A Trip Down Election Lane
Pennywize the Rewilding Clown and Wayne Brown walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “Election season already?”
Aotearoa’s local elections have dominated headlines this year… except in Palmerston North. It’s boring as anything there. Meanwhile, across the rest of the country, Pennywize is promising to rewild Wellington, and Wayne Brown is trying to insult his way into Auckland mayoralship. NZ politics has never been short of chaos, controversy, and, sometimes, a bit of fun.
Let’s have a look at the past at Aotearoa’s most nostalgic (and iconic) election moments that have helped shape our political world today...
The ‘Worm’ debates
If you’re the type to let your social media algorithm influence your voting decisions, you would have loved the Worm.
Between 1996 and 2011, TVNZ’s televised election debates featured a squiggly on-screen line nicknamed the ‘Worm’. It was controlled by 100 undecided voters, each holding a dial with five settings: Very good, good, normal, dull, and very dull. On screen, the Worm rose and fell in real time, reacting to each speaker. If viewers liked what a politician was saying, the line climbed. If they didn’t, it sank.
Many politicians hated the Worm, including former Prime Minister Jim Bolger, who called it “a total irrelevancy that has no place in intelligent discussion”. Another former PM, Bill English, told NZ Herald the worm “only encouraged superficial debate and commentary”.
In 2002, 1News reported worries that the Worm might distract voters from real issues, instead turning attention to politicians' onscreen performance. TVNZ’s head of news Heaton Dyer defended it as a tool to “help people see how uncommitted voters responded to what the leaders had to say”.
The worm influenced the rise and fall of several political parties – most famously Peter Dunne’s United Future Party in 2002. The same year, the NZ Herald ran the headline: How the worm turned up surprise victor. It described how “the worm wriggled into the election campaign ... and turned towards the commonsense answers of United Future leader Peter Dunne”.
United Future went from 0.54% of the party vote in 1999, to 6.69% in 2002, winning eight seats in Parliament. Dunne’s success was widely attributed to his mastery of the Worm’s rises and dips during the televised debates.
After 2011, the worm retired for several reasons. Most importantly, it distorted debates. Politicians started performing for the Worm instead of addressing policy. Critics also warned that it appeared like scientific polling, when it was simply a small focus group with outsized influence.
By then, live audience reactions moved to social media and broadcasters didn’t need a squiggly line anymore.
Orange Guy
Art / Daniel Vernon
Shiny, orange, allusive and charming — exactly how I like my men and my election mascots. The Electoral Commission’s ‘Orange Guy’ was created in 2009 to encourage young people to vote. To this day, Orange Guy remains a staple of every national and local election.
Over the years, Orange Guy has undergone a few themed rebrands. Most notably, in 2011 where a version of Orange Guy in a dress was created to celebrate Women’s Suffrage Day. Instead of simply putting him in a dress, his whole body morphed into a dress shape. As The Spinoff put it, this version “looked absolutely cursed”.
In 2020, Orange Guy was updated. He reappeared for the election looking relatively the same, but now he had a companion: Pup the orange dog. 1News reported that the Electoral Commission spent $13,000 of taxpayer money for Pup and almost $100,000 for the entire rebrand.
When he’s not cross-dressing or taking Pup for walks, Orange Guy appeared on TV, radio, newspapers, social media, billboards, and on “I voted” stickers – until 2023.
In 2023, voters were outraged to find that polling booths no longer included Orange Guy stickers. NewsHub reported Kiwi’s calling this a "personal attack" and the "Worst. Election. Ever.”
Many demanded knockoff Orange Guy stickers to be created instead, and the Electoral Commision said to Stuff, “there's nothing to say you can't make your own”.
So, Kiwi artists took to giving Orange Guy a sexy makeover. Posts showed him flexing greased-up muscles, flaunting his bum, or sending flirty Snapchat mirror selfies saying things like:
“Nooo, you're too cute to say your vote doesn't count aha.”
Or fanfic style Snapchats like this: “You're stressed from work; I come home and walk up behind you. My hand slowly descends down your arm ever so gently, until our hands clasp passionately. I then take your hand and log you into Vote.nz - what do you do next? ;)"
From nostalgic icon to sex symbol, Orange Guy remains an unmistakable part of Aotearoa’s election culture.
The McGillicuddy Serious Party
Do you want to transform Courtney Place into a lazy river? Or turn the Basin Reserve into a swamp? These are some of the policies promised from some Wellington’s local mayoral candidates this year. Pennywize the Rewilding Clown and the Silly Hat Party are only two of many who have added on to a long history of satirical politicians. Perhaps the most well-known is the 1990s McGillicuddy Serious Party.
Running from the 1980s until 1999, the party was famous for its deliberately ridiculous policies, which included replacing money with chocolate fish, and bulldozing the Southern Alps into the Cook Strait to link the islands. Members of the group said they stood “for no promises, no progress, and no change”.
Founded by Graeme Cairns — the party’s ‘Emperor’ — the group began with the McGillicuddy Highland Army. Dressed in Scottish Highland regalia, the mock army staged elaborate public battles with flour bombs, water balloons, and cardboard swords.
In 2023, Seven Sharp tracked down Cairns, who explained the party’s place on the political spectrum: “You’ve got the right wing, and the left wing ... This is a hoop. And where the extreme right and extreme left meet, that’s the McGillicuddy Serious Party.”
Cairns dissolved the party in 2000 with a public “punishment” for never winning an election. Archival footage shows him locked in stocks, being beaten with silver beet and rhubarb as a sign reading LIAR hangs around his neck. “I led you astray! Lay your spawn upon me!” he shouted to the crowd.
Though never close to power, their antics held up a mirror to the theatre of politics. “They [the media] needed a mirror to poke fun at other parties,” Cairns said. “Then there were so many other loony parties that we were no longer needed.”
The party re-released their manifesto in 2018 filled with their policies. Party president Mark Servian said to RNZ that many policies were “made up on the fly”, pointing to Hamilton East candidate Tania Smeaton, the “bitch-goddess” who promised to sort men into breeding and lifting stock.
Now in self-imposed exile for 25 years, the McGillicuddy's remain a cult classic of Kiwi politics — a reminder that the line between satire and reality is often very thin.
Laser Kiwi
After spending $25.7 million of taxpayer money for the flag to remain the same, Aotearoa’s flag referendum was the most expensive failed referendum in the country’s history. PM John Key had had enough of being photograph in front of the Australian flag by accident. With a red-flushed face, he decided it was time to change Aotearoa’s flag.
So, after 10 months, 10,300 public submissions, and $25.7 million. The country decided after two rounds of voting to keep the flag exactly the same. While the flag didn’t change, something else did: satire. The thousands of joke flag entries gave rise to some of the most iconic and nostalgic memes of the 2010s. The most famous being Laser Kiwi.
Laser Kiwi was designed by James Gray, who explained: “The laser beam projects a powerful image of New Zealand. I believe my design is so powerful it does not need to be discussed.”
You might think the Laser Kiwi is not an iconic election moment per say, and that we just really wanted to bring it up (which we did). But the Laser Kiwi actually outlived the referendum, reappearing in the 2023 general election coverage. Here, TV3 brought Linda the Laser Kiwi to life on screen. Throughout the night, the kiwi plopped out an egg and then used her lasers to hatch two NZ First MPs from the shell. As results came in, Linda began to laser down those who lost their electoral seats.
While the flag stayed the same, the referendum gave New Zealanders a new national icon.