You’re throwing a dinner party. You’ve been planning it for three years. You have the date: Saturday, October 14. You’ve planned the menu. You just haven’t announced it yet. You have the seating worked out. But you know what they say about best-laid plans. What if a number of your guests are abducted by aliens, or even anti-vaxers, on their way to your bash? You can’t have empty seats at the table.
You could always put Winston on your B list. He likes a party. But which party? And would he come? He’ll have lots of conditions. Where will he be seated at the table? Who will he be seated next to? How many other guests can he bring? What will be in his goodie bag?
But actually, the host doesn’t want him at the table. The other guests don’t want him at the table, either. Winston knows this. But does he care? Nah, of course not. He’s not in the game to be liked. He’s in the game simply to be in the game. Game playing is what Winston does best.
As we enter the final weeks of the election campaign, there is no escaping the likely host of this horror of a dinner party will almost certainly be National leader Christopher Luxon. And after months of dithering about whether he could swallow having Winston at his table, he has finally said he could. But only if he had to. That is akin to an invitation that says, “You can come to my party but only if someone else dies and I’m desperate to fill seats. And, by the way, there won’t be any whisky. I’m a teetotaller!”
Should Luxon win, the after-dinner entertainment is definitely going to be a frantic game of Twister, in which a spin of a wheel tells each player which foot or hand to place on which coloured circle on a floor mat. If you get so entwined with other players’ bodies that you fall over, you’re out of the game.
The secret to Twister, like politics, is that you need to be flexible. And you also have to be prepared for the inevitability of somebody sticking their bum in your face. The big question for Luxon is whether it will be one bum or two.
It would have been fun to eavesdrop on the phone call Luxon made to Act leader David Seymour last week to let him know that, um, actually, National is willing to do a deal with Winston.
Luxon left himself with no choice but to finally concede he’ll have a threesome with Act and NZ First. He has long said that he didn’t need to answer any questions about the possibility of a coalition with NZ First because it wasn’t in the game. The party hadn’t reached the 5% threshold in the polls, which would make it a viable contender to return to Parliament. Now it has. So, sucks boo. The latest poll shows NZ First at 5.2% support, which would give it six seats in the House, and it could be that a National-Act coalition will need those six seats to make up the 61 needed to govern.
This election campaign may well be the prelude to one of those parties you regret putting on in the first place, one where, as the evening wears on and on and on, you start wondering why all these awful people are in your house and why they can’t all just go home.
Yet another outing
At the other end of the table is Act leader David Seymour. Is he a cult leader? According to a former Act candidate – an anonymous, disillusioned one who has since joined the Labour Party – he is.
Mind you, you could argue all political parties are cults. But if Act was actually one, it would be the cult of Leave Me Alone And Don’t Touch My Stuff because, in the entirely unlikely event that its cult leader somehow became leader of the country, we would all be forced to convert to libertarianism.
Another week, another example of an Act candidate’s idiocy. Simon Angelo is, at number 37, a long way down Act’s list, and his shot for the Whangaparāoa seat is as long as one of Dame Valerie Adams’ gold medal throws.
Angelo is also the latest Act candidate to have been outed on the internet. Some time ago, he “liked” on X (formerly known as Twitter, and forever known as that place where trolls hang out) a post mocking Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick’s experience of depression.
As well, he has sent love-heart emojis to offensive posts about the LGBTQI+ community. And on and drearily, homophobic-ally, on. Why do these troll people get incensed about gay people when their lives are not affected in any way by the existence of gay people?
Flaky and frothy
The Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, could be the leader of the Cult of Flaky Pastry because by this stage in the election campaign he must be 80% sausage roll. The other 20%? Despair, perhaps. Labour’s polling has been reduced to flaky crumbs: its support has fallen to just 26.5%.
On the wireless the other day, Hipkins said, slightly plaintively, that he also likes pies. Perhaps somebody will give him a pie. He’d better hope they don’t. He says he has put on 5kg since he took office in January.
Wherever he pops up on the campaign trail, a plate of flaky pastry is proffered. He can’t refuse to eat one. That would be churlish. Does he have a professional crumb remover on call? It is a well-known fact that nobody can eat a sausage roll without ending up covered in crumbs.
There is no dignity on a campaign trail. Last week, Luxon milked a goat. Why? Does not-very-successfully milking a goat qualify you to run the country?
At another one of his endless, increasingly random photo ops, he, a lifelong wowser, tried to pour a pint of lager at a pub. It was all froth.
But then, it’s been all froth on the campaign trail. Except when it hasn’t been. While visiting a strawberry farm, Luxon announced that if National wins, it will get tough on those on the dole deemed to be work shy. The party will introduce a “traffic light” policy that will penalise those who “breach” strict new Jobseeker conditions. A “red light” breach could see sanctions, benefit cuts or suspension, money management and mandatory community work experience.
In short: There will be no strawberries for slackers. And no dinner parties, either.
