Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics: Luxon targets women with ‘Don’t Vote National’ campaign

Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Politics is a weekly, mostly satirical column on politics that appears on listener.co.nz.

The National Party will not seek votes from women at the next election, its leader Christopher Luxon says. The party has decided that it does not need women’s support to retain the treasury benches next year because they are “not a significant voting bloc” and can be safely ignored.

“National hasn’t been very popular with women generally in recent years, anyway,” Luxon says. “So I am now laser-focused on returning the favour. We think that working women in particular should be treated as second-class citizens because, actually, a woman’s place is in the home, not earning or voting.”

Most political commentators believe the Equal Pay Amendment Act, passed this week under urgency without a scintilla of warning or public consultation and just 15 days before Budget 2025, was mainly focused on saving Finance Minister Nicola Willis from a giant fiscal hole and a colossal red face. However, it is understood the act was also seen by National as a first shot in its “War on Whinging Women”. The party privately hopes it will encourage “ungrateful” women not to vote National in 2026.

Its plan to ignore women voters at the next election comes as little surprise to local women’s advocacy groups. National had previously signalled its attitude to what, it is understood, its male MPs call “the sheilas” by having less than a third of its caucus made up of women in a country, and on a planet, where just over half the population is female.

Authored by Act MP and Minister for Backstabbing Women Brooke van Velden, the act is intended to make it much more difficult for women who come neither from wealth nor a private school and university education to achieve pay equity in the future, but will instead see them rely on men or become skivvies and prostitutes -- just like in the good old days.

The National-led coalition wants to rehabilitate the country’s villains by scrapping prison sentences in favour of hangings. Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell says the government believes hanging could be used to help the county’s most serious offenders and reduce reoffending rates. “A short trip to the gallows would mean serious offenders would be much more likely to successfully re-enter society on completion of their sentence,” Mitchell says.

The proposed new policy, understood to be tentatively titled “Hang ‘Em High Rehab”, would lead to fewer victims of crime overall even if it did require many more violent deaths each year.

“When offenders receive prison sentences they are released back into the community without proper rehabilitation and it puts the public at risk,” says Mitchell. “I have asked Corrections to look into how prison sentences of all lengths relate to reoffending with a view to gaining a better understanding of whether hanging is the best option. We’ve been coddling crims with nice warm cells and woke handholding for way too long.