Labour
Chris Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni: The ginga and the princess.
For the Prime Minister, reading Labour’s polls must feel akin to reading your own obit before you have actually departed this mortal coil – otherwise known as the PM’s office on the ninth floor of the Beehive.
In a trucker’s bakery in Masterton, they sell mega sausage rolls. Somebody should send him a box of ‘em. He needs sustenance. He must feel like Sisyphus, forced to roll that enormous boulder up to the top of the hill only for it to roll back down again. Over and over.
You can’t fault him for stamina. He is the ultimate reminder that politicians are not normal people. Normal people would take to their bed with a … box of mega sausage rolls. Not Chippy. He has to pretend to go on being chipper.
He can be a scrappy little bugger. He’s stubborn – like a red heeler chasing a rabbit. Will he get his rabbit? It is looking increasingly unlikely. But a red heeler never gives up the chase.
Carmel Sepuloni (who was unavailable for our photograph) is the first Pasifika deputy PM. She is a working-class gal from Waitara who has the effortless grace of a Pasifika princess. Known as a hard worker with a calm head, she has presence. Height doesn’t hurt. At over six foot, she looms over her boss. It is also quite possible that, depending on the election result, she will go on to loom even larger as the next leader of the Labour party.
National
Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis: The odd couple
He’s an evangelical Christian and a pro-lifer. She’s pro-choice, and agnostic, although she does believe in some undefined “higher being” and in “Christian values”. She’s a feminist. She has charm and steel but she never overplays either. She has owned to smoking dope, when younger, although she now says it’s “not cool”. You cannot imagine a universe in which Luxon would be on the other end of a joint. He’s not cool and never has been. He’s gaffe-prone. He was overheard telling farmers that New Zealand was a “very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country”, which made a lot of people very whiny indeed. In July last year, he posted on social media, “Today I’m in Te Puke, the heart of kiwifruit country.” No, he wasn’t. He was on hols in Hawaii. Which allowed the Labour benches to throw some coconuts by way of taunts: “Aloha”, and, “I thought he was in Te Puke.” It was a mild misstep. But it looked sloppy.
Willis never looks sloppy. She has poise. With the exception of her memorably hilarious Grant Robertson “How big is his hole?” faux pas, she seldom stuffs up. And apologising to the nation for proffering such an unfortunate image of Robertson’s hole was funny.
Luxon wears his leadership awkwardly, like an ill-fitting suit. Willis wears her deputy’s cloak like a perfectly tailored power suit. She never upstages Luxon. She is too clever for that. Many National voters regard her as the next natural leader of the party. She almost certainly won’t roll Luxon. Such a move wouldn’t suit her calm, reasonable and loyal profile.
Act
David Seymour and Brooke van Velden: The comedian and the straight sidekick
She gets to play Ernie Wise, the straight guy to his Eric Morecambe. He delivers the jokes. She provides the applause.
He is ambitious. Is she? She said recently, and slightly plaintively, perhaps, that she thinks she’s on the billboards to demonstrate that Act is not just Seymour. Which is akin to asserting that New Zealand First is not just Winston.
She is known best as the tireless saleswoman for the End of Life Choice Bill, passed in 2019. She stood about gutsily in the corridors of Parliament, accosting and debating with MPs. Seymour was the public face of the bill.
Her political sympathies were once Green. Then she discovered a thing called choice. Now she is riding on Seymour’s big pink bus. It is called “Pinky”. This sounds a bit commie, come to think of it. Never mind, she can read Ayn Rand on the bus ride to Te Puke.
She doesn’t have a particularly high public profile. It is impossible to compete with the larger-than-life character that is Seymour. She’s wise enough not to try.
Of Seymour, ask him. He’s the expert. He’s a one-man PR machine. He’s funny as a fight. Except when he’s not.
Occasionally, his king of comedy-mask slips. On 1News recently, he was asked about the fourth of his candidates to quit. He went full Winston, which means implying that the journalist’s questions are stupid. Ergo, the journalist is stupid. It is the comedy equivalent of planting a custard pie in a stupid journo’s face.
Green
Marama Davidson and James Shaw: The “It’s not easy being Green” team.
Davidson is a happy radical. She has said, “If I’m going to be labelled radical, I’m fine with that.” Her parents (Hanakawhi Nepe-Fox and actor dad Rawiri Paratene) were early advocates for te reo. She wants to “reclaim” the C-word. She repeatedly used it an anti-racism rally in 2018. She copped flack earlier this year for saying that it is “white cis men” who cause most of the violence in the world. This went down as well as calling someone the C-word.
Did she apologise? Sort of. Not really. She clarified to the PM that she was perhaps a bit discombobulated after being hit by a motorbike at a rally opposing anti-trans activist Posie Parker. She sure as hell wasn’t going to apologise to cis men. She’s happy being a radical.
Climate change amounts to the weight of the world on her co-leader, Shaw (who was overseas when the Listener came to Parliament). As Climate Change Minister, he once said it was “not surprising that that frustration circles around on me”. He has an air of faint melancholy about him. It’s as much a personality trait as a political one. Shouldn’t he be angrier? Or friendlier? Or just anything, actually?
Compare him with former Greens leaders – the cheerful and easy-to-like Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, or Russel Norman, that chipper, combative Aussie import. Nah, don’t bother. Shaw does not do personality politics. He regards questions about his personal life as invasive.
He is well aware of the accusations that the Greens have pandered to Labour. He is also well aware of the personal jibe – that he is not a real Green. He has said that in the 2011 Greens selection process, party members disregarded him as “an ex-PwC management consultant in a suit”. He worked for PwC in London. Does he like being a politician? Who knows. He believes in causes and in duty.
Te Pāti Māori
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi: The not-so-mad hatters?
They score for sartorial swagger. Between them they may own the coolest collection of hats in the country. They certainly stand out from the boringly besuited politicians who stride about Parliament. They are like a pair of walking, te reo-talking Lindauer portraits come to life. They scare the bejesus out of many conservative Pākehā voters. You get the sense that they don’t much mind scaring the bejesus out of conservative Pākehā voters.
They regard any possible post-election deals as “the coalition of colonisers”. They regard the arcane rules of the House with what borders on contempt. They were both kicked out by the Speaker after breaking into a gleeful, and unauthorised, waiata to welcome back the former Labour MP, Meka Whaitiri, who waka-jumped to Te Pāti Māori. Censured!, they shouted.
Last month, Waititi was “named” and ejected from the House for 24 hours for appearing to breach a suppression order relating to a case before the courts. “Named” is Parliament’s equivalent of a public shaming. Waititi did not appear remotely shamed.
Previously, he was kicked out of the chamber for refusing to wear a tie, which Parliament’s business-attire dress code dictated for blokes. Waititi instead wore a hei tiki. This, he declared, was Māori business attire. Ngarewa-Packer donned a tie. She might as well have stuck her tongue out at then-Speaker Trevor Mallard. Sometimes, the funniest protests are the most effective. The silly tie rule was given the biff. As co-leaders they are both colourful and charismatic and, okay, a bit scary.
