Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The New Zealand General Election of 2023
38 Plays1 year ago
After a brief hiatus, M and Josh join together once more, this time to talk about the New Zealand General Election of 2023.
—
You can contact us at: [email protected]
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Beliefs in Dinosaurs: Comedic Takes
00:00:00
Speaker
Mr Addison, one final question before we let you go vote. Do you believe in dinosaurs? Do I believe in a thing called love? Is love a dinosaur? There have been questions whether you can love a dinosaur. I don't feel this answers the question Mr Addison. Do you or do you not believe in dinosaurs? I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. Peridactyls?
00:00:23
Speaker
No, Attilia. You're alpha-scating. Do you believe or not? Don't stop believing. Hold on to that feeling. Mr. Addison, you are angling to be the country's next Prime Minister. Why won't you answer the questions? Dinosaurs, yes or no? Yes. So you do believe in dinosaurs? I believe in Barney the dinosaur, and all the Friends from the Land Before Time series of films which… I'm going to be having 14 of those?
00:00:47
Speaker
And each one is historically accurate. Sorry, so you believe in talking dinosaurs? Yes, you don't. You don't believe in the Gospels of Littlefoot, Sarah, Ducky, Petri and Spike. You doubt the tale of the tiny sauruses and the trip to the mysterious island. I... I... I... I'm just going to go and vote now. And I think you need to think very carefully about your future as a politically and historically literate person.
Introductions and Health Updates
00:01:11
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Anderson and Em Dintus.
00:01:22
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China. It's Dr. M.R.X.Denteth. Are you well? Are you hale and healthy, Dr. Denteth? I am healthier than I've been in the last few weeks. I went to Guangzhou last week.
00:01:41
Speaker
in order to vote. And I came back with an astounding head call, actually now technically it was last week, it was the beginning of last week, technically the end of the week before. But the moral is, if you go to another city, you will get sick when you exercise your franchise. Exercising your franchise outside of your electorate, very bad for your health.
00:02:03
Speaker
Not the COVIDs though. No, no, I did a COVID test and it was in fact just a bog-standard head cold, which is still a horrible thing to experience. Although, it was not as bad as the time I had COVID. That really was a terrible experience. I never want to get COVID ever again. No, no, I wouldn't recommend it myself. So yeah, I think the moral of the story is democracy wants you dead and it's not going to stop trying.
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, I mean, that is that is the story of globalization.
00:02:34
Speaker
So we're a couple of weeks late to this now.
New Zealand General Election Results
00:02:39
Speaker
We originally intended that we were going to record an episode shortly before the general election in New Zealand, which would probably have been out after the results were known. So we'd be humorously out of date immediately. But as it turns out, we're now recording after the general election and everyone knows what happened, more or less, special votes. But you know how that goes.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, so we had an election, we get a preliminary or provisional result. We actually don't get the final result until early November because votes like mine need to be counted. And so, but nevertheless, there's enough stuff going on with the election that a summary of it should fill up most of an episode. And
00:03:26
Speaker
Then we'll see what else happens. We also have two weeks worth of news, which we might save for the bonus content, or we might chuck a little bit in now. I don't know. Anything's possible. Literally anything is possible right now.
00:03:37
Speaker
Well, I mean, figuratively anything is possible. Literally. I mean, there are literally literally everything is possible. Okay. I mean, if that if that's your ontology, I'm willing to go with it. Yeah. But but I think what's most possible is that we'll play a chime and then start talking about the election. Indeed. In fact, shall we vote on it? I say aye. How do you vote? I also say aye. Vote to carry it. The election continues.
00:04:07
Speaker
And now the election is over. Right, well, a last little bit of democracy chase of the year, just to keep us going. So the election that's come and gone, to the surprise of basically no one, I think, the political right got in. The major left party, Labour, got kicked out.
00:04:28
Speaker
quite firmly, quite a step down from the government under Jacinda Ardern receiving the highest majority any party has ever got under an MNP system here in New Zealand to now basically getting a small share of the vote, losing a bunch of quite historically fruit.
00:04:52
Speaker
They lost Mount Roscoe for God's sake, mostly because of Michael Wood's shenanigans earlier. But I don't like Roscoe has never been not Labour as long as I've been alive, I think. And Mount Albert, which has historically been the seat which Labour leaders sit in,
00:05:10
Speaker
has gone from a 20,000 vote majority three years ago to what appears to be only a few thousand votes or even only a few hundred votes in it this time round. So there has been quite a significant movement away from Labour, both with respect to the party vote and also with respect to the electorate votes.
00:05:32
Speaker
And the vote kind of dispersed all over the place, really. The Greens picked up a bunch. The Greens picked up a bunch of electorate seats. Yeah, they now have gone from historically having had one seat to now having three seats. So Wellington Central, Rongatai and Auckland Central.
00:05:49
Speaker
But also to New Zealand first. They're back again. Winston Peters literally cannot die. I'm going to keep saying literally about everything. Literally everything. This is one thing I think we do agree with with respect to the literal claim. I wouldn't be surprised if on the day that we have our funerals, Winston Peters is announcing yet another run. Yes. New Zealand first will be making for parliament.
00:06:15
Speaker
But yes, the major winners, of course, were National,
Winston Peters: The Unpredictable Kingmaker
00:06:20
Speaker
the main right-wing party here in New Zealand, and their buddies ACT, who are the sort of far-right party who are usually there appended, although ACT's done fairly well for themselves this time as well.
00:06:34
Speaker
Well, yes and no. I mean, they've done better than the last election. So they've actually improved by one seat in the last election. But six weeks ago, ACT was polling almost twice as well as it actually received on election day. So it was in the high teens six weeks ago. It was, I think, about nine point six percent on polling day itself.
00:06:59
Speaker
So ACT on one level looked like it was going to be a really major, minor party in a center-right government, and has only done marginally better than it did in the last election, even though it appears to be the party that spent the most trying to get into power, and also had a private plane donated for campaigning use during its campaign. So the right put a lot of money into ACT,
00:07:28
Speaker
and they actually got very little in return. Although, again, they won a seat that wasn't epsom, didn't they? They took one off national somewhere. They did, yes. In part because, I mean, in some respects, the reason why the Greens did so well in electorate seats was Labour having bad candidates there and also
00:07:50
Speaker
there seems to be a general sentiment that Labour deserved to lose this election anyway. But National didn't help itself with its piss-poor selection of candidates, allowing someone like Van Halden to basically sweep into Act's second electoral seat.
00:08:07
Speaker
And then, of course, New Zealand first. So if you're not familiar with the history of elections in New Zealand, Winston Peters is very much the populist party, I guess. He's a little bit left, he's a little bit right, he's whatever will get him the most votes at any or at least the most attention at any time.
00:08:24
Speaker
And that has led to several occasions where neither the right-wing parties nor the left-wing parties have quite enough votes to govern, which means New Zealand first gets to be the position of kingmaker, where whichever side they go with, which could be either, will end up being the party in power. Now, it's not possible this time, is it? Even Labor and the Greens and New Zealand first couldn't do it.
00:08:50
Speaker
I believe. But also, Winston ruled out working with the Labour Party sometime last year. Although, as my mother pointed out when I spoke to her last post the election, you don't ever trust anything during a campaign versus after a campaign. But Chris Hopkins, the former PM and leader of the Labour Party, ruled out ever working with Winston Peters ever again.
00:09:16
Speaker
which then led to a really interesting situation.
Challenges for the National-led Government
00:09:20
Speaker
So historically, political leaders have ruled out working with Winston in the past. So John Key rolled out working with Winston during his tenure as PM. Recipients rolled out working with Winston during his tenure as PM. This then put a lot of pressure on Christopher Luxon to say, what is the national party's position on working with Winston Peters and New Zealand first?
00:09:46
Speaker
And arguably one of the reasons why Nationals' vote went down and New Zealand First's vote went up is that Luxon, for a long time, wouldn't answer that question by saying, well, you know, New Zealand First isn't currently a viable party for us to have negotiations with, so he wasn't ruling them in or ruling them out.
00:10:07
Speaker
And then as they got closer to the election and New Zealand first looked like it was creeping up in the polls, Luckson said, oh, you know, I would work with Winston Peters, which then led to New Zealand first getting a massive boost in the polls. And then he said he didn't want to work with Winston Peters. And then he said he would reluctantly work with Winston Peters. And then when he was asked, what do you think of Winston Peters policy? He said, well, I don't even really know who Winston Peters is.
00:10:36
Speaker
which people are pointing out, if you want to be the next Prime Minister, surely knowing a little bit about previous coalition governments involving New Zealand First would be a very good idea, because New Zealand First tends to work against the government they're in coalition with, rather than with it. Yes, yes, people have talked about having
00:11:01
Speaker
What is it, rather than having Winston Peters outside the tent pissing in, they have him inside the tent pissing in. Usually there's a cycle of Winston Peters gets to be kingmaker, chooses the government,
00:11:16
Speaker
makes a lot of fuss. Everybody realizes that all the various other MPs from his party who aren't Winston Peters are a bunch of nutcases, and they get absolutely destroyed and kicked out of Parliament at the next election. And then the one after that, people are like, oh, that wacky Winston Peters, he'll keep the bastards honest. He'll do the stuff that we project on.
00:11:41
Speaker
the other politicians who aren't in at the moment because we think voting for change will magically make everything want to happen happen. But yes, so I don't know. It looks like they'll have to make nice, but at the very least, act in New Zealand first. Not bosom buddies, I think it would be fair to say.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yes, it's going to be interesting for a national led government because at this stage, given what we know about how special votes work, when the final result gets delivered in early November, it's very likely that National Act will not have a governing majority, at which point they will need New Zealand first in coalition or at least in confidence and supply if they want to get anything done.
00:12:23
Speaker
and ACT doesn't like New Zealand first, and New Zealand first doesn't like ACT. In fact, the leaders of those two parties, David Seymour, Leader of ACT, and Winston Peters, New Zealand's first leader, they really, really despise each other. Yes, so there may be some
00:12:43
Speaker
some some some amusement a small amount of schadenfreude for those on the left but probably not enough to make up for the fact that they are not in power now that's that's all very interesting a little little recap if you're listening from new zealand i don't think we told you anything you don't already know and if you're not well well that's a little an interesting look into the
Conspiratorial Views in Minor Parties
00:13:04
Speaker
party politics over here, but not exceptionally conspiratorial, unless you count the potential backroom dealings that may happen in getting a national act in New Zealand first.
00:13:16
Speaker
coalition working together. But things did get a bit more conspiratorial in the lead up to the election when we look at the minor parties. Especially as we say, New Zealand first is led by Winston Peters and as far as most people are concerned, New Zealand first is Winston Peters.
00:13:35
Speaker
But New Zealand First usually gets enough of the vote that Winston Peters and a bunch of his other candidates get into Parliament, which often is the first time anyone is exposed to them. And sometimes that can be a little bit of a shock. So in the case of both New Zealand First and ACT, which is largely the same, I personally could not name anyone other than David Seymour, who's an ACT MP, including the one who just won a seat off of national. And so... Brooke Van Halden.
00:14:03
Speaker
Brooklyn Health. Okay, now I know the names of two Act MPs. I mean, she was the architect of our euthanasia bill. Oh, okay. But I think they call it the dying with dignity bill. Yes. But in the lead up to the election, some people in the press did start combing through the various lists from from the various parties and finding some interesting characters in there, wouldn't you say?
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, ACT in particular turned out to have quite a lot of candidates who expressed conspiratorial views about, say, Covid vaccines or the Labour government, which would then lead to journalists asking the leader of ACT, David Seymour, what's going on with your candidate selection processes?
00:14:52
Speaker
Which then led to David Seymour getting very, very angry that people were asking questions about the candidate selection processes, because as soon as these comments came to light, they would force those candidates out. And as people pointed out, David Seymour seemed to be getting annoyed that journalists were exposing his candidates, because somehow he would have found out about it naturally and expelled them after they were selected in the first instance.
00:15:21
Speaker
Yes, very strange act in particular. I mean, I'll be honest, I did not pay a lot of attention to this election. The actual results seemed to be a foregone conclusion. I mean, I voted, of course, I went and did my civic duty, but there didn't really seem to be
00:15:37
Speaker
much, much question into what was going to happen. So I wasn't really paying a heck of a lot of attention. I did see, though, what headlines did pop up for me where ACT did seem to be going in on the American-style culture wars bullshit, which we don't have so much of here. I mean, COVID was kind of what really jumpstarted it here a bit. But ACT, there seemed to be a bit of I'm sure ACT had something to do. I saw sort of your anti-trans stuff.
00:16:07
Speaker
that we've been saying overseas a little bit, and David Soomer in particular, I say without a word of a lie,
00:16:16
Speaker
There's the tendency for people to use the word politics to just mean opinions I don't agree with when they're saying, why do you have to bring politics into this? David Seymour accused people of making things political in a political campaign. I don't even understand how that is supposed to work. But yeah, there was some of that style to it.
00:16:46
Speaker
And those are the Act of New Zealand first of the major minor parties, but the minor minor parties were the notable ones, at least for those founded basically following the Covid anti-vaccination culture war stuff that cropped up here in 2020.
00:17:06
Speaker
So there's one thing to note about ACT. ACT have actually been doing the culture war stuff for a while. So under Rodney Hyde and also under John Banks, two of their previous leaders, they would, during election campaigns, try to accuse the government, whether it be national or labor, of engaging in socialist or communist policies.
00:17:28
Speaker
which is basically straight out of the American right playbook, where if you label something as being socialist or communist, people go, Oh, we can't have that. That's bad. And as people pointed out to hide and banks at the time, that kind of pejorative framing doesn't really work particularly well. And I'll do not afraid socialist here. No, we're afraid of the word. We're not afraid of the word socialist.
00:17:53
Speaker
So they seemed to think they could win debates by labeling their opponents as being socialists. And the socialists would go, yeah, we are. And we're going to explain to you now why being socialist is good. So they've been doing this for a while. But yes, the the trend stuff they brought in,
00:18:11
Speaker
and their particular acts, particular pivot towards their racial equality stuff, which is basically getting rid of any ministry that's going to help marginalised or oppressed minorities back home. That's relatively new and is quite disturbing. Yes.
00:18:29
Speaker
And I should possibly clarify, before I said they were the major-minor parties, they're the major-minor right-wing parties. We, of course, have the Green Party and Tipati Maori, the Maori Party, whose candidates appear to be less wildly insane, or at least if they are better at hiding it.
00:18:47
Speaker
Now, admittedly, we do have to put our bona fides out. We're both green voters, and I suspect we're also both sympathetic towards the party more, even though we're not voting for that particular party. So, of course, we are going to think very highly of the candidates from our side of the aisle versus those of the other.
00:19:08
Speaker
But it is also interesting that, whilst there were lots of news reports about scandals about New Zealand First candidates and Act Party candidates, there really weren't any scandalous stories this time around about the Greens or Te Parti Māori. No, it was the Labor MPs who took up all of that space on the left.
00:19:29
Speaker
And mostly Labour ministers who were engaging in the kind of behaviour that actually does lead to populations going, maybe you shouldn't be governing the country anymore. But moving to the little, the minnows of the New Zealand electorate, we have parties like Freedom's New Zealand Party now.
Freedoms New Zealand Party's Underperformance
00:19:54
Speaker
This doesn't quite resonate, perhaps, so much with people outside of New Zealand, but freedom
00:20:03
Speaker
We've said this before on the podcast. It's been suggested that one of the key differences in the character between New Zealand and America is that in America, the fundamental value is freedom, and in New Zealand, the fundamental value is fairness, which isn't to say that neither of us value the other.
00:20:22
Speaker
New Zealanders will tolerate a curtailing of our freedom in the name of making everything fairer, and Americans will tolerate a loss of fairness in the name of maximizing their freedoms, obviously, as a massive generalization. But the idea of freedom and going on about freedom all the time, and everything being about freedom, I think is seen here as being a very American thing to do.
00:20:47
Speaker
And that was one of the things that did seem to transfer across in the whole culture wars business when the COVID lockdown started. I'm sure I must have said this at the time, the thing I found so annoying about the rhetoric of the anti-COVID crowd here in New Zealand was that it was just all copied, just cut and pasted from the stuff you'd hear from America, and in particular the emphasis on freedoms, freedoms, all the time freedoms.
00:21:15
Speaker
So, following on from this, Bishop, quote-unquote, Bishop Brian Tamaki founded the Freedoms New Zealand Party. It was quite clear that he was still on that kick.
00:21:32
Speaker
Now, I say Bishop Brian Tamaki, if you're not familiar, is the head of the Destiny Church here in New Zealand, which is, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given that it is very much the American style of evangelical sort of, what's that style called, where it's basically all just about making lots of money for the guys at the bar? Pentecostal. Pentecostal. Oh, no. Prosperity Gospel. Prosperity Gospel. There we go. Yeah.
00:21:58
Speaker
Now, they came from an explicitly conspiratorial position. And I assume their policies, not that I have any idea what they actually were, were a fair bit of the sort of anti-vaxxie in question to COVID stuff. But they were also very much a religious party. And we've always had religious parties. Christian Heritage Party was around for a long time, things like that. They never do super well.
00:22:28
Speaker
But I didn't hear much myself about the Freedoms New Zealand Party, and they didn't really get many votes. So what are you going to do? No, they did not get many votes at all, which has got Bishop Brian Tamaki very, very angry. I was going to try to slip in a Judge Reinhold joke in here by saying that Judge Reinhold is not a real judge, but his real first name is Judge.
00:22:52
Speaker
Well, Bishop Brian Tamaki is neither a bishop nor has taken the stance of adopting bishop as a first name because you're not allowed to do that in our country. You can't call someone by a title in our country, even though you can in the UK. So you can call your child King Charles in the UK, but you can't do it back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:23:14
Speaker
Unless you sneak it in by calling your child Kingy, but that's another matter entirely. But no, Bishop Brian Tamaki thought that the Christians would rally around his party, and is now very angry that they only got 20,000 votes or so.
00:23:31
Speaker
And that's largely because the Christian vote is very much just tied in to the major parties. Certain Catholics vote Labour, certain Catholics vote National. The Christian vote is not taken to be a kind of deciding factor as to which party you vote for. The Christian vote is very much demarcated along class lines and particular classes of people vote National and particular classes of people vote Labour.
00:23:59
Speaker
So every time a religious party forms in the country and just assumes that our
00:24:07
Speaker
religious polarity is going to vote for them, turns out actually religion is not a motivating factor in most ordinary people's lives back home.
NZ Loyal's Electoral Struggles
00:24:18
Speaker
But as for the secular conspiracist party, we have NZ Loyal. So this is the party that was headed by Liz Gung. Did she actually set it up?
00:24:29
Speaker
She did, yes. She is the party leader. She is. So Liz Gunn is a former newsreader here in New Zealand who then went on... I think she was also a investigative journalist at one point as well. Yeah, she was someone on the news anyway. I know that much. But we went hardcore anti-vaxxer during COVID and
00:24:56
Speaker
what did she she was in court what did she do she was she tried to go somewhere in the Auckland airport where she wasn't allowed to go or something like that and got into some sort of altercation with security i can't remember the exact details but she's just been in court over that
00:25:12
Speaker
But she, so her party was very definitely the anti-vaxxer party. Now, she made this crack about expecting to get two million votes. I should point out the voting population of New Zealand is about three and a bit million, I think.
00:25:31
Speaker
Now, she said she was joking, and I think we could probably take her at her word for that. I don't think she's delusional enough to have thought she was actually going to get 2 million votes. I think it was just a lighthearted thing. As it turns out, she got about 22,000 votes, about the same as Freedom's New Zealand party. But they'd be insinuating that they were conspired against, were they? Yes.
00:25:52
Speaker
New Zealand Loyal had a particular problem going into the election and that I think they had three candidates and no party list. And New Zealand Loyal claimed that they had supplied the Electoral Commission with all of the documentation required for their three candidates in electorate seats and the party list itself. And the Electoral Commission went, no, you you put in the information
00:26:19
Speaker
on the wrong day, which means you submitted the party list after closing of the date you're meant to submit the party list, and therefore you cannot have a party list. And initially, Liz Gunn was claiming, oh, this is the electoral commission. They've tricked us to make sure we submit information at the wrong time so that people can't vote for us and thus we're not going to be able to have members in
00:26:46
Speaker
the New Zealand Parliament, because even if she was joking about getting 2 million votes, she was of the firm opinion that New Zealand loyal would get well over the 5% threshold and thus have party MPs in the New Zealand Parliament.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so they went to court. They basically took the Electoral Commission to court by claiming that the instructions that their party's secretry were given were not up to the task, that the interpretation the Electoral Commission had about submission dates was not consistent with New Zealand law, and some claim that by not amending the party list upon request,
00:27:32
Speaker
This was robbing people of the ability to vote for New Zealand loyal, which was a contravention of the Bill of Rights. And this this went through the courts in time before the election because it was decided that this should be dealt with as quickly as possible to ensure that it wasn't going to be any disparity in the vote.
00:27:52
Speaker
And they lost on all three counts. So the Electoral Commission pointed out that the party secretary was constantly sending them emails thanking them for their help throughout the process. So if the party secretary felt that she did not have enough information, she never indicated that to the Electoral Commission at any particular point in time.
00:28:14
Speaker
They also pointed out that it is the party, rather than the electoral commission, who haven't interpreted the law appropriately about submission dates. The electoral act is very, very clear as to when things need to be submitted at particular times. And also the fact that the party secretary didn't supply the information at the right time.
00:28:41
Speaker
is the reason why if there were party votes cast for New Zealand loyal, it wouldn't mean anything. It was their thing to solve rather than the Electoral Commission to solve. And the big takeaway from this was the courts pointing out that the Electoral Act is an act of parliament and is not something which the courts have the jurisdiction to in
00:29:05
Speaker
interpret, it's laid down by Parliament exactly how the Commission works, and the court shouldn't be interpreting that because it will actually cause a very messy situation in future elections if the courts are able to arbitrarily decide that the Electoral Commission is at the final arbiter of exactly what goes on with preparing for and running elections.
00:29:27
Speaker
So for all, they might darkly insinuate that the Electoral Commission had it in for them. That does not actually appear to be the case. Now, they also were involved with Voices for Freedom.
00:29:41
Speaker
Which reminds me again, which of the groups of nutcases in New Zealand are Voices for Freedom? So Voices for Freedom were the wellness people who got involved with the Plan B people and during the lockdown to running a whole bunch of protests around the lockdowns and the like. So Voices for Freedom
00:30:05
Speaker
were a fairly, what appeared to be a fairly major power during the Covid lockdowns we had back home. And then they made a punt at the local elections, which we had last year, and they didn't do particularly well.
00:30:22
Speaker
And they had a punt at the general election this year by throwing their weight behind parties like New Zealand Loyal. And I think to a lesser extent, freedoms New Zealand, but I think Bishop Brian Tamaki and voices for freedom ended up getting offside due to different ideological views and metaphysical views.
00:30:45
Speaker
The thing which was interesting about Voices for Freedom is that they wanted their members to become election scrutinyers, so i.e. people at polling booths involved in the election because they were fairly sure they were going to be able to find vote stealing.
00:31:01
Speaker
going on during this election. So they were predicting that votes were going to be stolen, largely coming out of the right wing playbook once again in the United States. As far as I'm aware, they weren't very successful in getting involved in the elections, in part because the Electoral Commission
00:31:24
Speaker
does this in a very professional way and does quite a lot of background checking with respect to people who are going to be involved in counting votes. Because if you're going to be involved in counting votes, you actually need to at least have the appearance of being politically neutral during a campaign, because what you don't want is an electoral commission which is being accused of politicizing the running of an election.
00:31:50
Speaker
Yes, I forget what the example is. Each party is allowed one observer at each polling booth, aren't they? But the fact is there are hundreds, I think, of polling booths across all of the electorate. But basically in New Zealand on Election Day, which is always a Saturday, every primary school, church, public hall, just anywhere where there's a large space that people can get into becomes a polling booth.
00:32:19
Speaker
So, if you actually wanted to canvas all of them, you'd probably need more Scrutineers than at least New Zealand loyal has voters. So, it probably wasn't going to work out. So, that was some of the interesting ones. Now, there was one
00:32:39
Speaker
One thing going on with the major parties.
Dinosaurs: Political Speculations and Comedy
00:32:43
Speaker
Chris Luxon, leader of the National Party, our next Prime Minister. Prime Minister-elect. I mean, he's Prime Minister in all but name. Yeah. So there's a thing. I kind of missed this a little bit. I caught the tail end of it. But apparently there was a question as to whether or not Chris Luxon believes in dinosaurs.
00:33:02
Speaker
Now, this was one of those, it was a comedian who asked him, it was clearly a jokey thing, but then it was one of those things that people started talking about a little bit almost as though it wasn't a joke and was maybe a relevant thing that might colour our perception of Christ.
00:33:25
Speaker
Was it, as someone who I assume followed this slightly more than I did, meant to be a statement on the idea that he's possibly such a fundamentalist Christian, he doesn't believe in dinosaurs? Or was it a statement on the fact that he never gave a straight answer to most of the questions during this electorate campaign?
00:33:42
Speaker
So the rumor was going around that when Christopher Luxon was CEO of Air New Zealand, he nixed an advert that made a reference to dinosaurs in Aotearoa's distant past because he is a fundamentalist Christian who doesn't believe in evolution by natural selection. So that was the rumor. So the comedian question, Tim
00:34:06
Speaker
Tim, what's Tim's last name? I thought it was Guy Williams. Or did he follow up? Sorry. Yes, Guy Williams. Yeah, no, you know, maybe it was Guy Williams. Maybe I'm just thinking of a different Tim now. Maybe just think of Tim. But so Guy, so Guy Williams found out about this rumour. So ask Christopher Luxon at a press event directly. Do you believe in dinosaurs? And Christopher Luxon would not answer the question.
00:34:32
Speaker
which of course suddenly lent credence to the theory that maybe he doesn't believe in dinosaurs. Then, to make things possibly slightly worse in our taking the piss culture back home, Christopher Luxon went on to form a Twitter and said, yes, of course I believe in dinosaurs. I believe in the tax reliefosaurus, a species of dinosaur that hasn't been seen for quite some time. And people were pointing out that
00:34:58
Speaker
that's A that's not a dinosaur and B that once again isn't really asking the answering the question so at no point did Chris Luxon ever answer the question does he believe in dinosaurs when he was asked on breakfast TV he would say oh you're not going to bring up this dinosaur question thing and roll to his eyes so there's still an open question it seems does Chris Luxon believe in dinosaurs
00:35:24
Speaker
Now, this then led to certain right-wing commentators being very annoyed that people were making fun of potentially the next prime minister, as all this went on before the election, and taking the piss about these things.
00:35:39
Speaker
And this was comments from right-wing commentators who always accuse the left of not being able to understand a joke, such as when, say, leader of the Act Party, David Seymour, threatened to blow up a ministry building. Because obviously a joke. The left had taken it far too seriously. But as soon as people started making fun of Chris Luxon, apparently that was going too far.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yes, I don't know. On the internet at least, people always tend to go a bit overboard with their hyperbole and take any little flub by a minister on either side and try to turn it into a giant thing. Remember that time John Key, and obviously this is not a good... What was the business with the shirt? He talked about wearing a gay red shirt or a gay pink shirt or something, described a brightly coloured shirt as gay, which obviously... Yeah.
00:36:32
Speaker
Not great, but any time anyone mentioned a shirt thereafter for a little while, you'd get someone on the left on Twitter, go, oh, it's not a gay shirt. I'm wearing a shirt. It's not a gay shirt. John Key won't like me or something. People do jump on anything, but yes, both sides do it. So just deal. So that's the election, more or less, as you say, the special votes. Now,
00:37:02
Speaker
The special votes are the votes that people such as yourself cast not in their electorate. You can do a special vote just if you happen to be in a different part of your city that isn't your voting electorate. So anyone can cast a special vote if they want to, but it's easier to just vote in your electorate. But they will have to be counted up later, and historically, they swing left.
00:37:26
Speaker
So, last election, my electorate, Melony Keke, went national on the night by a very slim margin and then actually went to the Labour Party once all the special votes had been counted. Of course, this election, what had been a very slim Labour victory, turned into a gigantic national victory, but that's part of the course.
00:37:50
Speaker
I remember in the US election, they tried to run a thing knowing that the votes tend, the left votes tend to come in later. I remember Trump wanting to have some sort of a strategy where, you know, they're in the front at first, and they'd make a big deal about that. And then as the votes would swing left, they'd say, oh, look, they're stealing the election office. But I don't know.
00:38:10
Speaker
I think everybody knows the deal with the special votes here. So even when there is a bit of a left-click swing, I don't think anyone... David Seymour has been complaining about the special votes. So he has made the claim that the special votes only swing left because left-wing voters are too lazy to vote in their own electorates. So he's trying to make some kind of claim that we should be dismissive of special votes because left-wing voters are mostly lazy voters.
00:38:40
Speaker
So he's not saying we shouldn't count those votes, but is the kind of thing of saying, oh, you know, those votes aren't serious votes. If these people were serious voters, they would make sure they voted in their actual elections. Yes, I don't know. So it'll be a couple of weeks until we have the final definite, definite results. But I can't imagine there aren't enough special votes coming in, I think, to actually swing the results of the election. They just might.
00:39:08
Speaker
There just might be a seat or two going one way or another, which, due to the complications around minor parties and things, may end up with what is known as an overhang. We'll end up having a couple of extra seats in Parliament, maybe, but I think that's as severe as it's going to be.
00:39:30
Speaker
And that's our national national election. Do we want to talk about Australia? That seems even more pressing. I mean, it's it's worth noting.
Australia's Referendum Impact on NZ
00:39:41
Speaker
So Australia also held a referendum at the same time that we held our general election. This referendum was called The Voice.
00:39:48
Speaker
about whether Australia should have a voice to Parliament representation of the Aboriginal people or people of the Dreamtime in the Australian Parliament. And Australians voted majority, no, they voted for more racism rather than less racism within the Australian system.
00:40:08
Speaker
And people like David Seymour are celebrating this result. So the Leader of the Act Party is celebrating the result in Australia because he wants to have a referendum on our foundational constitutional document, the Treaty of Waitangi.
00:40:27
Speaker
because he would like to kind of get rid of what he takes to be the left-wing, wokest interpretation of the treaty and bring in something which is more about libertarian property rights as well. So the voice vote in Australia is kind of salient to what might happen in the next electoral turn because ACT have said that a bottom line for coalition
00:40:56
Speaker
negotiations with national is a referendum on the role of the treaty in New Zealand. Now, it should be said, we basically already have the sort of system that Australia just voted not to put in. We have Maori electorates, we have Maori wards for local politics and what have you. And yes, you always get you always get complaints about that from the from the act types.
00:41:24
Speaker
But yeah, this idea of a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi itself, I think some people have sort of said, well, it just couldn't even actually work, because even if you question it on a constitutional basis, there's decades and decades of legal precedent of how it's been treated. And also, like, I don't know if this is an oversimplicate, it would be like Brexit for New Zealand.
00:41:50
Speaker
That sort of a thing which of the people who wanted it got their way would probably screw up the country in a major way. And we don't think Chris Luxon is silly enough to countenance that from what I've... Yeah, he has made the claim he thinks it would be a divisive thing to do, so he wants to rule it out. I think a lot of this will depend on what New Zealand first attitude towards this is.
00:42:17
Speaker
Now, New Zealand first is in a weird situation in that its leader, Winston Peters, is Maori, and yet he's probably also charitably described as one of the more racially prejudiced politicians we have in Aotearoa, including quite severe anti-Maori prejudice on lots of issues.
00:42:43
Speaker
Yes, I don't know. That'll be fun. Now, there's one other thing here. I see you wanted to talk about the lobbyist pipeline. Now, I assume this is some sort of an infrastructural issue we have where we're pumping lobbyists into our country from overseas to make up some sort of a local surfeit of
00:43:04
Speaker
of lobbyists? Do we import them as some sort of slurry through a pipe and then form them into lobbyists in our country and send them on their way?
00:43:14
Speaker
I mean, I've always thought that's how lobbyists are formed, but actually it turns out many of them are former government ministers who, once they stop being ministers, just go on to become lobbyists with no stand-down period whatsoever. And Aotearoa is actually fairly unique in Western nations by not having a stand-down period between being an MP and being able to take up lobbying work when you're lobbying on behalf of private clients to the government.
00:43:44
Speaker
And this has become quite stark because two disgraced ministers from the previous Labour administration, Stuart Nash and Kerry Allen, have both indicated that they're about to become lobbyists. So immediately after the election, two former government ministers are now going to be lobbying the new government on behalf of corporations and private citizens.
00:44:11
Speaker
And the country as a whole needs to have a discussion about the minister or activist to lobbyist pipeline, especially since Kerry Allen, who was justice minister in the previous administration,
00:44:28
Speaker
was involved in looking into a bill, putting forward a stand down period between being in parliament and becoming a lobbyist, a bill that she did not advance during her time as
00:44:44
Speaker
as justice minister, which does seem ever so slightly like a conflict of interest in retrospect. It does a little bit, yes. So that's, yeah, possibly more of a developing issue. We might have to keep an eye on that, but definitely dodgy and not a little bit conspiratorial. So it's OK for us to be talking about it now. Well, precisely.
00:45:07
Speaker
So I think we've filled up in episodes with just talking about the election, which means we have a bumper crop of fun for our bonus episode that we're going to record for our patrons just shortly. So we've we've got to catch up on a bunch of stuff that's happened over the last couple of weeks. Tupac Shakur must have heard about him and his developments there.
00:45:28
Speaker
Some interesting stuff around Yevgeny Pregojin and his plane crash. Interesting, possibly an inverted commas there. Tom Delong's up to his usual malarkey. And I know your favourite. We've got a sports conspiracy. A local New Zealand sports conspiracy. I'm all about the sport. Games are too hard with best sides winning. Sports and nothing but. So we're going to talk about all that.
00:45:55
Speaker
in a little bit. But right now, we're going to stop talking about the election because I frankly would be quite happy to never hear about it again. But I expect we're gonna. Three more years, Josh. Three more years. Three more years. Yeah, most likely. Oh, well, with that delightful prospect echoing in my brain, all I can find the strength to do is say goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:46:51
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.