Upon arriving at the Link, I realised that all of the youth political parties lined up for Clubs Day were just a bunch of people in an awkward group project. The assignment is to get the youths to vote come September. And, just like in a group project, none of them seemed to know what they’re doing.
The permanent absentee - ACT and Greens
Neither ACT nor Greens had stalls at Clubs Day, so they are the always absentee members of your group (either the one who inexplicably pulls out of uni days after starting this paper or the one who just decides tutorials are an optional affair).
The one who loves graphs and statistics - TOP
There’s always one. The TOP party was the first stop on my party pilgrimage, and I was quickly handed a whiteboard marker and asked to place a tick on the issue that mattered most to me, out of mental health, housing, and a UBI (Universal Basic Income). That straw poll was only the beginning of the economics onslaught as I was shown graph after graph to illustrate TOP’s policies.
While the general idea of TOP’s policies made sense (I mean, I got shown graphs that
made their policies made sense), no one else in this group project is keen on radical stats and economics yarns and TOP were not good at helping us understand them. Their slides in the group presentation will make yours look like shit, though.
The mature student with old-timey ideas - Labour
The metre between the TOP stall and the Southern Young Labour stall was enough to send me back twenty-five years into the past. Both the signage and the giant red cloth laid on Labour’s table looked straight out of the 90s. While I was told that Helen Clark herself had used the big red cloth in her own campaigns, it only served to compound the fact that Young Labour were flaunting a very old-timey “tried and true” vibe.
They say “with age comes wisdom”, but when I asked about their policies I was told to wait until five days out from the election which is when they’ll be released (!!!). Guess this member of the group wants to keep the good information secret to blow away the lecturer when it comes to presentation time. Not cool.
The one who rewrites everyone’s ideas and thinks they’re being original - New Zealand First
Holding true to their centrist ideology, I was unsure which of their policies weren’t repackaged from another party and sprinkled with a light dose of Winston. The one policy I actually did like is that they’d erase your student loan if you worked as many years as you were at uni for and, while it was good, it felt like I was being sold a pyramid scheme by the sheer quantity of suits confronting me at the NZF stall.
It’s at around this time they’d pipe up during your presentation repeating everything you’ve said, but because they’re in a suit it sounds much better than when you said it. Just stay on the right side of this one, as depending on whose speech they repeat, they just might be the difference between an A and a C.
The one who cruises by but also somehow gets all the work done - National
It was pretty hard to get a read on the Young Nats’ vibe. I left their stall having absolutely no idea what they’d actually do in government, but with the general vibe that they know what they’re doing.
Much like that person in your group project, you never truly know who they are until they
produce some brilliant (or awful) work out of nowhere. Guess I’m playing Russian roulette with my grades in this presentation.
Winner on the day - Student dressed up as Po the Teletubby
You keep doing you, mate.