The Civilian Party

The first billboard of The Civilian Party. Love it. Some extracts:

We believe that New Zealand is the greatest country in Australasia, with the possible exception of Australia.

New Zealand is a place where dreams come true, particularly if those dreams are about drinking heavily.

New Zealand has a long record of great accomplishments. We’ve done so many things we can be proud of. We climbed a big mountain. We said no to new forms of energy because we were scared. We got bombed by France. We had a nationwide argument about whether to actively oppose segregation or watch a game of rugby. We gave women the vote. We went to war and lost a significant portion of our population. We crashed a plane in Antarctica. We had a Prime Minister who called an election while drunk.

Heh.

But six years on, John Key has failed us.

The economy is performing well in some aspects, but poorly in others, the gap between rich and poor is growing faster than ever; earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have killed thousands*, and frozen L&P is a limited-time offer at best.
(*In other places)

To add to this, unemployment is high, innocent synthetic cannabis junkies are not, and our small country doesn’t even have the beginnings of a space program, unless you count the one time we all deliberately let go of our helium balloons. It didn’t occur to even one of us how we’d retrieve the cameras we put inside them.

It is clear to anyone who examines the record that this government is weak, it is tired, and its time has come.

But it is not simply enough that the Government needs to go. A strong and viable opposition is required, and this is something that our country is sorely lacking.

The Green Party, our nation’s main opposition party, once strong, has become shrill and petty, while the Labour Party remains adrift, with current leader David Cunliffe performing even worse in polls than the previous leader, a polite forehead.

Indeed, no one is doing well in John Key’s New Zealand; especially not the opposition.

But not all is lost. With the traditional vehicles of resistance fading, a new opposition rises from the ashes, one better equipped to echo the sentiments of a nation that barely knows what it’s talking about. That opposition is the Civilian Party.

Where the Labour Party is shrinking in support, the Civilian Party is growing. Where the Greens have had half their leadership threatened with legal action by Colin Craig, the Civilian Party has had its entire leadership threatened with legal action by Colin Craig; and before the year is over, we intend to be threatened again.

I hope they get lots of candidates. Will make candidate meetings much more fun to attend.

Some policies:

• Declare New Zealand’s independence from Hamilton. (Read more)
• Close the pay gap between men and women by working to reduce men’s wages.
• Alleviate poverty amongst children by giving every poverty-stricken child a llama as a means to a basic income.
• Make Wellington airport safer by moving it to Christchurch.
• Reform the Justice system so that every citizen is required to prove why they shouldn’t be in prison.
• Issue a formal apology to Australia’s aboriginal population.
• Maintain New Zealand’s long-term commitment to free nuclear energy.
• Ice cream.
• Lower greenhouse gas emissions by placing restrictions on the number of greenhouses, and greater obligations upon trees to absorb carbon dioxide.
• Bring ultra-fast broadband access to the majority of rural New Zealand by 2016 and dial-up to Invercargill by 2017.

And a final thought from them:

The only thing that our great nation has to fear is fear itself, stagnant unemployment, low wages, superannuation costs, the economic consequences of existing and prospective free trade deals, rheumatic fever, Winston Peters, small pointy objects, daytime television, oil spills, earthquakes, cancer, traffic congestion in Auckland, systemic poverty, the ineffectiveness of throat lozenges, tornadoes, the housing shortage, global warming, gay marriage, straight marriage, bullying, chemtrails, losing one hour of sleep at daylight savings time, paedophiles, the current account deficit, terrorism, bus fares, and the possibility that a crab will sever our undersea telecommunications cables.

That crab fear is quite a worry!