Just when you thought the election campaign couldn’t get even more bonkers, it got even more bonkers at Act’s campaign launch at Auckland’s Civic Theatre.
They’d already had what everyone thought was their campaign launch back in June at the SkyCity Theatre, where Act leader David Seymour, also known as the Entertainer, drove on stage in a little yellow car. But, hey, who couldn’t use a little more spectacle in this dreary election campaign?
So, how do you top the death-defying act of driving a little car on stage? Poof! By making Seymour – perhaps we should call him Mr Magic – magically disappear in a puff of Barbie pink smoke. More than a few people would be happy to see him disappear permanently, so that was perhaps not the smartest of tricks.
But then – poof! – a clown jumps up in Mr Magic’s audience. This was the huge and hugely annoying fellow who popped up over a fence to disrupt National leader Christopher Luxon’s press conference in August. He had previously heckled Prime Minister Chris Hipkins at the Ōtara Markets. His name is apparently Karl Mokaraka, a candidate for Vision New Zealand, a circus aligned to Destiny Church. Mokaraka likes to shout. He likes attention. He’d like some votes, too. So, in the unlikely event that you want to give him yours, just look for Annoying Shouty Man on the ballot paper.
How did he manage to infiltrate the campaign launch? Not the same way those five now-resigned Act candidates managed to infiltrate the party’s list. He wriggled his way in by wearing a false moustache.
Getting rid of the ‘tache was the easy bit; getting rid of him was hard. During a 10-minute circus act to get rid of Mokaraka, some over-stimulated Act supporters decided to join in and began whacking some members of the media with their signs. Whump! A camera geezer fell into some seats and was smacked in the noggin by an elderly lady.
If you hold your campaign launch in a theatre, you’re pretty much asking for melodrama – in this case, a chaotic performance of The Comedy of Errors.
Once Seymour could be heard again over the mad melee, he suggested people were being forced to use te reo Māori. “The way to turn a treasure into a form of torture is to impose it on people by force, perhaps with the very best of intentions.”
Quite how we are all being tortured is not clear. Are we all being threatened with getting the strap? Which is what used to happen to Māori kids who spoke te reo back in the good old days when we had what were called native schools.
After the shouting was over, Seymour told the media that, “Frankly, I think if a person can come and interrupt our meeting by protesting like that then I think equally other people … have a right to peacefully prevent them from succeeding in their goal of getting coverage.” Righty-ho. Apparently, probably in some parallel Act universe ruled by Mr Magic, thwacking and thwumping people with signs counts as some kind of peaceful protest.
“When New Zealanders try to shut down or push each other, all that does is make it harder for people to have the discussion that we need,” he said.
So just shut up, all right, or we’ll whack you with our “Vote Act” signs. Seymour later apologised for the attack on the cameraman.
History catches up
A rival in the race for biggest clown of the campaign so far is the National candidate for Hamilton East, Ryan Hamilton, to be known from now on as Raro Man. Actually, he is now a reformed clown. The Hamilton city councillor used to campaign, using made-up pseudo-science, for the removal of fluoride, otherwise known as the Work of the Devil, from our drinking water. On social media, he posted codswallop like “Get rid of fluoride. The poverty issue is redundant, most lower socio-economics fill their tap water with raro so pull the other one.” What a nice chap. Pity about the punctuation, though he obviously has a way with words. He owns a pest-control business, Bug Off Now, and a house-cleaning business, Grime Off Now.
He says he made these comments a decade ago. He now believes in National’s support of fluoridation. He ate some crow over his Raro comment. “I’m a National Party candidate so … I apologise for any offence that I may have caused.” Can somebody please advise politicians to stop prefacing obviously offensive and idiotic statements with “may”.
What Hamilton once believed about fluoride is quite clear. As to whether he may have changed his view about it? Pull the other one.
Hoping for blood
We’ve endured the first leaders’ debate on TV. For which you were waiting with bated breath. Or not.
The moderator, TVNZ political editor Jessica Mutch McKay, was wearing a frock that appeared to be a cross between chain mail and something you might wear to an opening-night performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. It’s an opera that features a fatal duel, which is what, if we’re honest, we were hoping the debate would be.
At least her outfit was entertaining. The debate, not so much. There were ad breaks ad nauseam for loo paper, dog treats and animal flea treatments. Ad breaks in a debate drive you as crazy as an attack of the fleas. Or the trots. They are called breaks for a reason, which is that they break up any sense of the ongoing back and forth that is the definition of a debate.
Between the ads, the leaders laid out their wares with the sort of energy you’d expect of two blokes desperate to be prime minister, but they were as entertaining as watching paint dry on the walls of the PM’s office.
Who won? Chris. Or Christopher. Who knows? Who really cares? If you already know how you’re going to vote, nothing changed. If you don’t know how you’ll vote, in all likelihood nothing changed.
Should a debate be entertaining? Probably not. But it should have some zing. Some real sense of competition for the top job in the country. Or at least a demonstration of what the respective candidates would offer as leaders.
The panel after the debate was haunted by two ghosts of parliaments past, Tau Henare, best known for being thumped by former speaker Trevor Mallard, and the lifelike David Cunliffe, best known for being leader of Labour for about 21/2 unhappy minutes. Talk about bringing out your dead. That pretty much summed up the entire dreary affair.
For those who stuck around, TVNZ 1 delivered the debate’s best verdict. The next programme was Would I Lie to You?
