Why so serious?

As a counterweight to this sometimes vitriolic election, we revisit the 1990s local darling the McGillicuddy Serious Party, who among other things campaigned for “the great leap backwards”. Only to find we were not the first to come recently knocking…

From 1984 to 1999 (officially) – a decent run for any political party  – the McGillicudy Serious Party took the business of light relief at least semi-seriously. The original founders met at the University of Waikato in the late 1970s, during Muldoon’s Prime Ministership, where they founded Clan McGillicudy - by the time the group entered politics, when party leader and Laird Graeme Cairns stood for Hamilton’s mayoralty in 1983, the “party elders” had spent a number of years stewing in their own political and philosophical ferment - and what emerged was an increasingly slick satire machine. In their first general election, the following year, they won a mere 174 votes. But by 1996, that had risen to more than 12,000 (and many wondered if the introduction of MMP would represent a break for the party).

The closest McGillicudy got to parliament (and closest here is a relative term) was courtesy of the man that would later be dubbed as “the king maker”, Winston Peters. In 1993, as his relationship with his National broke down, his resignation from the party forced a byelection in his Tauranga electorate, where he ran as an independent. Importantly, this was boycotted by the majority of legitimate political candidates, and in a vacuum created by lack of serious opponents, McGillicudy offered a non-serious one (as did a number of other colourful independents; you can read the full list here), with the tagline "If you want to waste your vote, vote for us". 

Their candidate Greg Pittams gained national exposure, both for the party and for himself - campaigning in his “emperors new kilt" (a shirt and sporran only). He came second - like, a really a distant second - as Peters got more than 90% of the vote. But that year the party also qualified for an allocated broadcasting budget (parties at that time were not allowed to buy airtime), because they finally meet all of the criteria for it: they were an established party, with policy, members, processes and infrastructure. As a new party NZ First didn’t, and missed out, much to the chagrin of Peters’ supporters.

That money, among other things, paid for the absurd, and slightly creepy McGillicudy stop motion ad of the 1996 election (made, incidentally by celebrated artist Lisa Reihana CNZM - who represented Aotearoa at the 2017 Venice Biennale). If you’re a child of the 90s, you may remember it - the internet mythology around it was that it was deliberately played during children’s television programmes, to align with the broader parody policy, limiting voting to minors only.

Which has some truth to it, says Graeme Cairns, on the phone from his home in Te Pahu and with a grandfather clock chiming in the background. “You’re possibly aware of how phenomenally expensive running a TV ad is,” he says. “And I did put at least one broadcast on at children’s hours. It was much much cheaper. When people asked me why, I said, ‘That’s so that the next generation will be wanting to vote McGillicuddy!’.”

It may have worked. I know I’m not the only one to go on to tease my parents about sending a tick McGillicuddy’s way once I reached voting age.

***

The McGillicudy Serious Party was a classic example of the satirical genre - punching up at the establishment, with liberal, indirect use of allegory and allusion. In 1993, when the school leaving age went from 15 to 16, the party made fun of how unambitious it was by campaigning for it to be raised to 65. In 1992 when Jim Bolger’s National campaigned for a “decent society”, they campaigned for an indecent one. And when I called Cairns for his take on where the light relief, let alone intelligent satire, has gone this election, he tells me I’m not the only one to ask. None other than Seven Sharp has pipped my story by about 48 hours, and dozens of other, normal people have asked him if – nay, when – will McGillicudy come back?

Does he get sick of people asking?

“No, not at all! I agree with the principle of it. And it’s a vote of confidence in the things that we did. I wish there was an equivalent party to ours around too,” he says.

For a former, actually quite experienced politician, he has not been keeping up with “the minutiae” of this election. He calls it all desperate, vile, viltrolic. The amount of incredibly bad attention Jacinda Ardern attracted, he says, is unprecedented in New Zealand - and he should know, because he once got hit over the head with a handbag by a die hard Winston Peters fan in her 70s.

***

The Unpleasantness, or at least the visibility of it for mainstream New Zealand, perhaps dates back to the convoy, that converged and then occupied parliament lawns, eventually setting fire to the children’s playground. In the lead up to this election, politicians have been heckled, slapped, and two people even turned up at the Ministry of Pacific Peoples to intimidate public servants. Conspiracy theorists target those disaffected by inflation and economic downturn, grafting crazy onto misery.

“Jim Bolger was never going to retaliate. We made lots and lots of mockery of Winston Peters - lots! We were merciless! But he never retaliated. And he never sent goons around to beat us up”

“When I was a kid,” Cairns says, “people died being either lifelong National or Labour supporters, so that hasn’t changed. But because people’s views are so so firmly entrenched, and they’re so vitriolic in their pursuit of the ideology they favour, there is also a very strong desire from the people that disagree with them to see them made to look a little bit foolish and made to be deflated a bit, and hopefully, do a little self-reflection. Have a bit of intelligent ridicule come their way. It seems like everyone with a strong opinion has got really angry, and no one’s diffusing that anger, and the anger is building.”

“With all that tension going on, on top of the conventional three year race to see who can out-lie themselves into parliament and con the most votes out of the poor population, it’s way more intense than it used to be and I’m guessing, like a sociocultural pressure cooker. A bit of comic relief would be highly useful.”

Politics is an inherently tribal game, where a small majority of undecided or swing voters actually decide the government - and this election, it has suddenly feels like there are less and less people without an opinion, and the intensity of those opinions sometimes feels very unpleasant. So, given how hard it is to talk directly about politics this election, it makes the lack of satire even more surprising.

He’s quick to point out that McGillicuddy was not the only satirical party in New Zealand; there have been at least three or four others, but they were the biggest, with the biggest profile. And Aotearoa New Zealand is certainly not the only place to have had a satirical party gain a fair amount of traction or notoriety - the Icelandic Pirate Party has actual seats in parliament. Then, in a digression, Graeme talks about a day he spent in London, and saw David Sutch, aka Screaming Lord Sutch of the Official Raving Monster Loony Party, and jumped off his bus to give him a McGillicuddy Serious manifesto, the two going on to spend half a day together. “Even though our expressed policies are almost diametrically opposed, we were filling the same role in our respective societies.”

If the McGillicudy Serious Party relaunched today, I ask, would it be harder to find a laugh when competing with actually genuinely nutty parties? “We would have to work harder,” says Cairns, “but it wouldn’t be impossible.”

“It would be infinitely harder to make fun of them than [Jim Bolger]. And a lot more dangerous. Because Jim Bolger was never going to retaliate. We made lots and lots of mockery of Winston Peters - lots! We were merciless! But he never retaliated. And he never sent goons around to beat us up.” Winston’s groupie with the handbag, he clarifies, was “just spin off from [Winston] being a charismatic cult-like leader.

“These days, you’d have to really watch what you did and said. You might get some violent retaliation. That would scare me, if I was in the political arena now.”

What is easy to underestimate about McGillicudy Serious, is was while it looked farcical, this was a group of artists that had been working cohesively together for years, before even entering the political arena. Coming up with that much content, as anyone who has tried will know, is actually a lot of work.

”It’s all very well to have a funny name, a silly hat, and six jokes. And seven friends who pretend to do the same thing. That isn’t actually enough, in this day and age. You need to be a fully formed cultural movement almost. And then you step through that door into the political arena, and here we all are, and everyone goes wow. But if you come in half-cocked - it just won’t work. By the time people noticed us, as a political party, all our nascent ideas had been well formed, tested, tried, well argued about.”

“The McGillicuddy Serious, while we appeared to be a joke party full of crack-pot oddball pranks, if you ever looked at our manifesto, which a lot of people did, you’d say, good heavens, everything is internally consistent. The whole philosophy makes sense. It’s a comprehensive utopian view of how New Zealand could operate. Everything has been thought about and everything is inter-connected […] Whereas there is no coherent or logical connection that I can see between any of the multiplicity of so-called conspiracy theories. It’s a grab-bag of unconnected weirdness.”

It’s also hard to see the economic conditions of their inception ever being recreated. “These days, although it’s easy to organise a political party, it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. A lot of us were originally university students in the days before there were fees. So uni was free, and we were a bunch of people thinking all our thoughts, with a bit of spare time on our hands, and we weren’t completely broke. So we had the leeway, and the time and the economic facility and the space and the inclination to do this. I don’t know that we have that subculture in New Zealand much any more.”

“And this was pre social media - the pace now would be exhausting. You’d need a whole dedicated infrastructure and the rewards are almost zero. A lot of us were on the unemployment benefit for much of the time. So we just figured, this is like the king or queen keeping the jester. We figured we were on the country’s payroll, and that was our job. To do billboards and posters and street theatre, and write speeches, and do all that stuff. And that was our payback for receiving the unemployment benefit. Even though we weren’t actually looking for a job. I calculated - because I was obsessed with staying on the dole for as long as possible - doing this what I considered to be this holy work, and I calculated it cost all the tax payers 2c per year, to keep me. It’s nothing.”

And while it’s not the most damaging thing about conspiracy theorists, their earnestness, their sincerity, is probably the most annoying one. “Whenever we poked fun of anyone and any thing, we also tried to poke fun at ourselves. We figured that gave us the moral platform on which to ridicule others. Otherwise you get a bit pompous and up yourself and a bit righteous.”

***

Former Waikato Times columnist, Nexus editor, famous-on-twitter for being one half of the satirical Don Brash parody account, and currently putting out his substack The Cynic’s Guide to Self Improvement – Joshua Drummond probably thinks satire as much as other men think about the Roman Empire.

He also has noticed a distinct lack of light relief this election. “But mainly,” he says, “because I think satire is dead.”

He softens. There’s Robbie Nichol, aka White Man Behind a Desk, he says, who’s doing brilliant work, and broadly in the satirical vein, Hayden Donnell at The Spinoff. In the States, obviously, there’s Jon Oliver. “So it's probably wrong to say that it's dead. It's just more that - and maybe this was always the case - all the people that I'm talking about here could be quite easily thought of as activists. And they're making points in a slightly satirical way I suppose. Like, there's jokes and there's layers and layers of dark humour. But all of them are sort of begging for a return to some kind of sanity. Or perhaps not a return to it, just for it to exist at all.”

He too, sees the cannibalisation of bat-shit crazy content from a-screenwriter-couldn't-make-this-up conspiracy parties, who pride themselves on “their own research”. He says. “In the post-fact world, I don't think there's any place for satire.”

Plus, he says, one of the crucial ingredients for satire is that people have to be afraid of being outcast of the monoculture tribe (or perhaps, more accurately, the monolithic media, which also no longer exists). Drummond is currently reading Naomi Klein’s new book Doppleganger. If you don’t know the story, the short version is this: Naomi Klein was being constantly mistaken for author Naomi Wolfe, who got famous for The Beauty Myth, but whose book Outages was discredited, and she subsequently went from being maybe an outmoded third-wave feminist to a raving conspiracy theorist. (Which became really interesting for Klein, especially online, during the pandemic, and serves as her springboard for the book.)

“Wolfe got some stuff just horribly wrong - journalistically, just not survivable,” says Drummond. “She got eaten alive in a live interview on the BBC where they fact checked her - they Fisked her live. The American edition of her book was pulped. She just didn't recover from it. And she'd always been a little weird politically, but it just seemed to make her completely crazy. So she went from an interview on the BBC losing her sort of reputation and livelihood overnight, to being welcomed with open arms by Steve Bannon.”

“Satire was always meant to hold a ridiculous mirror up to society. But people used to be afraid of being mocked. And now there is a home for anyone who loses it in the public sphere, they’re just welcomed with open arms into the bosom of the cookers. The home of legitimacy is so fragmented now that people can just go and find legitimacy elsewhere.”

Like Liz Gunn?

“Liz Gunn is New Zealand's Naomi Wolfe,” he says immediately. “There are so many similarities. Once you look in one place you start seeing them everywhere. These are people who were reputationally sound, with maybe a few off-kilter views, found themselves without a home and the respect of the world, so they've just gone and found a new one in this parallel universe where the facts are made up and the rules don't matter.”

Which is what makes Don Brash circa 2010 satirical gold, but Liz Gunn a slippery, uncatchable fish.

Towards the end of his time as a Times columnist, he also began to have serious qualms about satire's ability to make the change that's needed. “Society needs some fairly radically different paradigms or climate change will eat us,” he says. “And yet none of those things are happening. As far as I can tell in our recent past, we have never satired our way to a solution to a better world. And there's such a surplus of ridiculousness to call out, where do you even start?”

“I was a really big believer in satire's ability to affect change, I thought it could be something quite important. I was informed by a Mark Twain quote, something along the lines of like - laughter can knock down towers. It's a really cool one. But I think he was wrong.”

***

When McGillicuddy disbanded, in 1999, they were New Zealand’s third oldest political party. There’s a mythology on the internet about this too - that the group was infiltrated by anarchists, and then collapsed under its own weight, it’s own success, mostly on the question of how seriously to take the role of court jester and how apolitical it should be.

Completely not true, at all, said Carins. There was a time in the party when a bunch of anarchists joined and it did seem as though the party developed two personas, two factions - but they sat down and hashed it out (something along the lines of, well if anarchy can mean self determinism, we can chose the Scottish monarchy we’ve always advocated, inventing “mon-anarchy” or what everyone calls anarcho-monarchism, and called it a day).

“What appeared to be a division in the party for a time disappeared - and we all got on famously!” It certainly never had anything to do with the “downfall” of the party.

Rather, it goes like this: at the beginning of it all, one day when Cairns was tramping along the Abel Tasman, he had a vision involving the whole narrative arc of McGillicudy Serious. He saw everything – how he was going to build the party, that they would get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then in 1999, and then they would transform themselves into… a millennial cult.

Because he could see those coming, having studied phenomenology of religion at Otago, he says. “When [the year] 999 turned over to 1000, lots of millennial cults sprang up, and lots of people were ripped off and taken for a ride. It was a really manipulative time. So I thought, I wanna be in charge of one of those! But do it for ethical reasons, to ward off any other cults at the pass, by being the biggest brightest, examples, so people can be forewarned,” he says.

“At the time I didn’t know that there was going to be the Y2K thing, that played into it really nicely,” he muses.

Next, he had wanted the whole thing to be reborn as extreme, pro-earth environmental terrorists, who actually really did take out the national grid, which didn’t happen. He also hadn’t counted on MMP, which did happen, and instead of the narrative of the party expanding and expanding and then mysteriously disappearing, like the fortunes of any other party, they found themselves in situations like their 1999 result being worse than that of 1993.

So they stopped. Soon after they ran a black box in the Hamilton mayoralty race, as a portent to AI. In 2006, Graeme installed the toothbrush fence on the roadside boundary of the old McGillicudy HQ.  (As Rhys Darby’s Murray in Flight of the Concords says, "Imagine that, a whole fence made out of toothbrushes!") The fence has become a sort-of short hand for their legacy, and their the lasting contribution to the Waikato landscape, to this funny little party of the Waikato that produced both Helen Clark and McGillicuddy - at diametrically opposed ends of the serious spectrum.

Plus, it’s useful when journalists want to track down Graeme.

If you like this, you might also enjoy….

Seven Sharp caught up with Graeme, here, a couple of nights ago.

Possibly our favourite local writer Aimee Cronin did a fantastic profile of Cairns here, in less turbulent political waters of 2013.

A profile on his fence can be read, here.