John MacDonald: Vanilla politics + lame sporting analogies = zzz

Last night’s leaders’ debate on TV was a brilliant advertisement for the minor parties.

In fact, I reckon Labour and National could make some money out of it because, as far as I’m concerned, I thought it provided 90 minutes of reasons not to go with the traditional red and blue parties.

So what I reckon Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon should be doing today, is writing out some invoices and sending them to all the minor parties, because that kind of primetime TV advertising doesn’t come cheap.

The common consensus among the commentators seems to be that Christopher Luxon’s performance was stronger than Labour leader Chris Hipkins’. It happens all the time - people chiming in with their thoughts on who “won”.

But I actually think neither of them won. It was the minor parties who won.

And as for the analysis after the debate. Man alive, if you stuck around for that, what about all the ridiculous sporting analogies?

We had former National and New Zealand First MP Tau Henare, former Labour leader David Cunliffe and TVNZ’s deputy political editor Maiki Sherman. And all the two guys could bang on about was the All Blacks and the Warriors and the World Cup.

At one point, poor-old Maiki obviously felt she had no option but to go down the sporting analogy route. She said as much.

Because it seemed every time Tau Henare and David Cunliffe opened their mouths, they’d go on about it being “a bit like the Warriors”, or “Christopher Luxon was like France and Chris Hipkins was like the All Blacks…and, like the All Blacks, Hipkins needs to come back and show he’s got more in the tank.”

I don’t know about you. But when I sat there watching that, I thought to myself ‘if this is high quality political analysis, then God help us’.

So the sporting analogies have to go from the next debate. So too do some of the meaningless questions. I don’t care what book Christopher Luxon is reading at the moment. I don’t care how many times they’ve been into churches this year.

What I did want to know last night, though, is why Chris Hipkins - just hours before the debate - made that haphazard announcement that Labour was ditching its goal of reducing the prison population by 30 percent.

It happened yesterday afternoon and had some people speculating that it was a pre-emptive move ahead of the debate. A pre-emptive move that Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis didn’t seem to even know about until after Chris Hipkins had announced it.

That’s the stuff I wanted to hear about. But we didn’t, of course, because these debates are carefully stage-managed and the topics up for discussion would have been settled-on weeks ago.

Which meant all it did, was reinforce the view some people have that our two main political parties are increasingly becoming one and the same.

Christopher Luxon said it himself - several times. It was something along the lines of “we both want the same things, but we’ve got different ideas on how to achieve them.”

The question there then is that, when it comes to voting, do we vote for outcomes or do we vote for methods of achieving those outcomes?

Hands down, we vote for outcomes. So if you’ve got the leaders of the two big political parties saying they want the same outcomes - then bring-in the minor parties. Because last night’s debate showed us that the minor parties really are the only alternatives to what we have now.

Political commentator Matthew Hooton wrote a piece in the NZ Herald recently saying that voter confidence in what he calls Labour and National’s “increasingly lazy, cynical and arrogant” duopoly in New Zealand politics has collapsed.

He says never before have Labour and National been rejected by so many voters at the same time.

And I reckon, based on what we saw in last night’s TV debate, support for the purple vote is about to get even lower. And I’m in no doubt that, when it comes to picking a winner from last night, it was the minor parties. It wasn’t Luxon and it wasn’t Hipkins.

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