The first week of the official election campaign has produced a moment of overweening ambition from National and the spectacle of the ACT Party staring fixedly at the rear vision mirror.
It has also seen variations on a theme of “I like EVs” and “I like EVs too” and “Yes but I liked them first”.
National's moment of ambition came when its campaign manager Chris Bishop warned that this election campaign could have the worst level of personal attacks in history.
Bishop has a problem here because history shows the competition for personal attacks is intense. Not only could David Lange smell the uranium on Jerry Falwell's breath, but he declared “the National Party couldn't run a bath”.
He also said that his father, who was a doctor, delivered Lange's fellow caucus member Michael Bassett and “it became plain later that he must have dropped him.”
And Winston Peters couldn't be in the debating chamber because “he was detained by a full length mirror.”
Rob Muldoon described his Labour opponent Bill Rowling as a “shiver looking for a spine to run up” while Muldoon “could go down the Mt Eden sewer and come up cleaner than when he went in”, according to Mike Moore.
And that rich vein of abuse is evident even without trawling through the 170 years of political history since Fox and Stafford, who were both notoriously combative. So Bishop can perhaps be admired for his gutsy ambition, but not for his sense of realism, in suggesting that this election might break new ground.
As for the ACT Party's dabble in retrospective thinking, this began with its appropriation of Nelson Mandela, claiming he would have supported the ACT Party. This view was later shot down by Mandela's grandson.
The party leader, David Seymour, then went on to suggest that if the Green Party's love of state control of the economy was correct, then the Soviets would have won the Cold War.
Seymour finally ended up discussing Kate Sheppard and her likely attitude to ACT, and he was forced to concede defeat.
“I absolutely agree (with her views on human rights) but because of her attitudes to booze prohibition, she would probably have voted Green.
“We are probably safe from her grandchildren, but you never know.”
In other developments this week. Labour pledged a 300-person increase in the police force, saying this would bring the ratio of police to one per every 470 New Zealanders.
The party also unveiled its plans to improve economic growth, though it mainly cited objectives rather than mechanisms, such as growing exports and having high paying jobs. Then, there was free dental care to people under 30.
National got down to details with its tourism plan, even specifying a new Great Walk and E bike charging stations on cycleways.
It also pledged to lift the age for working holiday makers, raising the prospect that English lovelies staffing our cafes while on a gap year will be joined by 30-somethings who haven't settled down yet.
National also pledged 10,000 EV chargers, only to be shot down by Labour and the Greens as a reluctant convert to the EV cause, and trying to help and to hinder EVs at the same time.
The Greens meanwhile pledged free dental care for all and reiterated their pledge to fund it with a “fair tax system.” The Greens also promised to end the social housing waitlist in five years.
New Zealand First inched over the 5% threshold according to one poll, despite an appeal to a relatively small demographic: women who feel threatened by trans people in bathrooms when they are not lumbered with unisex toilets already. But populist measures like freezing MP's salaries and declaring gangs to be terrorist entities might have helped.
New Zealand First is also revealing a hard-nosed attitude to economic development which is diametrically opposed to the Greens. And it has declared war on woke.
There have been other, lesser, events, such as a banana being thown at the National leader Christopher Luxon.
It missed, but if it had hit, it might have given new meaning to the term, “slipping on a banana skin”, given the Moeraki boulder-like smoothness of Luxon's bald pate.
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