The winner of the third NZ election leaders’ debate? Death

Are we there yet? Is it election day? Is it possible to bring the date forward a little bit from 17 October? Not by too much – things have to be put in place, pens secured to pieces of string and the like. How’s tomorrow?

Election fatigue hit hard during Tuesday night’s leaders’ debate. It was a long programme. It could have been worse: it could still be going. Mind you, it feels like it still is and always will be; that the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, and the opposition leader, Judith Collins, will go at it unhappily ever after in front of a live audience in a dark room in Christchurch.

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The best thing about it were the subtitles. Typed at reckless speed. Ardern was transcribed as saying: “Auckland people could travel and dead rubber”. What? Collins was transcribed as saying: “There is rattan happening.” Huh? Best of all, which I tried not to take personally, was the subtitle that claimed Collins said: “Steve is going to rot”. She actually said “Teeth”, but same difference.

It was the third debate of the election campaign and both leaders brought their B-game. Nothing new in that from Ardern. She’s been generally kind of like actually completely hopeless in every debate; a bit of a total howling bore, unwilling or unable to say a single memorable thing. There was one change in her performance on Tuesday, though: she moved. She went full-on jazz hands, and came very close to busting out some tasty air guitar.

While the prime minister played instrumentals, Collins took on vocals. She gave a below-par performance but still managed to say things that sounded like someone who has something to say. Two newspaper editors moderated the debate, and demonstrated that the last people you want moderating a debate are two newspaper editors. Neither of them pushed questions or demanded answers. Collins did both, jumping down Ardern’s throat when the prime minister gave her routine answer to whether she will vote in favour of legalising cannabis at the referendum by giving no answer at all. “You voted for it, didn’t you?” interrupted Collins. “Answer! Answer! How did you vote? Answer the question! Did you vote for it? Yes or no? You did vote for it, didn’t you?”

The leader of the National party comfortably won the first debate. She probably won the second. Death won the third debate – the promise of eternal sleep was so very strong as the broadcast dragged on – but Collins was responsible for the few signs of life. She cackled, she accused, she said the magic words: “Dr Shane Reti.” Not a debate goes by without Collins chanting the name of National’s health spokesman, who is surely capable of whipping up a vaccine for Covid and will personally provide town water supplies with fluoride.

The programme was preceded by a vox pop of voters. A Waikato woman, asked who she would prefer for prime minister, said: “I must say Judith Collins has made a jolly good show of it.” Beautifully put. Collins has nothing to lose except the political careers of quite a few National MPs who the opinion polls suggest will be down the road on 17 October, but she has conducted a robust, free-wheeling campaign, sometimes made sense, sometimes raved for the hell of it, and impressed as one of the few people in public life who has no interest in regarding Ardern as any kind of sacred being. “Where’d that come from?” she taunted the prime minister on Tuesday, apropos of some unmemorable remark by Ardern. “Under a rock in your garden?” Ardern looked across at her, confused, as though she were picturing the rocks in her garden and what lay beneath.

By the time she moved on, Collins had moved on further. Asked what kind of cars they drove, Ardern said she had a Hyunda EV, Collins said she had a BMW. There was a stir from the studio audience; if the siren song of the debate was death, Collins’s reply was a reminder of the one truly good Oasis song, Supersonic, in which Liam Gallagher sings: “Can I ride with you in your BMW?” Something many hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders would probably like to ask Collins.

“You make me laugh / Give me your autograph,” Gallagher also sings. It’s been strange to watch Ardern, a genuine celebrity on the world stage, outshone at each debate by the funnier and more compelling Collins, an essentially shallow, self-serving politician and a complete nobody beyond New Zealand’s shores. She’s made a jolly good show of it. All roads lead to October 17. It can’t come fast enough for a fatigued nation, and Jacinda Ardern.