Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's speech from the haybale with James Shaw (left), Damien O'Connor and Kieran McAnulty. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's speech from the haybale with James Shaw (left), Damien O'Connor and Kieran McAnulty. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The PM heads to a dairy farm - but won't be seen with the cows - as Seymour and Peters jostle over whose audiences are bigger.
Bucolic scenes started the PM's week as she travelled out to a dairy farm in Wairarapa to announce the Government's proposed levy on agriculturalemissions - only to then refuse to be seen near an actual cow.
An electric fence clicked in the background as Ardern spoke in the calf shed, she wore her Red Bands and used a pallet atop a hay bale as a podium while the rain fell on the corrugated iron roof.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refuses the final effort by a reporter to go and see the calves in the background. Photo / Mark Mitchell
However, she repeatedly refused to go and look at nearby calves for television footage, saying she'd seen a "fair few in my time". Admittedly, the calves in question were bobby calves, awaiting the truck which was to take them off to that big farm in the sky - an association no politician really invites.
But the PM is notoriously wary when it comes to doing anything for the cameras beyond the basics of speeches, smiles and selfies.
National's leader Christopher Luxon is shaping up as more fruitful pickings - it took only minimal encouragement to get him to put on some boxing gloves for a bit of sparring with Billy Graham a month or so ago. He sang - badly - for his Backbencher puppet debut.
And this week he posted his own photo of his top half in a black-tie formal for a Zoom awards ceremony - with shorts and slip-ons beneath.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon models his Zoom-beach split. Photo / Facebook
Matt King rebrands anti-mandate party as rural
Former National MP Matt King managed to get his new Democracy NZ party registered with the Electoral Commission - and wasted no time sticking the knife into his former party in a bid to get some votes.
King's party started from the vaccine mandate protests at Parliament - King was advocating for police and military who were against the mandates. Alas, the dismantling of the mandates left him in an all hat, no horse situation. Now the former policeman turned farmer has pivoted to the rural vote and is claiming his party was "born out of the rural sector as much as anything" and criticising National's leader Christopher Luxon for "muted opposition" to the Government's plan for a farm tax on emissions.
Does my crowd look big in this?
Ahead of NZ First's annual conference this weekend, both Winston Peters and Act leader David Seymour have taken to tweeting photos of the crowds that turn up to their public meetings and mocking the other. After Peters noted Seymour still didn't know to fill a town hall, Seymour has spent the week tweeting photos of his audience.
On Sunday in Tauranga we had the second in a series of meetings we are holding around the country and it was great to have yet another packed hall. pic.twitter.com/xe8ghqjM13
There were good crowds for both Seymour and Peters in Tauranga, and Seymour also did well in Hastings and Feilding. But in Dannevirke only about 30 or 40 people turned up. To Seymour's credit, it was still tweeted - but described as "engaged" rather than large.
A stop off in Dannevirke with Karen Chhour before Palmy tonight. A really engaged crowd, looking for real change. pic.twitter.com/8o2SW081Vu
When Beehive Diaries poked fun about the contest for biggest audience, Seymour noted while Peters had done two speeches in three months, he had turned up night after night all over New Zealand - and then sent a picture of a massive Chinese Communist Party meeting, claiming it was his latest audience size.
Quote of the Week:
"I've never been one to read particularly into local government elections in that way, or to make those direct comparisons... Local government you see it move in its own rhythms across the country." Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's take on whether the defeats of Efeso Collins and Paul Eagle - the two mayoral candidates she endorsed as Labour leader - reflected trouble for Labour.
