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Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly, mostly satirical column on politics that appears on listener.co.nz.
The National Party will not seek votes from women at the next election, its leader Christopher Luxon says. The party has decided that it does not need women’s support to retain the treasury benches next year because they are “not a significant voting bloc” and can be safely ignored.
“National hasn’t been very popular with women generally in recent years, anyway,” Luxon says. “So I am now laser-focused on returning the favour. We think that working women in particular should be treated as second-class citizens because, actually, a woman’s place is in the home, not earning or voting.”
Most political commentators believe the Equal Pay Amendment Act, passed this week under urgency without a scintilla of warning or public consultation and just 15 days before Budget 2025, was mainly focused on saving Finance Minister Nicola Willis from a giant fiscal hole and a colossal red face. However, it is understood the act was also seen by National as a first shot in its “War on Whinging Women”. The party privately hopes it will encourage “ungrateful” women not to vote National in 2026.
Its plan to ignore women voters at the next election comes as little surprise to local women’s advocacy groups. National had previously signalled its attitude to what, it is understood, its male MPs call “the sheilas” by having less than a third of its caucus made up of women in a country, and on a planet, where just over half the population is female.
Authored by Act MP and Minister for Backstabbing Women Brooke van Velden, the act is intended to make it much more difficult for women who come neither from wealth nor a private school and university education to achieve pay equity in the future, but will instead see them rely on men or become skivvies and prostitutes -- just like in the good old days.
Nats planning to bring back hanging
The National-led coalition wants to rehabilitate the country’s villains by scrapping prison sentences in favour of hangings. Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell says the government believes hanging could be used to help the county’s most serious offenders and reduce reoffending rates. “A short trip to the gallows would mean serious offenders would be much more likely to successfully re-enter society on completion of their sentence,” Mitchell says.
The proposed new policy, understood to be tentatively titled “Hang ‘Em High Rehab”, would lead to fewer victims of crime overall even if it did require many more violent deaths each year.
“When offenders receive prison sentences they are released back into the community without proper rehabilitation and it puts the public at risk,” says Mitchell. “I have asked Corrections to look into how prison sentences of all lengths relate to reoffending with a view to gaining a better understanding of whether hanging is the best option. We’ve been coddling crims with nice warm cells and woke handholding for way too long.
“National isn’t afraid of taking the tough decisions to ensure serious crime leads to serious consequences, which is why we intend investing in programmes that break the cycle of reoffending. We want to see offenders turn their lives around and become meaningful, contributing members of society, and hanging them is a great, cost-effective way to do it, even if you have to hang them twice.”
Mitchell said that history showed that criminals who went to the gallows were always non-violent on completion of their sentence. “Minnie Dean never killed another baby after she was hanged,” Mitchell said. “She had been completely rehabilitated.”
Unicorns to replace social media for under-16s
National will give kids unicorns as part of its proposed ban on social media for under-16s. Tukituki MP Catherine Wedd, who put forward a member’s bill on Tuesday to ban under-16s from accessing TikTok and other social platforms, said every child would be given a unicorn to play with instead.
“It doesn’t matter that the unicorns are not real,” Wedd says. “The proposed ban is a fiction, too. But we are hoping that while their kids play with imaginary, no-cost unicorns, my unworkable copycat ban which will never be law will fool enough stupid-but-worried parents to vote National back into office next year.”
Computer says “Yeah, Nah” to Education Minister
Education Minister Erica Stanford is to complete a “Computers for Dummies” course at the Wellington Institute of Technology next month after this week admitting spending 18 months struggling to work a printer.
It was revealed Stanford had been forwarding potentially sensitive emails from her government email account to her unsecured Gmail account because she was unable to print documents out without using what some have dubbed “the old-age pensioners’ workaround”.
“Computers for Dummies is a remedial programme for slow learners,” a course tutor said. “It’s been very successful with helping the elderly and others who struggle to use new technology, so we believe Erica should be able to cope.”
During the six-week night course, Stanford will be taught about basic internet security, how to turn a printer on and off and how to contact the IT department if her printer is not working properly.
Political quiz of the week
What tasty fare will Act leader David Seymour be having for his dinner?
A/ Clownfish.
B/ Toadfish.
C/ Slippery Dick.
D/ Chicken legs.
