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Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly satirical column on politics that appears on listener.co.nz.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has admitted to “mistakenly” doing the numbers for a challenge to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s lacklustre leadership. While overseas earlier this month, she is believed to have “inadvertently” sent a text to every National MP except Luxon asking if they would support her if she “accidentally” organised a bloody coup d’état and “unintentionally” put the deeply unpopular PM to the sword before the end of the year.
“For the last six months he’s been about a useful as a one-legged man at a bum-kicking contest,” she is rumoured to have “unwittingly” written in the text. “The opposition is going to wring our necks like chickens at the next election if we don’t get rid of him.”
Willis’s inadvertent white-anting campaign is thought to have begun in Molesworth St last month when she ordered the chauffeur of her crown limousine to cut in front of Luxon’s crown limousine. She is also suspected to be the culprit of graffiti found in a parliamentary toilet saying that Luxon, formerly a Unilever vice president of deodorant for North America, was as useless as an “empty Lynx roll-on”.
In her latest accidental undermining of Luxon, Willis this week muscled in on the Prime Minister’s special podium of banalities, which he uses for his usual Tuesday morning, sitting-week press conference, forcing Luxon to utter his platitudes to journalists elsewhere.
“I regret that I came and took his lectern,” Willis said while accidentally continuing to stand at the lectern. “What I was intending to do, was I wanted to make myself available to journalists to talk about successfully begging the international credit rating agencies not to downgrade New Zealand’s rating. So I thought it was important I come down early and appear Prime Ministerial while talking up the tanked economy and also calling out critics as ‘merchants of doom’ for pointing out the economy is much worse than when we took office.”
She said that her stealing of Luxon’s special lectern of banalities was simply a case of wrong place, wrong time, like President Kennedy’s assassination. However, she went on to confirm speculation about a coup, saying that she had somehow inadvertently launched a leadership challenge against Luxon, who, she unwittingly reminded everyone, has the lowest support of any PM since Jim Bolger in the 1990s.
“I’m so embarrassed to be accidentally attempting to roll the Prime Minister,” Willis told media while accidentally still standing at the Prime Minister’s lectern. “Please don’t accidentally write about this.”
Meanwhile in Washington
Shane Jones seeks help for speaking in the third person
NZ First Minister For Oceans and Fisheries Shane Jones has entered rehab after admitting he has an addiction to speaking about himself in the third person. “I don’t want to catastrophise, but the Jones Boy has a big problem,” he admitted as he was admitted to the It’s Not All About Shane Jones Rehabilitation Unit And Seafood Restaurant.
“Shane Jones is always Shane Jones,” Shane Jones said. “But Shane Jones desperately needs to stop repeatedly referring to Shane Jones as Shane Jones when using Shane Jones’s outside voice.
“I have to accept that Shane Jones is not another person, but I can’t help talking about Shane Jones as if Shane Jones is another person, or perhaps even an omnipotent god who you people are not worthy to look upon.
“But Shane Jones knows that Shane Jones needs help. So Shane Jones is hoping doctors can help Shane Jones to become a normal functioning Shane Jones and begin referring to Shane Jones as ‘I’ or ‘me’ from now on.”
A specialist at the It’s Not All About Shane Jones Rehabilitation Unit And Seafood Restaurant said it was the worst case of addiction to speaking in the third person he had ever seen. “I don’t want to catastrophise, but we believe that if Shane Jones is not helped to recover with intensive illeism aversion therapy, he may become as insufferably third person as Donald Trump.”
Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard celebrates the dumping of freshwater rules for farmers like him
NZ to be renamed “Land of the Long Cost of Living Crisis”
As a tribute to the worst cost of living crisis in more than a generation, the New Zealand Geographic Board is set to change the county’s name to “Ao-tahae-roa”.
“We wanted to pay tribute to the government’s and Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s ongoing strategy to make the cost living crisis permanent for ordinary New Zealanders who don’t own multiple homes, didn’t go to private schools, and don’t earn hundreds of thousands a year,” a board spokesperson said.
“In the end we felt that a name that suggested New Zealand was no longer the land of the long white cloud, but was instead the land of the long cost of living crisis would be the most apt. So as of September 1, New Zealand’s official name will be Ao-tahae-roa. The literal translation is ‘long suffering land’.”
Political quiz of the week
What is Speaker Gerry Brownlee ruling?
A/ That blancmange is definitely a funnier word than custard.
B/ That Parliament’s most important standing order is for a steak pie for his lunch.
C/ That it is gutless and spineless not to admit gutless and spineless mean the same thing.
D/ That he makes ex-Labour speaker of the house Trevor Mallard look like a paragon of impartiality.
