Motels, hook ups, memorandums, and politics

Green Party leader James Shaw is showing a great poker face with disaster polls threatening extinction for his party.

With only 34 days till election day, Shaw could have panicked and gone cap in hand to the Greens’ Memorandum of Understanding partner Labour to ask for a deal in an electorate seat to secure a return to Parliament.

And that electorate would be Wellington Central, the seat that Shaw is standing in.

But that would be an enormous ask for Labour with Wellington Central held very comfortably by Labour MP Grant Robertson.

Labour’s historical hold over Wellington Central is a point of pride and asking loyal Labour voters to sacrifice their vote and give it to the unsustainable Greens wouldn’t go down at all well.

With the election now a tight race, voters like to be on the winning side and won’t take kindly to having to admit that they were rerouted to giving their franchise to the pity party.

The reality of MMP is that you’re lucky if you get a straightforward vote, and there is cold comfort in having to tick a box out of your political comfort zone.

Even though MMP has been around since Noah was a boy, circa 1996, many have become quite the political strategist.

We are still tribal and feel out of kilter standing under another banner.

Meanwhile at the top of the south, National Party MP Nick Smith will be breathing a small sigh of relief as the Greens’ once threatening assault on his seat takes a back seat due to the Metiria effect.

Lucky Labour Party candidate Greg O’Connor is currently going gangbusters and polling brilliantly in Ohariu. I

t seems the former president of the New Zealand Police Association doesn’t have to do fiveeighths of feck all to win over United Future leader Peter Dunne.

Dunne’s long hold over the electorate appears to be going so far down the toilet it could have Aaron Smith in it.

Dredging up that old dunny dalliance of All Black ‘‘Mr Smith’’, as his coach calls him, by his cooffender, on the eve of the Bledisloe Cup, just when you thought it well and truly flushed, was a dull distraction.

If the hook-up had happened this year, the happy couple could have blamed the Government for having to use a toilet for lavatory love because there was no room at the inns.

The Government’s expensive purchase of motels to house the homeless puts a strain on tourist accommodation, and for residents seeking away-from-prying-eyes respite for the purposes of afternoon delight.

Seriously though. Buying motels to temporarily house the homeless is at best a band-aid solution to a problem exacerbated by swollen immigration numbers.

New Zealand’s population was predicted to hit 5 million by 2020 but with it currently at 4.8m the situation is well out of control.

There appears to be no clear plan in place for how big we want New Zealand’s population to grow.

Jamming people in till we’re fit to bust and fraying at the seams, with no halt to stem immigration numbers and to just keep hoping that the people of the land absorbs the influx, is not a plan.

Where’s the vision? Do we have any idea where we’re going with this short-sighted general call-out for a party at chez Kiwi, no invitation necessary, and the drinks are on us?

Perhaps in the wake of getting the bash from the Bish, when bolshie Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop threatened to interfere in New Zealand’s elections, saying she would find it hard to trust a Labour-led Kiwi government, we should halt the free-flow of Australian residents in order to create more space.

Or herd them into detention centres.

While the Aussie Government explores their sloppy experiment with eugenics and continues to ethnically cleanse their elected mob of any trace of the impure Kiwi, we might childishly retaliate by finding the slightest excuse to biff out Australian residents.

Julie Bishop’s untoward nastypiece-of-knitting swipe at the NZ Labour Party did a favour to all female Kiwi MPs across the political divide, making our girls look positively genteel.

The Australian minister’s the sort of slugger who would give you a couple of blasts in the backside just to make sure her gun was clean.

She makes Jacinda Ardern appear Helen-ically heroic, Crusher Collins seem like a declawed pussy cat, and Amy Adams quite the puffin-cheeked pushover. Lucky for Bishop, her performance was outdone by One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson, who wore the burqa into the Australian Senate chamber.

Now that really is making a complete berk of yourself.