On election night, the Labour Party held a bash at the Lower Hutt Town Hall. There were plates of bleak, beige food: sausage rolls, samosas, those little “party pies” that inevitably conceal nasty bits of gristly, grey mince. There were curling-at-the-edges sandwiches.
Did the Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, indulge in one last prime ministerial sausage roll? Let’s hope not. He and the nation have long ago tired of sausage rolls. But those dismal platters summed up the mood. It was the sort of spread on offer at a wake.
The rigor mortis had set in weeks before for the now outgoing prime minister. He caught Covid. He went into isolation looking like a beaten puppy. He emerged a cornered attack dog. In the final 1News debate, he bared his fangs and sank them into National leader Christopher Luxon’s rear end. It made no difference. Come 10pm on election night, it was Luxon who was top dog.
Was the result a ringing endorsement of the Nats? Or more of a giant kick up the bum for the Labour government? It was obviously the latter. On the election night numbers, National got just 38.95% of the vote. In 2017 – before it was swept away by Labour’s once-in-a-generation “red wave” win in 2020 – National got a much healthier 44.4% of the vote. However, thanks to a capricious Winston Peters’ decision to go with Labour, National still found itself in opposition.
That 44.4% of votes in 2017 got National 56 seats. In 2023, special votes and the Port Waikato by-election notwithstanding, National has just 50 seats. Under John Key, National never governed with fewer than 58 seats. Luxon’s win wasn’t the “blue-nami” some suggested, it was a “blue ripple” at best.
The 2023 election’s real winners were the Green Party, who picked up 2 electorate seats from Labour, and now have 14 seats in total, and Te Pāti Māori, who have fully emerged as an electoral force, winning 4 of the 7 Māori electorate seats.
Then there was Peters, who, like a corpse in the Night of The Living Dead, emerged from the grave to stagger back into the House. Surely, it’s all going to end in screams.
Nutty utterances
Election night’s other big contest was which broadcaster would deliver the most bonkers metaphor of the evening.
TVNZ’s John “Excitable Boy” Campbell won the most votes for the nuttiest utterance of the evening: “It’s tighter than a fish’s bum,” he bellowed, apparently in reference to National and Act’s majority. He got a win for the most succinct summing-up of Hipkins’ fate: “He’s buggered, isn’t he?”
The day after you are officially declared buggered, you must begin preparing for the longest, loneliest, bleakest walk of your political life. You do get to go back to your fancy office on the 9th floor of the Beehive. But soon you must pack up your political life in boxes and find your new office. It is a broom closet next to the men’s loos. Not actually. But it might as well be. Hopefully, your broom closet contains a mop. You’ll need it to clean up all of that spilled blood.
On election night, Hipkins gave his concession speech. It was his obituary, too. His voice broke, he was on the brink of tears. Whatever your tribal affiliations, if you weren’t at least a bit moved by that you’ve got some work to do.
There was a moment of lightish relief. He referred, for the first time publicly, to his new partner, someone called “Tony”. Now headed for the political closet, was he also coming out of the closet? Clarification had to be hastily provided: His partner’s name was Toni, not Tony. Later, Hipkins would say he had not meant to “trigger that set of rumours”. He had the grace to laugh about it, on a night when, for Labour, laughs were in short supply.
The loopiest bit of inexplicable idiocy on election night came courtesy of Newshub’s animated graphic, “Louise the Laser Kiwi”. When a new MP was confirmed, Louise laid an egg on screen. When an MP was deemed to be buggered, Louise activated her laser beak and zapped them dead. Righto. Makes absolute sense. Whoever came up with that one must have been snorting some of that Bolivian marching powder. Perhaps in the men’s loos next door to the about-to-be-new leader of the Opposition’s broom closet.
Also high, though on over-excitement, Newshub’s Paddy Gower madly and gleefully murdered metaphors. “Nearly the whole red wall is collapsing. Are we going to be tearing out red bricks? I say yes, we are. Are we going to be tearing out a lot of red bricks? I say, ‘Oh hell, yeah baby,’ on these numbers.” Go Gower. He totally demolished the election coverage: “It is more than a bulldozer, it is more than a freight train, the blue-nami is on!” Bang. Crash. Smash.
Winston’s back. Of course he is. This was foreshadowed by the polls. Also, he told you so. Winston is always right. NZ First got 6.46% of the vote, which gives them, specials notwithstanding, eight seats. Former Labour cabinet minister Shane Jones, NZ First’s No 2, is also back. Jones does politics as performance art. Imagine being in the same room as this pair. You’d be lucky to emerge alive. You’d be suffocated to death by Jones’ gymnastic verbosity. If you were a member of the media, you’d be lashed to death by Winston’s laser-shooting tongue.
He held a press conference the morning after the night before. Stuff labelled it an “unhelpful press conference”. When did he ever give a helpful press conference? He told the assembled hacks to ask only “sensible” questions. Also that they were “corrupt”. That one is getting as stale as an old sausage roll. He gets away with this because he knows his audience. Does he actually loathe the media? He has been known to have a drink with hacks.
Conciliation & cussing
At the end of a nasty, snippy, campaign there was a rare gesture of generous conciliation. Labour’s Kieran McAnulty, who lost his Wairarapa seat to National’s Mike Butterick, popped around to offer congrats and to share a beer.
But it was Labour MP Damien O’Connor, who has been in Parliament three decades and who appears to have lost his West Coast-Tasman seat, who summed up the mood of the campaign, if not the mood of many in the country as we await the shape of our next government. Emerging from the caucus room, he was asked whether Hipkins was still the leader. He said: “Fuck off. I am just going to the toilet.”
