Whatever this election is, I don’t like it!

John Lapsley.

It was a week which would have been better wasted on a good thriller and bad golf. And so, I declare today Curmudgeon’s Day.

Of course the positivists will wag the nag’s finger and claim my cup is half full because I didn’t visit the vet, or get fitted with a wooden leg.

To rub even more salt in the wounds, the smart Kiwi girl who’d got cutting my hair down to  10 minutes flat has packed her bags and emigrated to Ireland. To Ireland for God’s sake? We aren’t meant to move to Ireland, it’s the Irish who come here.

I’ve taken my Curmudgeon’s Day inspiration from Howard Jacobson, who wrote the only genuinely funny novel to win the Booker prize. While doing The Finkler Question, Jacobson helped pay the rent with a newspaper column  titled "Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It".

This makes a nifty theme for an election campaign. It can’t go wrong, and there’s so much room for the purest dislike. For starters, I don’t like all these late promises of new hospitals. Such pledges are as nauseous as  20-year betrothals — they should have been bedded several governments ago. If you think Dunedin Hospital is badly treated, try Queenstown, where you may be shipped to Invercargill to lance a boil. OK, I exaggerate, but the point is how did building a hospital become such a big stretch for a country which, in its toddler’s clothes, built rail networks, immense hydro schemes, and the nation’s roads?  What’s happened here?

Bill English, Steven Joyce, et al may well lose what was recently the unloseable election. They’re doing this with the same maddening efficiency with which they’ve governed. The curmudgeon also doesn’t care for Jacindamania.  Is the country so jaded our voting is turned upside down by a cheerful face?

Ardern edges even John Key as a TV natural — but she’s yet another politician who has risen through the party ranks without the enlightenment of another career.  Unless, perhaps, you count her job as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth, as doing one semester at the University of Life? (Hardly, but if you yearn for the Reds Under the Beds days, you’ll love the fact that Jacinda’s union was created by the founder of the Communist Party of Germany, Karl Liebknecht. Karl’s revolutionary fans included both Lenin and Trotsky, and you see the three chaps together on the same ancient posters).

But enough of that rubbish. The Jacinda Effect is more driven by us than her, so its soul is populist politics. The Trump and Brexit votes were the work of dodgy populism too, but the curmudgeon is unwise to make this unpleasant comparison — it’s well known that The Left is, by definition, virtuous. The Right, on the other hand, is an evil coalition of money-grubbers, water thieves, and old white men. Why charge tourists $25 when these parasites could be taxed to within an inch of their mortgages?

The bane of modern Labour has been its ability to waylay itself with the smarm of all things politically correct.

Ardern is probably as PC as the best of them, but she’d do well to keep it hidden in the coming days. Sadly for we fun-lovers, she didn’t take the "lipstick on a pig" bait.

My opinions of Winston Peters are too compromised by having shared the same schoolroom.  The problem for his — or any — career spent as a maverick, is this task burns up so many of the useful parts of your talent.  So who’s left for the curmudgeon to bucket?  I get the impression Judith Collins has been locked in her kennel. The usual Nicky Hager show has come and gone. And who was that Whale Oil chap from long ago?

The Greens’ last leader standing, James Shaw, has somehow kept his cool. But then, I expect aplomb from a man who, after his wedding, received five minutes of astounding career coaching from your columnist.  (It was his fault. He asked, and the drinks had been poured).

But the wisest quotes of the entire election campaign have come from the daftest source — Gareth Morgan. I should expand on that but won’t, because on Curmudgeon’s Day, whoever he is, I don’t like him.

- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.