The non-birthday birthday holiday thing

Today was the first day of the work week for most New Zealanders, as it is every year at this time. That’s because the first Monday in June is the King’s Birthday public holiday, which means this past weekend was a three-day holiday weekend. It used to be the last public holiday until Labour Day at the end of October, but now we have Matariki (also known as “Māori New Year”) which comes between the two, and this year it will be on Friday, June 20

Technically, the holiday is actually the “Reigning Monarch’s Birthday” or some such (that’s what it was called in my various employment contracts), because it’s not their actual birthday. The late Queen of New Zealand, Elizabeth II, was actually born on April 21, and her successor and son, King Charles III, was born on November 14. I have a hunch that while most New Zealanders know that the first Monday in June is just a public holiday, I doubt all that many know when the monarch’s actual birthday is. For some unknown reason, I somehow memorised King Charles’ actual birthday, but I could never remember the exact birthday of our late queen, aside from the fact she was born in April. So, yay me? Yeah, I’ll go with that.

King’s Birthday is one of two pubic holidays on which honours are handed out (the other is New Year’s Day), but it’s a werid process. Technically, anyone can nominate someone (other than themselves) online. The nominations go to a special committee chaired by the Prime Minister of the day (currently the National Party’s Chris Luxon). This year, additional committee members include the leaders of the parties in Luxon’s coalition, Winston Peters of NZ First and David Seymour of Act. The other members of the committee are from all three parties in the coalition.

After the committee reviews the list (according to some sort of process), the prime minister makes a recommendation to the King of New Zealand, and he then approves the honours list, as the saying goes, “on the prime minister’s advice”. Put another way, it’s kind of a rubber stamp. Naturally, there are problems with this system.

First, and most obviously, it’s controlled by the government of the day. Traditional, National Party-led governments reward business people, and Labour Party-led governments tend to reward teachers and union/worker organisers. Both tend to reward community organisers, as well as folks in the arts, and sport, though ratios may vary between the two.

I always read through the entire list of folks getting an honour (Related: This year’s full list of King’s Birthday Honours), and I seldom recognise very many names. Whenever I raise an eyebrow at an honours list, it’s inevitably a National Party-led government that’s created it. This year was no different.

The one that jumped out at me was them honouring Ruth Richardson, a neoliberal’s neoliberal, who was Finance Minister from 1990 to 1993 in the Fourth National Government led by Jim Bolger as Prime Minister. She was the first female to hold the position, which absolutely is notable—or, it would be if she hadn’t been so absolutely awful. Darien Fenton, a former Labour Party Member of Parliament, summed it up well on her Facebook page:

Ruth Richardson did untold damage that our country wears til this day. But 30 years on, she is still boasting about it: "I have always worn those reforms that I championed as a badge of honour, and the restoration of New Zealand's fortunes made it worth it. So I guess this award thirty years down the track is a recognition of that work." Nicola Willis [the current National Party Finance Minister and Deputy Leader of her party] is following in her tradition.

Richarsons’s 1991 "Mother of all Budgets" drastically cut benefits to “encourage employment”, but it led to an explosion in income inequality and poverty, and general hardship for the poorest New Zealanders. It wasn’t until 2016 that there was a small effective increase under National, and then Labour largely restored pre-1991 funding levels 2020-21. Richardson’s policies were so toxic that National barely won re-election in 1993 (they had a one seat majority in those pre-MMP days), and she was fired from the Finance Minister role, so she decided to resign from Parliament rather than accept a different Cabinet position, thus forcing an expensive by-election on NZ taxpayers, which, in my opinion, is the ultimate “fuck you” from a selfish, arrogant, and narcissistic politician.

New Zealand still hasn’t fully recovered from the damage done by the 1991 Budget, nor from the neoliberal takeover of Labour before that which also caused huge damage to New Zealand. The architects of Labour’s awful neoliberal policies natually joined with Richardson to establish the expressly neoliberal Act Party, and neither they not Act have wavered from their war against working people in favour of the rich—leopards really don’t change their spots, apparently.

All of this just underscores why the honours process should never be under the control of the government of the day: Partisanship always gets in the way. I think that a ministerial committee (made up of non-political career ministry workers) should review all nominations and make recommendations to the government of the day that they can either accept or reject. Ideally, that should be it—the politicians shouldn’t be allowed to add strictly partisan nominees, but maybe they could be allowed to add a certain number (5?) of lower-level honours. In my opinion.

While I’m a huge fan of public holidays—especially because they matter in New Zealand—I’m like most New Zealanders in that, for me, the King’s Birthday public holiday is nothing more than a three-day holiday weekend. Honestly, I don’t even care about the Honours List, even when I think one includes people who shouldn’t be honoured. After all, people who have opposite political beliefs from mine probably think the same of lists put out by a Labour-led government. It is the way of things.

So, a three-day holiday weekend was had. Happy us!

Related: "King's Birthday Honours: Dai Henwood, Tim Southee and Jude Dobson among those recognised" – RNZ