What: Winston Peters’ State of the Nation Revue
Where: Palmerston North Convention Centre, last Sunday
Rating out of 5: *****
Is he the saviour of New Zealand or the saviour of New Zealand comedy?
The country’s most famous insult comic Winston Peters proved he’s definitely still both in a bravura performance at a fit-to-burst Palmerston North Convention Centre last Sunday.
In a freewheeling hour of stand-up, the legendary funnyman wowed an audience of his oldest and most loyal fans with some of his classic routines — PC gone mad, immigration gone mad, the media gone mad — while showing he was unafraid to court controversy with new Nazi and zombie-based material.
Arriving on stage to anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping — it really had the pensioners toe-tapping — Winston wasted no time in delivering a comedy riot with his hilarious attack on the “imploding” Green party.
Raising a laugh about the suspension of “the latest one with the moko on her chin” — Green MP Darleen Tana — he brought the house down with his bang-on observation that the wet, social justice warriors in the Greens “couldn’t run a school tuck shop”. Classic!
Calling out last year’s massive jump in new immigrants to this great country, he skewered the libtards, saying that “anyone who asks questions about an unplanned immigration policy is instantly called something they can’t even spell — he’s called xenophobic. No, we’re not xenophobic, we’re just not zombies.” Classic!
Referencing his years as a lawyer before going into political comedy, he drew chuckles by observing that his “problem way back then was I thought I could change the world if I went into politics — it’s just taking a bit longer”. Classic!
Working his crowd like the pro he is, he got stuck into Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori big time, saying they were busy arguing over who could be most culturally woke and go the furthest to the left.
“You hear them on the interviews, you watch them on TV, aways over-gesturing like an Italian waiter. They’ve got a vowel sandwich for every word, the more vowels the better. Makes them sound good. And they’re getting away with all this bull dust. Until now.” Classic!
One the biggest laughs of his new show came from his brilliant observation of Te Pāti Māori MPs’ head dresses at this year’s opening of parliament. “They had half the plumage from the native birds on their heads. Truly. I thought they were protected species, but no, half of them on their head. And they’re anti-mining but they had half the greenstone around their chest.” Classic!
Winston’s rapier wit is, of course, only for those who really understand what’s going on in this great country. To liberal snowflakes, his latest show would probably draw the same response George W Bush had to Donald J Trump’s inauguration speech back in 2017: “That was some weird shit.”
However for comedy connoisseurs, Winston’s act is still deep-fried gold — and he’s taking his show on the road around this great nation for the next three years. For your funny bone’s sake, make sure you see him soon.
Ticktock, ticktock, boom
For the first time in 2024, the brainy political science boffins here at Another Kind Of Politics have changed the time on the Coalition Government Doomsday Clock, moving the minute hand to five minutes to midnight.
The consensus among our experts is that increasing tension between the government’s three parties has put the coalition under the most strain it has experienced since the coalition agreements were signed four months ago.
In the latest disturbance in the mysterious force that holds the coalition together, the Prime Minister, the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christoper “Luxe” Luxon, confirmed he had spoken to Winston Peters after the Deputy Prime Minister said during a state of the nation speech on Sunday that the last government’s co-governance plans were “race-based theory” and compared it to Nazi Germany.
Peters also publicly confirmed speculation there’s a fiscal hole you could drive a bus through — some $5.6 billion — between what National promised voters before the election and what it can now afford, suggesting sandstone rather than granite was used in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ “rock-solid” costings.
The Deputy Prime Minister also appeared to give the political equivalent of “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyaaah” by saying he had predicted last year this would happen.
The weekend’s Peters incident follows an earlier disturbance in the mysterious force that holds the coalition together when Act leader David Seymour, speaking after Waitangi Day, appeared to question whether Luxon’s word could be trusted. In a television interview, Seymour said Luxon had been “spooked” by Act’s Treaty Principles Bill, and that he didn’t believe Luxon would oppose the bill if the public supported it.
Our experts were unconvinced by Luxon’s attempts to downplay these not very subtle attacks on him and his party.
In a statement issued to mark the moving of the Coalition Government Doomsday Clock, our experts said they were sounding an alarm for the whole of the country, and that to avert the catastrophic implosion of the mysterious force that holds the coalition together, the party leaders should be made to sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya until inter-party relations improve.
