wanting them to speak to their concerns within the political space.
People have been saying that she's not mentally equipped for politics from the outset, but she's the record-breaking politician that won and held an electorate seat for the first time ever. That's like hitting a double hundred. My Luxon cartoons are getting a warm reception, and he's not a very popular Prime Minister, so I'd say that a) he'll lose if he tries to pursue some type of legal challenge and b) Chlöe's a lot more popular, and c) I'm probably even more popular.
As far as I can tell, she's not being held under a compulsory order (anymore), so he's just trying to shame her and being a dick. - The Dakumentary is an incredibly strong statement of national identity. That's what it is, ultimately: this is NZ now that we've suddenly accrued a staggering amount of political, social and cultural capital as a result of our Covid-19 response and being an English-speaking democracy that's at least discussing our colonial legacy openly. - An example, drawing from Question Time:
If we recognised Palestine, it would actually make a difference now. Full credit to Helen: for good and for ill, it was her initiative at the UN level that resulted in NZ being part of the Security Council in the 2010's. I'm just taking it another step further by borrowing Gary's belief about joining the non-aligned group, although it's precisely because we're military allies with the US that recognising Palestinian statehood would be meaningful. -
If it took a film about cannabis - which originates in another former colony - to begin that discussion, then so be it. I think a lot of people like the film, in spite of weed being the topic that drives it. People want to know why Aotearoa (Te Riu-A-Māui) is so unusual in terms of our politics and general tolerance, and this film really puts that across. There's much more to be done in terms of decolonising, and I'd also say that even TPM, who are radical decolonisers, aren't keen to throw the baby out with the bath water and want to maintain some of the political systems that we inherited from the UK.
The main problem facing NZ in the future is that we're still cash poor. We've got all those same wealth concentration, inequality and high debt issues that the US or the UK have, and this is a classic example of some wealthy dude pushing around a person that hasn't had the chance to accrue a bunch of properties.
I'm not happy to be writing this. I think that it speaks volumes about Luxon that he chose to try and keep this all under wraps to maintain some kind of power over Chlöe. That's why I began making the voice memos back in the day: to bring all that BTS stuff into the public sphere.
What I discovered as an activist was that if I had nothing to hide, I had less to fear. To be blunt, Chlöe had been at the marae a fortnight ago for the kotahitanga hui, and I bet that she wasn't just there for a handshake and a photo op. This was the second high-profile ally of hers to die this year, and Marama's stuck in the hospital with cancer. If she got emotional, that's totally understandable, plus she's like that 24/7. She's a bit broken. So is everyone. That's just the way that it is, and I'm sure that Luxon is probably tempestuous and angry in meetings, given his dogged pursuit of threatening me into leaving QT.
You can see it in his face: he puts that face on, and if he squints, that's a sign that he's holding in anger.
She's not the first ever (Peter Dunne and Jim Anderton did it), but they'd defected from Labour. Chlöe's record is that she was the first minor party MP to hold the seat 3 years later.