Another debate and the prospect of cowless days

Diary of the last 28 hours

6.00pm last night

Making dinner, a chicken fideo, if you’re wondering. You give it a good bit of smoked paprika, brown it, skin down, toast some pasta, make a sofrito with anchovies, add water, kale, olives and bake it. It will be by far the best part of your day if your day comprises:

political debate

political debate

chicken fideo

The afternoon’s one was excruciating, made a complete trainwreck by the psychotic man-baby in the White House. Of course he would do that, noisily hectoring, interrupting, obstructing. It was his best option.

How could anyone vote for that? The most plausible answer I've heard is: people are not voting for him, they're voting for the wreckage. What he's doing appeals to people who love chaos, who want to stick it to the libs; to the existing order; to the elites; to the peckerheads responsible for the way things are and it doesn't matter to them at all how bad or wrong or contemptible he is, that's the appeal. He’s bringing turmoil and that's just the way they like it.

Here - have some chicken, have some pasta, it's a great rich deep sauce thanks to anchovies, mainly. When the rest of the day is complete shit, food is a comfort.

7.30pm

Still eating, so we get the laptop and fire up the TV3 and it’s mostly out of a sense of duty. The enthusiasm was for the chicken.

It’s taking place at Q Theatre where you can have a really great night out, except not this year, much.

The Q Theatre audience is masked and distanced and not looking to be having nearly as enthralling or joyous a time as people have had in this room watching say Krishnan's Dairy or Chicago.

Meantime here is the pop-pup leader of the opposition and here also is the woman presently at 5 to 1 odds to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She appears caffeinated, and engaged, and off we go with New Zealand's perpetual puppy dog Paddy Gower who is all seriousness for the moment to intone a grim hypothetical Christmas scene.

It’s Christmas Eve, and somewhere else it may be a wonderful life but here in Aotearoa Ashley Bloomfield is informing you there's a fresh outback of Covid-19. What to do?

The PM is clear; take the expert advice, act on it, leave no room for risk. Judith Collins is making the same sounds. But as the scenarios develop, difference becomes apparent.

She's prepared to set levels without knowing the extent of the spread, to show a bit more latitude for the sake of letting business happen. Her party likes to talk a staunch game about a fanciful omnipotent border agency and rules about getting on planes but it's a fantasy of control that the virus will just laugh at.

The PM who has spent the past six months dealing with this unavoidable reality knows it, is demonstrating how she knows it, and is making it clear she’s not prepared to bend the rules or pretend the five second rule will allow her to cut corners. 

It wouldn't be The Punchin’ Judy Show without some distorted facts. A country like Samoa, it closed its borders a month before New Zealand did, she asserts, So, so much for hard and early - they actually did.

Fact checkers are quick to say Wrong, that's way off! 

Of course it is. And of course she won’t be bothered.

As they work through the particulars it seems pretty obvious that one of these people has a deep understanding of what's required and what's possible and the other one is texting Dr Shane.

What also becomes clear as we press on is that one of them has an enthusiasm for the promise that can't be delivered and the easy hit.

Asked about large profitable businesses doing very well out of wage subsidy money that may have been legal but not necessarily ethical, both call it morally wrong,  but it's Collins who goes further when asked and says yes she'd go after them, although we’re not told how she might go about it.

There’s some comfortable armchair second-guessing going on here. Worse in fact, the PM points out, because the National party raised no objection at the time to the way it was designed.

The wage subsidy we can surely recall, was a huge firehose emptied fast to catch the flames before they spread. In the way of these things, not all the water landed where it was needed. But that surely doesn't make it a bad idea to take a firehose to a fire.

There was, the PM recalls, a degree of trust built into it, but the larger interest -  to hold everything together - demonstrably, emphatically, worked. Second-guessing it now is a cheap shot.

As we go on the cheap shots keep coming from the armchair: backpedaling on gun laws, playing on emotions about pharmac decisions, all easy to say if you’re willing to pretend complicating considerations do not exist that make it much less easy.

Always with the shortcut: she says her tax cut for a favoured number of earners will stimulate the economy. The PM calls it a tax sugar hit and of course she's right, that's all it is. 

On we go through the nation's problems until hello, we’re in my old home town! Feilding represent! Momentarily I am excited by the marketing ramifications for this little newsletter (and am also in text conversation with a mate who is saying can you believe this shit) to realise that the reason we are figuratively standing in Kimbolton Road, taking a look around and maybe getting a steak pie from the Rosebowl, is that this is all about the scourge of meth. And because I’m still watching on the laptop, this is when the stream now dies and I have to restart and watch 42 ads and by the time we’re back, Feilding is gone.

Have to hand it to Paddy, though, our lively, reassuringly awkward and jocular host, he knows how to give it all a cheerful office drinks mood.

Suddenly we’re talking about what the two leaders eat for dinner and saving the planet and what David Attenborough suggests we need to do, namely eat less meat, and because of the Muldoon vibe that always hangs in the air around Judith Collins I think: cowless days!

This is not what she's thinking, though. She's thinking that it’s communism to tell people what you can eat, and begins to riff on this until she is challenged by the PM asking yes but what would she do, what’s her plan, and now here comes the moment I absolutely bet people will remember and will be the one thing that sticks in their mind, she says:

What for, dear?

Twitter goes WTF and Joel Steedman has the best response of all:

The last time I heard that was when I asked ‘how much’ at the hospice shop

It's quite the TV3 carnival of entertainment. We learn what tree and what bird they would like to be reincarnated as, or something, and there are rapid-fire questions and somewhere in there, it's already a bit of a blur, there is Trump. They are both a bit careful what they say and that reminds me that once on Twitter we had an exchange about this - Judith Collins and I - at the time of that fateful election. So I go into my Twitter messages to find it, and hello what's this: I have been blocked by Judith Collins!

I’ll be blowed, whatever can I have done to upset the pop-up leader of the opposition?

There goes a warm cordial relationship. We were never close, you understand, not like Slater. But we’ve socialised. Once when we were both columnists at a Sunday newspaper they put on a nice lunch for us and she shared a story.

She said the person in life that had scared her more than anyone else was Eb Leary (You know, the lawyer tied up with Mr Asia).

So anyway: Eb Leary, she said. 

Pause. And I've met Putin.

That is a top story, so I'm sorry that we appear to have fallen out and I won’t  get to hear more. Won't be voting for her though.

The PM is interviewed afterwards and at last we reach the real point.

When she’s out on the trail, she says, the one thing all the voters want to talk about, what matters most is Covid, that's it. Ask the other questions if you like, but it's not really what people have on their minds.

9.43am

On Twitter last night, Anusha Bradley asked:

Do these debates actually sway people's votes?

I said:

Key flooring Goff with show me the money, I could see that having some effect. But I can't see this doing much

This morning, James Bews-Hair adds:

And Lange v Muldoon. But, agree, that stuff from last night won’t

I say:

Yes, think that one really captured the sense that he was out of time and being eclipsed.

James says

Sure did. Those were the days, 14 and imprisoned in Masterton Rolling on the floor laughing

We go on to talk about Kennedy and Nixon but the point here is clear enough, eh. Generally, the vibe of the election just gets amplified. 

The vibe of this one seems to be: people are worried about the pandemic far more than anything else and they trust the leader who has been protecting them. I don't see that changing much.