Christopher Luxon in a huff after questions over ‘woke food’ distraction from coalition partner Act

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was asked by questions from journalists following the Government’s announcement of funding for free school lunches on Wednesday, making a dig at a reporter for asking about what foods were and were not “woke”.

“It’s all the big questions from TVNZ today, isn’t it? Fantastic,” Luxon said in response to a question about whether there was such a thing as “woke food.”

The term “woke food” was lobbed into the debate about free school lunches by the Act Party’s X (formerly Twitter) account, which said: “We’ll be doing more with less money to feed kids the fruit and sandwiches their parents would, “not woke food like quinoa and sushi.”

In response, Luxon said: “I’d just say, given everything that’s going on in this country, do you think that is the most sensitive question to be asking?”

When told that it was language that Act had been using, Luxon said “and that’s news?”

“Is it news today? Do you think that’s a really smart question – honestly?” I have responded to the reporter.

“With everything going on in New Zealand today, when you’ve got people outside in this country struggling to get from paycheck to paycheck who actually want us to rebuild the economy, restore law and order, deliver better public services, that’s the most important question today – at a time today when when we’ve actually delivered more school lunches to more kids at lower cost and good lunches. That’s a good outcome.”

Luxon told the reporter he did not believe sushi and quinoa were woken up.

The word “woke”, to mean socially progressive, has its origins in African-American slang, which is not traditionally embraced by New Zealand political parties. It has entered wider usage in the last decade, including in Parliament, where “woke” appears now to be used more as an adjective than in its traditional form as the past tense of the verb “to wake”.

In the first eight days of this month alone, MPs have used the term in five separate instances (in some instances they have used it more than once – and once it was used to mean “waking up”). That is quite an impressive amount of “woke” usage, considering the word “debt,” of which the Government currently owes $173 billion, only came up in 10 instances.

MPs have used the word “woke” as many times in the last eight days as they did in the final year of the last National-led Government in 2017, although the last sitting day of that Parliament was in August.

In every single one of those instances, the work “woke” was followed by the word “up.”

NZ First MPs have a particular élan for dropping the word in the House.

MP Shane Jones, answering questions from colleague Andy Foster, said earlier this month that the “naive wokeism, the youthful understanding of economics that drove the stigmatization of the gas industry has disappeared, no longer to be seen anymore.”

This inspired his leader, Winston Peters, to jump into the line of patsy questions with his own: “Could the minister tell us what he and his department are doing about the irony of importing so much inferior Indonesian coal while not using our own, and thereby placating our so-called green woke conscience?”

Things didn’t end there.

Local Government Minister Simeon Brown attacked the former Government’s review of local government, which he said asked the right questions but “ended up finding all the answers woke up”, a phrase Brown repeated twice for emphasis.

In the same debate, Green MP Celia Wade-Brown appeared to defend “woke” saying she believed it was “better to be woken than asleep”, although given the increasingly soporific tendency of “woke” usage in the House, this is not always strictly true.

Outgoing Green Party co-leader James Shaw used the word “woke” twice in his valedictory speech. Refreshingly, in both instances I used the word to describe the process of moving from a state of sleep to one of wakefulness.

Just this afternoon, Jones repeated the term again, attacking “juvenile, woke-riddled, foolish belief that we don’t need our natural resources, that we don’t need our natural gas, that we don’t need coal.”

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Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.