PM’s jokes no slippery soap in funny old year
Like the Queen and the Pope, Santa is supposed to be politically neutral. But being Santa does not come cheap. There is the tax to calculate and pay in each different jurisdiction. Allianz Global Assistance calculated Santa’s travel insurance premium at $335.69. And while oil prices are at record lows, the sleigh does not use petrol. Little wonder that rumour is abound Santa has had to resort to a bit of product placement in his gift-giving. For politicians, Santa is rumoured to be planning Donald Trump-themed presents.
After his disastrous showing on radio station The Rock, Prime Minister John Key can expect a modern slang dictionary which will include definitions for older phrases such as “don’t drop the soap” as well as Trump’s own special chapter containing words such as “schlonged”.
Labour leader Andrew Little can expect a big wall to keep property buyers with Chinese sounding surnames out of Auckland.
NZ First leader Winston Peters can also expect a big wall, big enough to keep out everyone apart from Northland voters, migrants bearing whisky, and people of Scottish-Maori ancestry who have SuperGold Cards. His MP Richard Prosser will get a wall to put up around Wogistan, as well as royalties for Trump’s use of Prosser’s 2013 policy to ban young Muslim men from flying on Western airlines.
Labour deputy leader Annette King, who has been known to compare herself to Hillary Clinton, will be allowed a bathroom break complete with commentary about how “disgusting” such things are. United Future leader Peter Dunne will get an acknowledgement for having inspired The Toupee (although Dunne’s is an all-natural wonder).
New Climate Change Minister Paula Bennett will get Trump as an advisor in the portfolio after showing he was an early inspiration. Trump once claimed climate change was a hoax, pointing to unseasonably cold weather in New York as evidence. Just after becoming the minister, Bennett claimed she was clearly already doing her job well because it was colder in Wellington than it had been the day before. Only one of them was joking.
The Green Party expect to find their names on the naughty side of the ledger and their Christmas stockings empty.
Whatever the deals he’s had to cut, Santa’s offerings are still likely to beat those of the political parties.
The National Party sprinkled about goodwill to mankind by releasing a cheesy video of John Key and sending out lists of its achievements — including the bonus (albeit temporary) “got the Government’s finances back in surplus”. Finance Minister Bill English will spend much of tomorrow crowing with delight about the record pre-Christmas retail spend and calculating whether the GST from that would be enough to tip him back into surplus next year.
Labour was even worse — it decided it was not better to give than to receive at all. On Tuesday it sent out an email to supporters asking pitifully “will you help?”
It told a sad tale of child poverty and then provided the solution to child poverty: a donation to the Labour Party. It was not exactly ambitious — options for donations included $2,$4, $6 or $8. Still, save a match and buy a farm.
Associate Transport Minister Craig Foss, meanwhile, set about his mission of saving lives by issuing two press statements in quick succession. One was headed “stay safe on the water these holidays”. The second was “stay safe on the roads these holidays”. Fans of Foss await the third instalment of the trilogy — “stay safe in the air these holidays”.
So ends a year in which New Zealand can feel quite smug about itself. We had our moments. We won the Rugby World Cup, almost won the Cricket World Cup, a multitude of sporting greats retired. There were deportees, the implosion of the Conservative Party, the TPP, the reincarnation of Judith Collins. But it was international events that dominated. Islamic State, Syrian refugees, the terrorist attacks in Paris. All of them touched us, but let us be thankful the only phenomenon that vaguely resembles Trump in New Zealand was Dunne’s quiff, the closest we came to a terrorist attack was the ringbarking of a kauri tree, and our other worries were so few people had the time to get riled up about the propriety of the PM’s jokes.