I’ve been politically active since I was 18, so have spent some time around the traps and interacted with way too many political people than is probably mentally healthy and I’ve noticed you can clump them together and get a vibe off them.
Here’s 32 years of satirical observation.
Labour – Most Tribal
If you are in the fold, you are warm and cosy.
Labourites love to socialise and they are friendly, welcoming and genuinely excited for the interaction. Love talking politics, very hospitable.
Disagree with Party dictate however and they will tear your fucking throat out and shoot your children in front of your pets. The tribalism of Labourites the millisecond you disagree with the sad pandering nothings of their incremental policy platform is, alongside a wilful subservience to mediocrity, their most disappointing trait.
How else can you explain Helen White?
I think the ideological warfare that Lange’s neoliberalism created plus the fall out from the Foreshore and Seabed confiscation plus the lack of real domestic reform under Jacinda all caused internal disagreement that makes Labour Party Mandarins clutch at their pearl greenstones so this generates a culture of obedience rather than vigorous intellectual debate.
Labour have had those debates, they rip the Party apart so now all the sleeping dogs are euthanised before they ever wake.
That acquiescence is great at ensuring someone always makes sausage rolls for LEC meetings, not so great at creating innovative populist social policy for the people.
If there was once a revolution here, it has dissipated into blind consent.
ACT – Armed, intellectually smug and overwhelmingly Zionist
Sigh, remember the good old days when David Seymour could only get .7% and then the middle class woke gave him all that culture war ammunition that we couldn’t possibly win and he’s now literally running the fucking country?
Thanks wokies, we get it, your manufactured identity is far more important than the common ground between us.
When ACT was polling .7% it was a glee club for Libertarians who wore anoraks and debated the finer issues of whether incest should be illegal because they are based on illiberal property rights that contradict the free autonomy of the individual which helps explain why there’s so much step-sister porn on PornHub.
It was a political geek club for the geeks of the political geek world that none of the other geeks wanted to play with.
ACT was as niche as the step-sister porn sub group on Reddit.
But then the middle class woke started strangling off free speech which Seymour then went on to champion by appearing on Dancing with the Stars where he produced a twerk so devoid of bass it should have eliminated him from speaking on race relations ever again.
The woke handed him the bloody political ammunition he used it to amass a following.
As ACT have metastasized, they have brought in the Gun nuts, the cross burning banjo twangers and have managed to become intellectually smug for no clear reason.
ACT supporters are now rich people who will corner you at a dinner party to rave endlessly about Crypto currency, the best military academy to send your kids to, why gun rights need to be taught in the classroom, why everyone who doesn’t like Israel is an anti-semite and the fucking Maaaaaris.
Normally these people wouldn’t dare crawl out from under a rock at social gatherings, but their undeserved confidence and 73 personal Twitter followers have combined to provide a dizzying false certainty on everything from the Treaty to stripping all workers of any rental rights.
National – Rich landowning Christians who don’t like uppity Māori
National Party members are split into 3 main basic groupings.
BASIC GROUP 1 – Rich landowning urban white Christians who don’t like Māori political aspirations but enjoy the aesthetics of the culture to not feel so white. The kids are totally in private schools and their names are ‘Apple’ and ‘Bruschetta’. Most aren’t sure what a Libertarian is. They are Professional with zero intellectual curiosity outside exclusive holiday destinations, no capital gains tax and some bullshit corporate meditation daily ritual to ‘be present’, which isn’t that tough when you can afford Lululemon and live in a leafy suburb mansion. Their children, ‘Apple’ and ‘Bruschetta’ are members of the Young Nats and are fucking pretentious arseholes who openly refer to their parents as ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’.
BASIC GROUP 2 – Chinese and Indian Migrants who don’t understand why poor people and the Māoris get welfare. These small business owners lust for political influence and see National Party local events as a chance to work business contacts while demanding to know why New Zealand can’t have the death penalty like they do back home.
BASIC GROUP 3 – Rich landowning rural Volk who don’t like Māori political aspirations and detest the aesthetics of the culture because it makes them feel less white. These are the ones who complain about Te Reo in the Weather report on TVNZ. They live in the South Island and believe the solution to every problem is ‘More Cows’.
To be a National Party supporter you have to be a rich land owning Christian who doesn’t like uppity Māori or at least be aspiring to be a rich land owning Christian who doesn’t like uppity Māori.
To be fair, most of them voted Luxon in the hope their house value would go up 10%, they didn’t really buy into a full blown race war, they have too much skin in the game for skinhead revolutions.
NZF – Most Dumbestest
The original NZ First electorate were older Kiwis shocked at the cruelty of National’s welfare reforms and were intellectually opposed to free market sales of our strategic national assets.
Somehow that has mutated into feral anti-Trans, Qanon Antivaxxer lunatics who believe a shadow one world government satanic child molesting clique are using 5G to spread the covid virus.
NZF supporters are dumb as a bag of hammers and their petty bigotries and spittle flecked conspiracy theories are harnessed to ensure provincial business Facebook mates of Shane Jones get endless rivers of pork barrel.
…when Shane Jones looking like a repressed farting patriot with flag wings is your Noam Chomsky, reading is not your friend.
There is a glint in the eyes of these ruddy faced supporters and that is from the reflection of the books they burn.
These are a superstitious people who fear eclipses, tampons and literacy.
NZF supporters are the only people who still have landlines.
If you meet a NZF supporter in any social setting, turn and run before you are accused of witchcraft or getting a booster vaccination shot (which they consider the same thing).
Māori – Most Strategic
Māori Party voters are the most tactical voters in New Zealand.
They are infinitely interested in how to maximise their representation in the Māori electorates and vote splitting strategies are the only dialogue.
They have the best food at all their events.
Never seem to care about what actually gets done in Parliament though, but amazing tacticians and cooks.
Great at always planning how to win, no clue what they want when they win, (but great kai and hospitality).
The Māori Caucus is all Hat, not enough Trouser but the membership demand more than political theatre with little substance.
Seem happy to never actually be in power ever again.
Green – Most insufferable
Green Party members are easily the most insufferable human beings on the planet.
They are so micro aggression policing that they would eat their own young if they weren’t all vegans.
Once upon a time the Green members were the most friendly and fun Party members in the world. You could hang out with them, get stoned and have a really cool talk about the world and how to change it alongside amazing organic food.
Then it got swamped by small businesses wanting to use environmentalism as a marketing brand which birthed the incrementalism of James Shaw which mutated into uber woke middle class activists who became offended at everything.
Your average Party meeting now consists of everyone arguing over who hates heteronormative white cismales the most.
They read The Spinoff and feel almost as intellectually superior as ACT supporters.
Every single radioactive Woke Wellington Social Media lyncher is a Green Party member.
In any social event, pious and lecturing Green Party members go down about as well as Trump at a Feminist Folk Singer Festival.
Half the time they don’t know if they are Arthur or Martha and if they did ever decide, there would be a 6month hui to decide pronouns.
The They/Thems will eat you alive with all the restraint of hungry piranhas forced onto an all soy diet.
I say all of this as someone who votes Green.
So.
In ranking best to worst supporters based on 32 years of hanging around them all:
Māori Party
Labour
National
Greens
ACT
NZF
Hang out with Māori Party supporters and Labour Supporters, sprint from the rest of them.
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Might be time for a real NZ party as all the above are quite fucked up .What about a people before profit party that actually gives a fuck about every KIWI not just the rich and squeezed middle .
Bradbury forgot(!) to mention TOP, which might be described as:
Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
Let’s face it. Bill English being a shortie, loved small-statured Chinese ‘cos they made him feel big. What else could ? Keeping poor people poor ? Culturally insulting Sicily’s iconic pizzas? Listening to Adele wailing about the inner sadness of being ? Grunting at supermarket checkouts? Spare me.
Talking of Bill English, his publicly denouncing young New Zealand men as unemployable drug addicts was a particularly pernicious form of bullying, just as John Key’s Sunday ponytail pulling was, although the latter was more creepily personalised. In Parliament, the loud demented boorishness may come from the left, with te Maori Party and the mad Greens confused about time, place, and many other things, but there’s as many ways to skin a cat as there are to be a pronoun.
I blame Gerry Brownlie for this. He should boot out all the hoons in the gallery who are disruptive, waste time, achieve zilch, and are often little more than adolescent exhibitionists. Let them stand and speak or sing on street corners, but Parliament needs to take itself and the voters in a more serious and grown-up way than it currently does.
That’s great Aunt Daisy and encourage them with some nice sponge cake at afternoon tea if they are good and do their job properly. It would be a great way to make a citizen protest with effect; a plea to return to our previous not always effectual political system but one we could believe was trying. Now it doesn’t care if we are crying.
And Martyn love your captions for each Paarty – well put.
so no one will be left then including jabba the hut .
What always amazed me was how Peters built a Party of two halves which on paper had nothing in common, except Peters. All the Maori seats and a base of conservative old white people. Still has the old whites and has replaced the Maori with “people who have done their own research”
Peter more of this incisive thinking would be good please.
He also raved about the asian invasion and he has flipped and replaced his maori with asian .
supporters of the freedom and outdoor party (or whatever those loons call themselves) are the worst, hands down.
Great analysis of the political parties Bomber and a great read on a hazy Sunday evening. Remember reading something that Bob Jones wrote “ The Labour ites had the best social gatherings while poor old National were just plain old dullards”
How about a party based on good old fashioned class analysis.
The problem is that the progressive left is now the upper class.
That would be the elitist right, ACT and National hold the moral high ground on the upper class.
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