Politics

A guide to the marvels stalking the corridors of power.

Jane Clifton

They try to be modest about it – well, not Shane Jones, obviously – but our political leaders are frequently pestered by the Marvel superhero movie franchise. The superpowers concentrated in our Parliament are not widely appreciated, but are highly developed in many of our senior ministers and frontbenchers.

Jones is one of the very few superheroes who’s “out”. As everybody knows, you can run, you can hide, but there’s no escape from … Bombastador.

With his blistering vocabulary and marae-strength te reo, our Regional Economic Development superhero can verbally strafe entire industries and mighty corporations from any distance.

Bombastador has a seemingly generous side, aerially topdressing provincial New Zealand with loans and grants, but this is, in reality, a subtle reign of terror. The people know they have no choice but to use this funding for Self-Improving Projects, such as jetties and roundabouts, whether they need them or not, otherwise Bombastador will give them his trademark Pompousonic Talking-To. But his real agenda is to turn New Zealand into a pine plantation. Or, as he puts it, “The Bard would doubtless opine that I am the magnificent embodiment of Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane. I know the populace at large is too hoha and heahea to appreciate the literary reference, so I will indubitably prevail.”

It’s also not a terrifically well-kept secret that Jacinda

Ardern’s real identity is Empathy Woman.

Her healing cuddle has become a

global-warming commodity – in a good way. With her fiancé and baby daughter, she has bathed the planet in images of tolerance, warm fuzzies and bunny cakes. There are, of course, those who point to the lack of transformative policy action and think Empathy Woman is

With her fiancé and baby daughter, she has bathed the planet in images of tolerance, warm fuzzies and bunny cakes.

just a highly evolved escapee from the Care Bear franchise. Yet some in Cabinet have found out the hard way that she is also the new custodian of the patented Helen Clark Stare of Death.

Still, there could be tough times ahead for the hijabed hugger. Disney, Hallmark,

Mills & Boon and others in the feel-good sector are pursuing a restraint-of-trade lawsuit against her, charging that she is jeopardising their viability.

Empathy Woman’s biggest adversary is legendarily well armed. Simon Bridges, aka the Catastrophiser, is among the very few Marvel heroes to have acquired the right to wield Thor’s hammer. Like the

Hulk and Captain America, he can lift the mighty Norse god’s iron smiter – and there’s plenty to smite: including the Government’s failure to deliver on housing and traffic issues. To keep his focus, the Catastrophiser likes to call every proposed Government measure “an assault on the Kiwi way of life”. And he was merciless in his smiting of the provision of iced-drink machines for prison officers during a heatwave.

Greens co-leader James

Shaw would never be a headline Marvel Avenger.

But as Reasonable Man, his superpower is impressive: he can see way, way into the future. Trouble is, his nearsight is underdeveloped and he’s in daily peril of tripping over immediate obstacles, not least his own party, which does not share his clear vision and superheroic patience. He and Bombastador butt heads a lot.

Shaw: “Drop the spade, and step away from those billion exotic seedlings, Bombastador!”

Jones: “Right tree, right place, bro!”

They have, however, so far resisted the depredations of Paula Bennett as she daily climbs into her Leopard

Woman suit – “Zip it, sweetie” – and claws at their flanks with a hiss and a roar.

Leopard Woman has spies inside other parties, and has come close to slashing Empathy Woman. Armed only with a baggie of “oregano”, she is trying to marshal a bogan

Simon Bridges, aka the Catastrophiser, is among the very few Marvel heroes to have acquired the right to wield Thor’s hammer.

army against the legalisation of cannabis, while being guard-cat of the throne of the Catastrophiser, to whom she is ferociously loyal. But one day she might have to reckon with Judith Collins, who has never hidden the fact that she is, in reality, the super-scourge of speeding male youths everywhere, the

Crusher. Her superpowers are legion, but not the least of them are the ability to arch one eyebrow at a time and to weep in public at will. Some say she will rule them all one day. Always on hand to help Crusher and her cohort is Marvel mascot Coat-Tail

Man, whom we know as

David Seymour. The Act Party leader is far too small to be a fully fledged hero, but his superpower is a stonker: he is simply indestructible. Ever since he accessed a small pocket of electoral kryptonite in Epsom, a powerful variant known as tacticalvoterium pronationalite, he has become politically immortal – one reason his right-todie legislation has been so controversial.

Though seemingly doomed to walk for eternity in the corridors of superpower alone, he still counts as National’s perennial plus one.

By day a mild-mannered, bespectacled policy wonk and Labour’s official “thinker”, Environment Minister

David Parker is, in reality, the Farminator. Using the power of freshwater, he can regulate you off your dairy land and tank your floriculture enterprise as soon as look at you. He has vowed to use his superpower mercifully, but he is so easily aroused to wrathfulness, just the sight of a cow peeing can trigger his terrible vengence.

The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division) have long

been on the trail of Transport and erstwhile Housing Minister Phil Twyford, suspecting him of a secret hoard of another kryptonite variant, bodiesium buriedhereasite, that makes him unsackable. S.H.I.E.L.D. long thought it might even be an evil superpower in itself to fail to build so many houses and to fail to sell so many alreadybuilt houses during an acute national housing shortage, let alone to fail even to initiate a light-rail project in traffic gridlock with moneyed entities falling over themselves to get the contract.

But Empathy Woman knows his dark secret. Twyford’s true identity is Hologram Man. He simply projects himself into politics, keeping his real whereabouts a mystery. Thus he can have his optical projection promise to do whatever he feels like, however outlandish and ultimately disappointing to voters, but no one can hold him to account because … it’s technically not him. As he said to Empathy Woman, “You can’t sack me. I’m not here.”

For National, much hope is vested in former Air New Zealand boss Christopher Luxon, aka A Bit Like John

Key Man. His superpower appears to be simply being a bit like John Key, but some say he has deeper reservoirs of awesomeness. He has certainly demonstrated the ability to appear in the “preferred prime minister” opinion poll category before even being elected, which is a handy political superpower if ever there was one.

Another power source for National is finance spokesman Paul Goldsmith, who, unusually, claims to channel a proxy superpower: that of the market. In all policy areas,

Goldsmith vows that under National, whatever needs doing or undoing, he will see to it that the market does or undoes it. Politicians need just stand back and watch it perform its wonders.

In his faith, Goldsmith is exceeded only by Vision NZ leader Hannah Tamaki and her husband, Destiny Church’s bishop Brian, who claims to channel the ultimate superpowers of God.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson remains coy about his superpower, but it is understood that he is the real

Secret Santa. He certainly tries to give everyone everything they want in his Budgets, but with tax-receipt fluctuations and the Reserve Bank’s gnomic opacity about monetary policy, he has to do it by blind ballot.

Although it’s often said that there’s nothing so ex- as an ex-politician, retirement need not mean hanging up one’s cape and mask. Helen Clark is now the Opinionopolist, able to insert herself into the news at will with a daily reckon, whether she has any standing in an issue or not. Whakaari/White Island, Eden Park, whom she’d have sacked if she were still PM – no subject is too great or small. Jim Bolger remains, as ever, the Great Helmsman, his latest superpower to rewrite history to show that he has always known, had we only listened to him, that climate change was a Thing, and food and water shortages were other Things – and that

neoliberalism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, whatever that was.

Finally, readers might wonder what superpower it is that fuels Winston Peters. We can reveal, with some reluctance, that being Winston Peters is his superpower. Frankly, what Marvel name could you give what he does? The Contrarianator?

Cantankor? The Irascible

oraptor? And who needs kryptonite when you can get this much political torque from whisky and invective? He and he alone can start a fight in an empty room, though he prefers there to be journalists in it as both audience and target. To borrow a concept from Lewis Carroll, Peters seems to start every day by believing at least six hopelessly contradictory things before breakfast. Who else could get away with: excoriating the media in daily outbursts his entire career, then calling a special press conference to vow to save it; renouncing tobacco but nipping out for a cheeky fag every couple of hours; making a federal case out of not disclosing the legrelated medical issue that kept him off work for a month (we still reckon it was bunions); insisting in court that Work & Income staff must both have noticed his striking partner, Jan, being with him when he signed up for his pension, and also not have noticed her, because she is so adept at blending into the background?

He is certainly as combative as any superhero, substituting “Moron!”, “Quisling!” and “Psycho!” for “Zap! Pow! Blam!”

But surely the most remarkable superpower of all is to manage to be both an affront to and an affirmation of democracy.

Who needs kryptonite when you can get this much political torque from whisky and invective?