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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 on Friday mornings.
Well, that’s damn spooky. The same week that Stats NZ releases figures showing a record net loss of Kiwis overseas in a calendar year — many leaving for Australia — good old Tourism NZ launches its new advertising campaign aimed at the Aussies featuring the slogan, “Everyone Must Go!”
Coincidence? Conspiracy? Major cock-up? You be the judge.
Whatever it is, it is hard not to choke with laughter on the irony of a government attempting to revive our buggered economy by attracting more Australian tourists as it also attempts to slow the enormous brain drain to Australia resulting from our buggered economy.
Still, to give the marketing geniuses who came up with this utterly illogical slogan their due, it does pretty much sum up the temper of the times in this depressed and increasingly poverty-stricken little country of ours.
“Everyone Must Go!” is a pretty good way to describe, for example, the bloodbath at the top of Health NZ, with three of its most senior managers gone and its board long since sacked. Hundreds more Health NZ staff must also go this year to save money (apparently), despite our public health system being in crisis.
Since the 2023 election “Everyone Must Go!” has been pretty much the government’s approach to parts of the public service, with thousands made redundant, causing, as a result, “Everything Must Go!” signs to appear in the windows of retail and hospo businesses in Wellington.
“Everyone Must Go!” is more or less what’s been happening with emergency housing for the poor, with the government bragging it has slashed the number of households in motels from 3141 in December 2023, to just 591 in December 2024.
Where all these people went has been less of a concern for the Associate Housing Minister, the swaggering macho man Tama Potaka, with he and his officials evidently having no idea where some 20%, or about 510, of those households have gone. The streets, maybe?
“Everyone Must Go!” is also a great slogan for New Zealand business, with liquidations at a 10-year high, leading, in part, to the highest unemployment in years.
“Everyone Must Go!” is what’s happening to hundreds of jobs in small towns all around the country, as timber mills have closed over the past year, something the government has barely acknowledged let alone attempted to prevent.
“Everyone Must Go!” has been the government’s approach, too, to potholes, but apparently not to hospital waiting lists.
You might even say that “Everyone Must Go!” appears to be the growing attitude of Kiwi voters to this coalition, with three recent polls showing a Labour-led government would be the result of an election held right now.
Yes, “Everyone Must Go!” is an era-defining slogan for what passes for life in New Zealand in 2025. Which is why we should dump God Defend New Zealand immediately and replace it with a new national anthem (and possibly National Party anthem) called, Everyone Must Go!
Here is the new first verse, sung, to make things easier, to the tune of God Defend New Zealand …
Everyone must go, now!
The country’s poked, Nats take a bow,
Hear our voices, as we leave,
God’s deserted our free land,
Guard your livelihood if you can,
As the country goes down the pan,
See you in the departures lounge,
God delete New Zealand!
How to identify a real NZer, a useful guide from NZ First
1/ Does not originally come from Mexico.
2/ Does not refer to this country as “Aotearoa”.
3/ Is a xenophobe.
Let Them Eat Muck, Just Not Halal Muck
It’s official: David Seymour is not halal friendly. Mind you the Act Party leader, who once said sushi in a child’s lunch is “woke”, is arguably not hungry-child-friendly either, having cynically politicised the last Labour government’s school lunches programme for the sake of attracting votes from people who, one can’t help but conclude, despise hungry children.
Since Seymour was allowed by National to take charge of the school lunches programme, he has handed — without going through a proper government tender process — the programme’s contract to a multinational with a patchy reputation overseas, while at the same time cutting the per-meal cost of the lunches from a lowly $8.68 to a measly $3, a decision that produces food a pig might turn up its nose at, and, according to anecdotal reports, some school children certainly are.
All that has been followed by the regular failure by the contractor since the school year began to deliver the lunches on time for lunchtime in some schools, leading to instances of teachers having to buy food for hungry kids.
Apparently not satisfied with delivering cheap and cheerless food late, it has now emerged that the lunches supplied by the contractor to Muslim children are not even halal certified, but instead “halal friendly”, which is not the same thing at all.
Seymour, ever keen to be seen saving taxpayers’ money to voters, defended this latest blunder by claiming proper halal food would require separate and expensive new preparation facilities — a claim a senior Muslim leader says is “lazy” and wrong.
Of course a sceptic might start to wonder whether the ongoing problems with the school lunches programme are all just part of the plan for Seymour: if you deliver bland, stodgy (and non-halal) lunches with little variety, and you sometimes deliver them late, then an increasing number of children will stop eating the lunches, leading to waste and to the lunches becoming increasingly unpopular, thus indicating the programme is unpopular and wasteful, leading Seymour to cut back the programme down the track before eventually killing it off altogether because it has “failed” because it was unpopular and wasteful, thus securing a win for smaller government — and a triumph for Act Party ideology over hungry children.
Political quiz of the week
What virtual reality world is the fiercely ambitious, up-and-coming National minister Erica Stanford visiting?
A/ A world where the Prime Minister of New Zealand is less unpopular.
B/ A world where the Prime Minister of New Zealand is almost popular.
C/ A world where the Prime Minister of New Zealand is actually popular.
D/ A world where she is the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
