Credit where credit is due: Christopher Luxon just got funnier and funnier, more determinedly ridiculous, a David Brent for our times, the embarrassing boss who is at once inept and bombastic. Stuff writer Verity Johnson came up with a widely quoted description: ‘‘He’s our 1am tuna sachet PM.’’ He’s the prime minister you have when you’ve run out of viable alternative prime ministers — and that most certainly includes Labour’s lacklustre leader. At least Luxon is hilarious; Chris Hipkins is just sad.
A senior minister for the Crown got in touch earlier this year saying how much he enjoyed a Secret Diary I wrote of Hipkins. I sidled back into my favourite genre, the cowboy saga, and presented Hipkins as Lonesome Cowboy Chip, a quiet, remote figure on a limping horse, ignored and avoided by the good people of Dodge. There was something crowing about the minister’s praise, a serving of schadenfreude, but I will accept a compliment from just about anyone and looked forward to his good-humoured response when I featured him in a Secret Diary. I texted a link to make sure he read it. There was no response.
National are inherently funny. They cling to terrible ideas. Politics is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; the 2024 model was the farce of boot camps. I really ought to get around to setting a Secret Diary as a boot camp caper, with camp leader Luxon walking around the dormitories in a pair of shorts and peeping on his whistle. Resentful inmates stare right through him as he says, ‘‘Well, what I would like to say to you is ... ’’ But no-one listens, and meanwhile camp security officer Mark Mitchell takes roll call and discovers half of the inmates have fled. Sadly, you can’t make this stuff up. It’s already happened except even worse. News story, December 5: ‘‘One of the 10 teenagers in the government’s boot camp trial has died in an accident, while another is currently on the run after attending his funeral.’’
Labour should be inherently funny, thanks mainly to their position as the hand-wringing middle-classes who claim to have the best interests of the working classes at heart. It gives them that classic hair-shirt look they dress down to contradict the outward luxury and comfort of their lives. But the Hipkins regime prefers another fashion statement: invisibility. It’s hard to laugh at the party that isn’t there.
Peters, too, has been a satirical disappointment. Looking ahead to 2024, I wrote in January, ‘‘Funnier than Luxon, stranger than Seymour, he will guarantee three years’ worth of satire.’’ But he’s largely stayed out of the news, and kept his own counsel, only now and then breaking his stride to proclaim bah! humbug! at anything that represents a challenge to his position. He plays the role of a dignified elder statesman very well. I think he may well be a dignified elder statesman.
Satire is often the practice of coming up with the same joke over and over, and hoping it will remain funny. Pretty much every time I satirised Te Pati Maori leader Rawiri Waititi, I made variations on something he said this year: ‘‘Te Pati Maori has issued a Declaration of Independence, anchored in tikanga and kawa, to determine the oranga of our people, our mokopuna the land and te iwi Maori katoa.’’ He can come across as a humourless faux Gandhi in a crazy Dad hat but there’s no doubting he had a keen sense of humour. ‘‘See you next Tuesday!’’, addressed to David Seymour, was surely the acronym of the year.
Ah yes. David Seymour. What can satire do with a problem like that? Left-wing social media does its best but it comes through a prism of hatred, detestation, sheer loathing — it’s the kind of satire that really just wants to punch him in the face, and laugh. I suppose the Unite Union pinata of Luxon was a bit like that. Anyway I think the thing to do is wait for Seymour to perform an act of explosively funny and quite damaging self-parody. Politics obeys the law of accidents; Seymour has long presented as an accident waiting to happen.
As for the Greens, and Chloe Swarbrick, nothing will ever be more comical than the revelations of an MP caught stealing clothes from a store on Ponsonby Rd. Mental health isn’t something we should laugh at but surely Golriz Gharaman, who has a keen wit, had occasion to laugh at her own misfortunes.
Sadly, you can’t make this stuff up ... I actually kind of hate it when politics precedes satire, and is so bizarre, so outlandish, so grotesque that it’s funnier than anything you can imagine.
Satire is at its best when dealing with people who strive to be earnest and attempt to come across as normal. My heartfelt thanks go to Christopher Luxon. He’s made for satire. I look forward to satirising him in 2025. Compliments of the season, prime minister!
- By Steve Braunias
