Autumn of political content
We are enjoying an amazing period of political contentment. There is nothing working us up, not health waiting lists, not unemployment, not immigration, not race.
The Government has not been rocked by scandal, there’s been no hint of collapse, there has been no policy change to upset us.
The great bulk of us are getting on with our lives without politics. It’s very enjoyable. Politicians leave us alone. We leave them alone. We are helped by the internet. We click on what we want. We choose our news and filter out the politics. It doesn’t interest us.
Politics is now a side issue despite its huge effect on our lives and our country. We can’t affect it, so we switch off. Sport and entertainment are far more interesting.
And so it has become incredibly difficult for politicians to communicate with voters, especially the all-important swing-voters who by their nature are the most uninterested of them all in politics.
The only politician to cut through is President Trump. He is a master tweeter. He reached the entire world, galvanised support and enraged his opponents.
“We must build a wall” and “Mexico will pay”. That’s political genius. He summarised policy in tweets that went global. His genius was not just the brevity but that his tweets were sufficiently controversial to reverberate and to turn more voters on than they turned off.
The great politicians have always been able to summarise their policy. “We will fight them on the beaches.”
They clearly define what they are for and against. They polarise and motivate. They shift opinion.
I rate the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Jacinda Ardern. She knows voters don’t follow politics and has used social media, her time as a DJ and being a celebrity to get noticed and gain support.
She has even dragged the Prime Minister into her field. Ardern and Andrew Little did a soft piece for a woman’s magazine. It was a readable and enjoyable piece. The controversial thing was their joint attack on pineapple pizza-topping. They were firmly against.
If I was a tweeter, I would have joined in. Pizza is best with pineapple in my humble view.
It certainly gained my attention more than the all-important fiscal Operating Balance Before Gains and Losses or the fast-tracking policy of an independent Crown entity called the Affordable Housing Authority.
Pineapple on pizza is something I understand. It matters to me.
Not to be outdone, the Prime Minister joined in. He took to Facebook to post pictures of his pizza adorned with canned spaghetti and pineapple and what looked like anything else he could think of. It was truly ghastly.
If I was on Facebook, I would have reached out to him to explain his crime. See it works. I got more engaged over pizza toppings than anything else happening in politics. We truly are politically content.