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PThe arents will be too familiar with this scenario. It is family vacation time. The car is full of everything but the kitchen sink. Each child has their own screen and headphones. You put the car in gear and you go. You can finally breathe a sigh of relief; The holidays have started! Then a small voice from behind says, “I have to go to the bathroom.” You take a detour to the nearest gas station, you sit down and wait for the trip to restart.
That, folks, is the 2020 New Zealand general election campaign.
Shifting up a gear this week after a month-long convenience stop, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern posted an Instagram photo from her campaign van with two peanut butter toasts and a cup of coffee, with the words ” Breakfast courtesy of mom =) It takes a village! “
This is what it all comes down to. These are not the heady campaign images of three months ago, during a time of coups, sudden resignations, and opinion poll plunges. In July, the 2020 election campaign was already a campaign like no other.
But that was in the days when New Zealand had lulled into a false sense of security about how protected we were from Covid-19. During the 102 days that we had eliminated community broadcasting, the election campaign looked a lot like the old “normality.”
The moment Covid-19 returned, everything changed. After intense lobbying by opposition parties claiming they could not campaign under such difficult circumstances, Ardern announced on August 17 his decision to delay the general election by four weeks, until October 17. That ad effectively paused the election campaign.
There was a flash of drama a fortnight ago when Green Party co-leader James Shaw approved Covid aid funding for the Green private school for wealthy kids. The usual calls for his resignation were heard from opposition party leaders waking up in the back seat from their self-induced slumber.
Then on September 2, when Auckland had dropped to alert level 2.5, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters boarded his “Back Your Future” bus to relaunch his campaign in Upper Hutt and then South Island. , both areas that, by the way, you could still have. visited in level 2 conditions.
The South Island is a much safer place, as it has not seen community broadcasting for over four months. But it’s still an uncomfortable sight to see Peters ignore social distancing and shake hands with strangers on the streets. Isn’t the deputy prime minister supposed to be a role model?
Once upon a time, these images could have generated whistleblowers. Not even Peters’ shaky interview on Q + A last Sunday, in which he was unable to answer most questions and mistakenly and repeatedly called interviewer Jack Tame “James,” garnered much comment from the public. It seems that no one can bother anymore with these elections or who will become the next government.
None of this is helped by the lack of natural light between the major parties’ policy offerings. Both are campaigning on jobs and infrastructure, and every day party leaders visit another factory to show their party’s support for small businesses. The only way to distinguish one day from the next is by changing the colors of the high-visibility vests that Ardern and Judith Collins wear on their factory visits.
Finally, Labor finance spokesman Grant Robertson announced a debt reduction plan that would require the top 2% of wages and salaries to “collaborate” with a higher tax rate of 39 cents on earned income. of more than $ 180,000. In previous elections, fiscal policy has been one of the areas of greatest division between left and right. But at a time when the amounts borrowed by the government to support the economy during the pandemic are so astronomical, the debt to be paid for generations is so unfathomable, regardless of which party leads the next government, few have cared about this policy. . .
The only numbers that seem to really matter to New Zealanders these days are the ones that tell us how many cases there are in the community, the ones that make the difference between life and death. The numbers may be small, but the repercussions remain huge for hospitality companies, entertainers and entertainers, athletes and hobbyists. It is these things that make up our culture, our spirit, our entertainment and fun. Without access to these, we feel trapped, unable to go anywhere. There’s even a palpable reluctance to plan for family vacations, in case levels change and our plans have to be canceled, again.
Thank God for the referenda. If it weren’t for the importance of each vote in determining the consequences of end-of-life referenda and cannabis legislation, it wouldn’t make much sense for someone to go to the polls in 2020.
Claire Robinson is a professor of communication design at Massey University.
