Editorial: Apathy fits trivial tone of election

National mum or Labour dad?

Somewhat sadly, the colours of rugby's coupe du monde have been replaced by the cheese of roadside election hoardings.

Yes, we've encountered the true silly season, a time when those in our community who define themselves by their political leanings become even more boorish to their friends.

I have two such friends. One, a Labour voter, tells me socialism is the only political ideology with a skerrick of morality. The other, a blue-blood, reckons any worker who strikes should be sacked on the spot - and besides, he says, to be a leftie you have to hate a lot.

They're both nuts.

Pedalling my way to work for a late shift a week ago, my senses were hammered with the slogans: "Building a brighter future", "No asset sales".

Arriving in the newsroom three minutes later, I happened upon grotesque photographs of a bloodied Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

His assassins, like jubilant big-game hunters, proudly propped up their bullet-ridden quarry for the camera. His last breath - "Don't kill me, my sons" - was apparently his epitaph.

It was a perfect reversal of roles; the captors adopting monstrous means to end the tyranny of a monster. Gaddafi, for all his inhumanity, made that most human of pleas to spare his life.

Suddenly the soapbox rhetoric of "brighter futures" and "no asset sales" had all the punch of a spent toilet roll. Perspective is a wonderful thing. In the space of five minutes, that short skip to the local hall to tick a few boxes on November 26 became a marathon.

I'm only echoing the late poet James K Baxter, who once said New Zealanders voted with their pay packets in mind. In less fortunate nations, the wrong vote can often mean the difference between life and death.

So while I'll confess I've had more dealings with Colonel Sanders than Gaddafi in my 39 years (strangely enough, that's the length of the latter's reign), it's too simplistic to think voter apathy amounts to political disengagement.

Rather, politicians should be thinking about how to capture a constituency more attune to global issues than the trappings of domestic trivia.

And, with no disrespect to the Bay's candidates, I remain convinced that our general election is the most spiritually vacuous, inarticulate, culturally bereft squabble on our triennial calendar.

My two friends symbolise a country which, after a nation-unifying rugby tournament, are now again at arms.

According to Baxter's poem, Ballad of Calvary Street, it's been that way since 1960, when our two main political parties, "two birds that peck in one fouled nest", slowly erode dignified debate in a country in which "two old souls go slowly mad, National Mum and Labour Dad".