God almighty. Hendo, Horrenderson, postcode 0650, doing its best out west, not entirely charmless, but essentially one of the great damp dumps of Auckland. It's got a thin, brown creek in the middle of it, going nowhere slow. It's got a mall where Wok Wok in the food hall recently wore the shame of a very bad food hygiene rating - the scarlet letter of E. And just above the banks of the creek, near Hume's Drainage and Morrison's funeral home, there's the Trusts Stadium, the woebegone, meanly landscaped venue for the National Party's 2017 election campaign launch in Henderson, held on a cold, wet Sunday afternoon, the rain coming in sideways off of the Waitakere Ranges.
Why? Why there? What genius thought of staging it in one of the dreariest suburbs known before God? Labour's launch was in the Auckland Town Hall, on Queen Street; bright lights, big city, a zone of fat wallets and valet parking - National could have done one better, and brazened it out by staging their launch at Sky.
Delegates could have wandered around and blown a few bucks on blackjack or actually made a few bucks because you never know your luck, and National are built on riding your luck, on the thrill of the chase, on financial reward. National, the party of sending the poor to boot camp; National, the party of the money tree at the front doorstep ... but you couldn't even see the Sky Tower through dense cloud on Sunday. The city was obscured, distant; to the many elderly delegates who arrived in Henderson by coach, it was as faraway as youth.
Traffic crawled along Central Park Drive past Lube King and Chimpunks towards the hump of the Trusts Stadium. At the front gate, there were vans selling nachos and dumplings; God they smelled good. On the front doors, there were posters for an upcoming show by Alice Cooper; God he looked old. His eyes spoke eloquently of the horror that was to come at National's campaign launch.
But we interrupt this live cross to bring news of vast and cosmic self-indulgence. The writer of these chronicles wishes to state that he shall henceforth be known as Gemini.
There are good reasons for this, sound reasons. First, he was indeed born in the sign of Gemini. Rude and impatient personages may wish to know what the hell that's got to do with anything, but hear Gemini out. Gemini is the sign of two choices, two roads, two possibilities; and this is a Gemini election. Forget the multiplicities and diversities of MMP. Election 2017 is exactly and precisely a twosome, a couplet, it's a stark choice, National or Labour, English or Ardern, one or t'other, FPP FFS in 2017.
It's a clear choice, and a hard choice. Ardern has the wind behind her, but English doth not require movement, for he is a rock. English is stable, experienced, the world of known things; Ardern is fresh, interesting, a journey to unknown shores. And who better than to understand these dualities than Gemini, that old two-face, that lifelong twin engine. He was made for this time. The polls showing National and Labour at just about neck and neck speak to his divided soul, thrum the deepest chord of his internal contradictory music. Two choices, two roads, two possibilities: these were Gemini's footprints.
As for the shocking arrogance of inventing a character for himself, Gemini is an old hand at that. For he had already invented a character for himself known as The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road. It was indeed the shockingly arrogant title of his latest book, which detailed his year-long attempt to eat at every single one of the 55 food joints on a single street in Auckland - a street just around the corner, in fact, from the Trusts Stadium. The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road had his own appreciation of the tough choices the country must make in 2017.
English versing Ardern was KFC's reliable potato and gravy versing the curious excitement of Texas Chicken's honey bun; it was McDonald's proven chicken nuggets versing Burger King's audacious chicken fries. But The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road was no more. He was Gemini, intuitive political hack, and he made his way through the stadium to renew his acquaintance with the less intuitive political hacks from the press gallery.
He hadn't seen many of them for three years, not since the last election campaign. And yet they looked younger. Corin Dann had the smooth face of a bright, earnest student in his first year at college. Paddy Gower, as dimpled and louche as a teenage lout, seemed to be modelling his first pair of long pants. Even Colin James, the veteran observer, looked less than his 300 years. The auld acquaintances talked a cup of kindness. Gemini left them to their detached seats in a table set aside for press, and headed off to sit with the people, and waited for the show to begin.
This report was written many hours after the campaign launch and in a sense Gemini is still waiting for the show to begin, which is to say it wasn't much of a show. It cannot be said that it was a complete fizzer. There was some fizz and indeed also some zing thus it can be said that sometimes it was fizzing. But there was a curious absence to proceedings. An emptiness, a void. The whole thing felt scattered. Gemini took his seat in an upstairs section. You could say there was plenty of legroom. Numerous rows were half empty and much less than that. National put attendance at 3000; Gemini, practised at counting mobs in his time as a bird watcher, did the maths from his vantage point and put it at more like 2200. It's possible he was out by 800. But certainly he was witness to the missing rows upstairs to the left of the floor and upstairs to the right of the floor and facing the stage at the back in the Ross Dallow Stand.
Why Henderson? Why the boring old Trusts Stadium? wasn't the place full to overflowing?
The six-piece covers band who played before the show had more questions to ask. Without love, they mused, where would you be now? Is this love, they queried, that I'm feeling? Oh-ho what's going, they pressed, on? Good questions, all, and they were left hanging, still to be answered. The jubilation and ecstasy of the Key campaign launches were missing. It was a self-conscious launch, stiff and awkward, which is to say it followed the lead of the MC, the actor and licensed real estate agent Scott Cortese. It was as though he'd only just been told about the National Party.
Had he prepared backstage in the minutes before his gig by making a quick Google search? He introduced Nikki Kaye by saying she adores her two cats, Lily and Charlie. He introduced Paula Bennett by saying she collects shoes. He introduced Bill English by saying something or other about pizza.
Kaye and Bennett were chosen as speakers before English. Kaye was presumably there as National's answer to Ardern - let's not forget that Kaye beat Ardern like a cur in two elections as the MP for Auckland Central - and Bennett was there to whip up a measure of excitement. Her opening statement was: "Isn't this country amazing, yeah?"
It was the first of her rhetorical yeahs but not the last yeah. Gemini, that old statistician, counted the yeahs. There were 19 yeahs in Bennett's blather. "Every one of you go out and find five votes, yeah?", she implored. But that's not gonna happen. The applause that welcomed Bennett to the stage had finished before she got to the microphone; and when she left the stage, she was rewarded with a standing ovation from maybe half the audience, two thirds at most.
As main event and man of the hour Bill English waxed and waned, came and went, like a radio not quite picking up the station. He busted one good zinger, the one about how hard-working New Zealanders are not the ATM for the Labour Party. But at another point in his speech he directed a comment to Mr Speaker; he laughed off his slip, but strange that his mind should wander to the point where he thought he was addressing the House of Representatives. He rang the bells of evil, and reminded the audience that Labour would not just raise taxes but invent new, fiendish taxes. He talked about putting police on the beat. He talked about giving sick new children a new set of curtains. And then he unveiled a new education policy which would cost $379 million thanks to the hard-working New Zedalanders who are the ATM for the National Party.
There wasn't much else and it all fizzled out at the end, when English asked the crowd whether they would make their party vote for National, and the crowd answered that yes they would do that, and then English poured himself a generous nip of water, picked it up with one hand and drank deep, and waved with his other hand, and then started walking off the stage. Oh, right, realised the audience, it's over, and began applauding just as English was leaving the stage.
The timing was off and the venue was cold and depressing and how Gemini wished he was once more The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road, that jolly gourmand choosing from the menu of 55 food joints, instead of starving to death at midday in the cheerless cavern of the Trust Stadium. Gemini, the intuitive political hack, thought that he had intuited the end of something. National's campaign launch felt like the last sigh of a Tory government; and when English and his team of MPs left the stage, they were piped off by the campaign theme song, that sad country lament. Its lonesome steel guitars spoke of the wide empty spaces of defeat. Its clip-clop bass was the sound of a broken old horse heading for the catfood factory. Coming soon to the Trusts Stadium, Alice Cooper; on Sunday, it was a rocky horror show, National down on its luck, smiling through tears, hanging on, finding new curtains for sick children, stuck in Henderson, and the last sound the National faithful heard as they left the Trusts Stadium in the Sunday rain was that dreary theme song, that wistful dirge.
