Sometimes the most inspiring leadership at a time of urgency can come from someone who appears retiring or casual or disorganised.
The reverse can also be true — an apparently natural leader or somebody who talks the talk who, when a crisis breaks, is found badly wanting.
Deputy Prime Minister and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has impressed during the past 10 months or so with his statesman-like performance as foreign minister when overseas. That has sometimes been jarringly at odds with the behaviour of the Mr Peters we know, and that some followers love, when he is on home soil.
It is quite disconcerting dealing with someone who, one day, can show such skill as a diplomat and eminence grise, and the next is out on the streets rabble-rousing, picking arguments and misconstruing conventional wisdoms, an approach which appeals to the conspiracy theorists among his supporters.
Unfortunately, Mr Peters now seems to have conflated the two approaches. Filling in for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Mr Peters was at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Meeting in Tonga last week, where he dug himself into a big hole over climate change.
There’s an old saying about opening your mouth to change feet.
It would have been a bad enough faux pas to make anywhere on the world stage as our foreign minister. But to do so in the middle of the South Pacific, where the island nations which are our neighbours are in the frontline of climate change and of rising sea-levels beggars belief and shows very poor judgment. What on earth was he thinking?
United Nations Secretary-general Antonio Guterres had already warned the forum "surging seas" were on the way. The Pacific was the most vulnerable part of the world in relation to climate change and while the islands did not contribute to it, the effects of it were multiplied for those nations, he said.
Two reports were released at the forum. One from the World Meteorological Organisation outlines how the region is facing an accelerating rise in sea-levels, along with warming oceans and extensive acidification of seawater.
And Mr Peters’ view? An embarrassing ramble about a tsunami in 1968, about climate change going on for thousands of years and a mini ice-age in the 1600s.
Where was the strong, unequivocal support for tougher international measures and advocacy for action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above pre-industrial era levels?
It was humiliating for New Zealand, so often in the past a world leader in environmental efforts, but which is already at risk of being shunned by some countries for its commitment to fossil fuels and reopening offshore exploration for oil and natural gas.
While Mr Peters made it clear he believed humankind had played a role in causing the climate to warm, his bizarre comments at such an important event come after experts called him out in last year’s election campaign for spreading misinformation at rallies about the scale of human activities on the rising levels of carbon dioxide. He even tried to link tsunamis to global warming.
One of the three climatologists who hauled Mr Peters up about his statements believed they had been borrowed from climate sceptics.
Mr Luxon has had to wade into the rising waters to rescue Mr Peters. The prime minister wasted little time in explaining that both of them "agree climate change is an existential threat to the Pacific Islands" and that that was not in dispute.
Mr Peters has also quite rightly come under fierce fire in the House for his mortifying prevarications.
A note to Mr Luxon — use Mr Peters for what he’s best at, offering sensible and diplomatic views on the state of the world.
But keep him away from climate change.
