What I saw on the old style television

Diary of the last 22 hours

6.55pm last night

Upstairs to watch the debate. Where exactly in Netflix do they keep the TV1 channel? The new guy doing the weather seems nice.

7.00pm last night

Swirling graphics, and we open on a scene that suggests TVNZ has drilled two miles into the earth below to create Darth Vader's cockpit. 

You could get out now and do something useful but no, you hang around because you feel you ought to, and who knows, it might be worth your time.

John Campbell makes his entrance from the wings in the manner of a 1970s variety show. There’s no roar of the crowd or any nice to see you nice, though, because there's a plague and therefore no audience, just him and the lady from the cover of Time and the lady who can’t believe a girl from a fish chip shop gets all this ridiculous attention honestly it's more pathetic than Greta, where is the respect for people who actually know who to write an invoice?

This is where we're going to spend the next 90 minutes, John Campbell warns us.

We begin in the customary 21st century fashion with what would once have been a speech, now reduced to a 30 second elevator pitch. There will be a bell.

It’s no game for amateurs, this meet-the-candidates MC carry-on. I’ve done a few. I will declare with no false humility that I am absolutely pants at getting people to show the slightest preparedness to respect the bell or the person ringing it i.e. me.

It can be fun, though. At a soapbox event in Epsom the Mana party unfurled their banners.  Candidate John Banks gestured at them and said to me indignantly, I'm not speaking next to those signs. One of them says I'm a corporate criminal and a child molester. I'm not a child molester! Then he thought for a moment and added - I'm not a corporate criminal either.

This isn’t looking like it will be all that much fun, but off we go with the elevator pitches.

Judith Collins is first and good god, what is that happening to her face? Is it a smile?

She is no stranger to the smile or the smirk but it is almost always deployed in service of a snark or a gotcha. This one appears to be saying: my name is Judith and I am your friend even though you are not at all the sort of person who matters. 

It has the look of hours of practice with Janet Wilson. But maybe it's a new emotion she's feeling, two miles beneath Victoria Street inside a yellow and purple spaceship with just Greta’s mate and John Campbell for company.

Maximum respect, though. She delivers her words right to the bell. Truly, she could work in radio, like Paula Bennett, after this if she fancied it. 

Now it’s the turn of Greta’s mate the Prime Minister and the first question that  crosses your mind is: is she wholly here for this? There's nothing wrong or miscued about it, it just feels like this is not to be one of these times when she moves it up into overdrive. She can. Her first appearance as leader showed that. But that person doesn’t seem to be here tonight. 

One possibility is: short on energy. Another is: this is deliberate. It feels much like the tone she's adopted these past two tumultuous years: inclusive, reassuring, keep it moving, keep it calm. 

Another possibility is that she’s taken a measure of the thing and figured, don’t put out your chin for someone who loves to take a whack. What would be the point really? Just keep gliding.

Off we go, for an hour or so, as each gets the chance - and maybe a chance and a half if you like to talk over the other person - to respond to questions from various concerned citizens, taped earlier above ground.

Oddly, we find ourselves for most of the night looking at the Prime Minister side on, and gazing past her into Judith Collins’ face of many expressions.

The hour just flies by, and what do we learn? Not much, if anything at all that we didn’t already, it feels.

Judith Collins has words to suggest the Climate Crisis matters. But when the Prime Minister raises it in a context where any sensible person jolly well knows you don’t need to pretend to be concerned about that nonsense, she flashes a look of unvarnished disgust.

Poor Janet Wilson! All those hours of work! Judith Collins remembering she’s supposed to be smiling is the best wrestling action on television tonight.

She has plenty of opinions about what the government has done wrong. How could the PM have made them stop building houses during level 4 lockdown? Er, because, the point of locking down hard was to get a clean restart? Maybe she hasn't had a chance to talk about it with Dr Shane.

She says You know what  and You know what John and You know why, and it's generally her way of announcing that what’s coming next is good old number eight wire common sense thinking. It will in fact be some truncated and conveniently distorted version of the reality. Complexity is for saps. She likes it plain and simple and if it’s misleading, well, you know what John, too bad.

Electricity prices will go up when NZ pursues a 100% renewable energy supply, she says, as she none-too-subtly presses the butcher’s thumb down on the scales of truth, and on we go with this stuff: about wages, about housing, about tax.

The PM says: I shouldn’t have a tax cut.

Well give it back then says Judith Collins with the triumphant smile of someone who imagines she has delivered some sort of slam dunk when it's nothing of the sort.

She’s not worried about the healthy homes, she says, she’s worried about landlords who can’t get tenants out. 

She talks about people who have found themselves unemployed in this pandemic and, with horrified anguish, adds: people who never thought they’d be on the dole heap!

Implicit in it all is the sense that there are people who count and people who don't and if you're poor that's probably some failing on your part.

There is no uranium on anyone’s breath, no zinger for the ages. But there’s a thudding own goal when John Campbell asks about a second property and she tells him, actually my trust owns it.

She is, in between forced smiles -  hello again Janet!  - scoffing and combative. 

She is divisive. 

We’re all in this together but some of us are more all in it than others. 

Jacinda, the ghost who is not quite there, does not raise  her voice. It’s not her way to diminish people, she prefers to allow everyone their dignity. She may look a bit of a dud tonight if your expectation is a bit of biff.  But it’s quite possible she's doing exactly what she needs to. 

Strangely though, she keeps talking about Double Judy. Gee I'm not sure about that, thanks all the same. One feels like plenty.  

4.47pm today

A day of National Party MPs tweeting lies, and a bit more covid in the community and horticulturists needing labour, and the harbour bridge getting a bit fixed, and where did the day go? Tune in tomorrow when this newsletter will try to write about all those things plus big thoughts about tourism.

In the meantime, here’s news: I plan to turn on the payment system for this little newsletter operation this coming Monday. It’ll be 7.99 a month, for a daily newsletter coming to you Monday through Friday and a column on Sunday mornings.

Free newsletters will still go out, on Mondays and Thursdays. I think. Really appreciate the feedback and support, keen to hear from you about this too.