Nickie Muir: Sun King god of the machine

Prime Minister John Key. Photo / John Stone

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Tip your minister overboard and listen to her ... oh. Sorry. That was Winston's version of the National Party TV campaign ad.

I love the National Party ad. So smooth - so sleek, such a slightly Aryan-looking machine. I love the wide shot of the big, unpolluted by any intensive dairying at all kind of a river. The helicopters must have cost a fortune.

By comparison, the Green Party's ad looks like it has been made by students in the back room of the local intermediate. Bless. But then I guess they don't really have the kinds of friends that the National Party have or their cheques. Marketing wise, it's like setting Starbucks up against your local coffee cart.

The hand-written cardboard sign in the back window is never going to cut it compared with big advertising, no matter how superior the coffee is. Joyce has spent his lifetime in the media and that cross-over genre, politics, and he knows what he's doing. I love the voice. So authoritative, so damn sure. It's nice to be sure. The use of statistics is good too. Growth is good. Apparently. Putting us ahead of Spain is a kicker. The only thing that's growing in Spain are olives and the youth unemployment rate.

It doesn't measure other stuff either like; adult literacy, kids not in education or employment and the ethereal indicators of success or failure like youth suicide. But that's not the point. The point is to row. Hard. Together. Like a team or rather; a machine. And the machine has never been more oiled.

Even Judith's resignation, accepting the advice of "my Prime Minister" quietly rolling over-board into the wake. "Yes, my lord." Difficult to believe that no one in the Government seems to disagree with Key, but apparently they don't. Because this is not about policy and it is most definitely about power and whatever it takes to maintain it. This is the 21st century version of an Elizabethan court.

The National Party ad is the perfect metaphor for so much that's wrong with politics right now. Do I want a machine where the only person who can see where we're headed is the guy yelling in the loudhailer? Every rower is turned not to the policy, or their electorate, but facing the Sun King Key. A vote for National in the North is a vote for the central machine.

What we need is someone to navigate a direction that's good for the region.

What if the roar in the ad is not the crowds applauding the rowers from the river-bank? Isn't considered negotiation preferable if that distant roar turns out to be the Huka falls of youth unemployment, inequality and climate change? Or does it make us feel better that we look tight as we row seamlessly off the edge?

I prefer the metaphor of the MMP waka. You don't need everyone in it wearing the same colour and it might be messy, but at least in a waka we'd all be looking where we're going.