Politics
The obligatory triennial trip to the political theatre is upon us again.
New Zealand has never had much of a pantomime tradition, yet every three years our politicians enter into its campy tropes and absurdities as though they were born in an Aladdin troupe.
A peculiarity of our election pantos is that there are far more back ends of the horse than there are fronts. Another is that the main audience is the media, as the voting public is apt to get bored by the repetition.
This week we had:
Media: “The Government is going to make a fat payout to settle Ihumatāo.”
Winston Peters: “Oh, no, it isn’t!”
Media: “Oh, yes, it is!” (Repeat ad infinitum) We also get the relentless pantomime innuendo, only not about how’s-your-father as in trad panto, but about immigration, law and order, race relations, even climate change. Shane Jones implies non-meat-eaters are unpatriotic, wimpy nut-jobs and James Shaw counter-hints that triumphalist meat-eaters are a bit thick and don’t understand science.
Our politics has lately subverted the set-piece “He’s behind you!”, because when it comes to the Principal Girl, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, the enemy is actually ahead of her, National consistently beating Labour in the polls. “Oh, no he isn’t!” she can say, pointing to her vastly better preferred-PM ratings. “Oh, yes I am!” says Simon Bridges, pointing to the latest opinion poll showing he could lead the Nats back into office with a couple of votes from Act.
From this week’s curtain-raiser election-date announcement, the Government is furiously penning gags, starting with the mass-pelting of lollies otherwise known as the infrastructure spend-up. Past administrations have lagged so poorly in this sphere that there’s almost no scope for the Opposition to criticise. But the Government simply cannot produce new and improved roads, rail lines, schools and hospitals fast enough to make voters forget or forgive its two headline infrastructural pratfalls: KiwiBuild and the sclerosis of Auckland traffic. The latter is now worsening because of much-longedfor construction finally coming to a head in the city, but the congestion would probably seem more bearable if something definitively improving, such as light rail, was among all that building chaos.
National’s panto chorus of “All promises, no delivery” is fairly earned by a Government that has sandbagged itself against making so many key decisions about Auckland.
SPINNING AT SPEED
The Nats’ stock of one-liners is now on heavy rotation: soft on gangs and slackers, tough on the farmers and businesses who fund this country; can’t provide enough public housing but punishes private landlords who can; happy to make meat-eating the new smoking, but agnostic about drug-taking.
Inevitably, each iteration of the above is followed by:
New Zealand First: “We said that first!”
National: “No, you didn’t”
NZ First: “Yes, we did!”
National: “No, you didn’t!”
The Greens: “Yes, they did!” National/NZ First: “Shut up, dopeheads – no one’s talking to you!”
This sort of exchange encapsulates the puerile panto sub-plot that, while mostly shadow-boxing, always ends up being the big election decider. It’s shorthanded as “Whither Winston?”, but it’s ever-more convoluted knockabout farce. National plays chicken with NZ First, unsure whether it’s safer to kiss it or kill it. NZ First pursues Peters’ ancient and nowirrelevant grudges against National – mostly dating back to Jenny Shipley’s pantomime dame turn of 1999 – even though the two parties have far more in common than not. NZ First mines anti-Greens sentiment among National-leaning voters, even though its continued Beehive residency probably depends on the Greens’ healthy survival.
Labour, meanwhile, must stay in sunny, ringletted Principal Girl mode, on no account appearing troubled or even aware of partners’ brawling. It must let these stagey fights rip, because small parties need to show
National’s panto chorus of “All promises, no delivery” is fairly earned by the Government.
mongrel to build their vote – even if the mongrel is mostly fake.
This is the great thing about pantomime: it really is all an act. It’s not like a serious play where the audience is expected to become convinced. The boring secret is that our main parties are much closer together on most issues than those of most other democracies. For MMP to work, the parties must engage in cartoon-character politics, talking lots of nonsense they don’t mean, to emphasise their often petty differences.
NZ First doesn’t question climate change, for all Jones’ macho swagger. After a ritual display of reluctance for the farm sector’s benefit, it has co-operated beatifically with all the Government’s emissions-reduction moves.
National, for its part, knows that “getting tough on gangs” is an empty, nonsense statement, and that it is far more culpable for housing unaffordability, the infrastructure deficit and our clogged cities than Labour. It even knows that, however sincerely it fears the impact of legalising cannabis, the present policy is absurd.
Labour, too, knows the gangs can’t be empathised out of their escalating crime spree; that beneficiaries are better off in work; that drug liberalisation will cause new problems; and that it should have weaned itself off the report and working-group wuss-a-thon at least a year ago and made some tough decisions.
GREEN IS AS GREEN DOES
The Greens are the only actors who believe most of the lines they utter – and that’s only because their supporters are too idealistic to challenge them with pragmatic questions such as, “Yes, but what would we live on if we decimated the dairy herd and meat industry? How could we import green technology without export receipts? And isn’t plant agriculture tough on the environment, too?”
Still, panto does pack in the surprises. Who will be Fairy Godmother this time? Gareth Morgan fancied his chances last election with the Opportunities Party, but voters unfortunately thought he was doing a smashing turn as the Widow Twankey, so he left the stage in a huff.
Judith Collins has a book pending about how she can get National to the ball; Act’s David Seymour has dibs on being Jack and the Beanstalk, growing two magic seats.
It’s certainly a big ask for this panto to top last election’s sensational ending: Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters getting the big happily-everafter, leaving the Crown Prince, Bill English, forlorn by the hearth.
Although one-term governments are rare, no one’s counting chickens. The Government is now angling for this to be the Infrastructure Election. Alas, when it comes to transport, Cinders’ team doesn’t have a great pumpkin-to-carriage conversion rate.
Labour, meanwhile, must stay in sunny, ringletted Principal Girl mode, on no account appearing troubled.