McGillicuddy Serious Party - Policies

Policies

The McGillicuddy Serious Party selected its policies on the basis of their absurdity and their impracticality.

Central McGillicuddy Serious policies in every election included a return to a medieval lifestyle, known as the "Great Leap Backwards" and (superficially) the restoration of a monarchy supposedly based on the Scottish Jacobite line, in the name of Bonnie Prince Geoffie "the reluctant". At a deeper level the Party invoked the political system of Tibetan Buddhism, with "stspm" (singularly transferable spirit possession monarchy) used as justification for the selection of Bonnie Prince Geoffie the reluctant as the undeniable head of the McState. This embodied the principles stated by the ancient Greeks that "no-one who seeks power should be allowed it." Bonnie Prince Geoffie refused consistently and permanently to have anything to do with the authority that this position gave him, and indeed ran for all he was worth and never had anything to do with McGillicuddy Serious ever again, thus proving his indisputable worthiness for the position. Other policies at various times included:

• Free dung
• Sending out intelligence agents around the world to wipe New Zealand off published maps, thus ensuring that no-one could invade the country.
• Standing a dog for parliament in the Hobson seat in Northland. Her policies included the abolition of cars, and turning a meat-works into an organic flea-powder factory.
• The abolition of money: Replacing money with chocolate fish or with sand as legal tender.
• The demolition of The Beehive: The demolition of New Zealand's parliament buildings, and all other buildings on a last-up, first-down basis.
• The diversion of all of NZ aluminium production away from building US military aircraft and missiles to build giant space-mirrors to melt the polar icecaps and destroy all of the foolish greed-worshipping cities of man in one stroke, thereby returning man to the sea, which he should never have left in the first place (this the inspiration of the Admiral of the Highland Navy Aaron Franklin).
• Raising the school leaving-age to sixty-five (after Parliament raised the school leaving-age by one unambitious year)
• Full unemployment; or (at other times) full employment through slavery
• Using beer as a National Defence strategy: leaving many bottles of beer on all beaches, so that any invading army would abandon its attack and get drunk instead while the broken bottles would prevent the army advancing any further anyway.
• Restricting the vote to minors: i.e., ONLY those under 18 years of age could vote (announced when Parliament lowered the voting age to 18 years). The party ran its 1993 electoral advertisements during children's programming.
• Student loans for Plunket (or at other times, Kindergarten) attendance: Prior to the 1984 election, David Lange's Labour Party promised to maintain free tertiary education, but Labour's Education Minister, Phil Goff, introduced student fees when elected. National Party education spokesman Lockwood Smith promised a return to free education if elected, but did not carry out this promise. Most McGillicuddy supporters, many of them students, felt displeased that both major political parties had deemed free tertiary education unsustainable, but had deliberately lied about their intentions to attract votes.
• Abandoning male suffrage: New Zealand, the first nation to achieve women's suffrage (in 1893), made a big deal of the centenary of this at the time of the 1993 elections.
• Full hedgehog suffrage: After a goat successfully received nomination in a local body election on Waiheke Island, the party unsuccessfully attempted to stand a hedgehog for Parliament, apparently solely in order to make "prick" jokes.
• Votes for trees: New Zealanders have a reputation as environmentalists, and the University of Auckland's ex-Marxist law-lecturer Klaus Bosselmann actually seriously advocated giving trees (and other bits of the environment) some legal standing. The McGillicuddies could not decide on whether native trees should have the option to vote in Māori electorates, whether male trees as well as female trees should vote, and on the status of shrubs.
• The demolition of the Auckland CBD to create a giant sundial, using the Sky Tower as the gnomon. Or at other times, to protect the Sky Tower by placing a condom over it.
• Replacing the Royal New Zealand Armoured Corps with Mounted Knights: claimed as more modern. The New Zealand Army's outdated equipment became a constant source of quips and embarrassment in the 1990s — at the time Queen Alexandra's Mounted Rifles operated FV101 Scorpions and M-113s.
• Building dreadnoughts in the Tamaki Estuary: A reference to the Royal New Zealand Navy's controversial purchase of Anzac class frigates.
• An All Whites victory in the Football World Cup: Both the Labour Party and the National Party used the All Blacks' victory in the 1987 Rugby World Cup in their 1990 campaigning — the All Whites stood about as much chance of winning the Football World Cup as Brazil have of winning the Rugby version.
• An indecent society: Jim Bolger's National Party used the slogan "A Decent Society".
• A potato famine: Prime Minister Jim Bolger's somewhat pock-marked countenance bore an unfortunate resemblance to the common garden potato. Much to his displeasure, he became widely known as "Spud"; the Royal New Zealand Air Force, with a typically Kiwi lack of reverence, christened his Boeing 727 "Spud One".
• Limiting the speed of light to 100 km/h: 50 km/h in Mt Roskill, (Auckland's Bible Belt), because folks there preferred to stay less enlightened.
• Linking the North Island and South Island: by bulldozing the Southern Alps into Cook Strait.
• Post-natal abortion: The McGillicuddies would make abortion illegal, but any mother could kill her child up to the age of 18, provided she did it with her own hands. The Party designed this policy to offend all sides in the abortion debate. The fundamentalist Christian Heritage Party used abortion as a major policy.
• Mandatory homosexuality for 33% of the population — also devised to annoy the fundamentalists.
• Free castrations
• Air bags for the New Zealand Stock Exchange (following the 1987 stock market crash)
• Replacing the Queen's chain with hemp: The Labour Party had a policy of protecting and extending the Queen's chain (publicly-accessible land bordering watercourses), forcing farmers and iwi to allow public access to waterways. Candidate Dominic Worthington proposed replacing the chain with more environmentally-sound hemp; with the Queen, of course, replaced by Prince Geoffie the reluctant. Rather than limiting the chain to protecting water in aqueous form, the King's hemp would also serve to hold together water in solid form, as in the ice in New Zealand's glaciers and Antarctic territory, in particular, the Ross Ice Shelf (alleviating environmentalists' concerns that the ice shelf might collapse and raise sea-levels). Ultimately, McGillicuddy policy envisaged that technology would regress far enough for it to become feasible to lasso water in gaseous form (i.e. clouds).
• Fixing accountants in concrete and using them as traffic barriers: Occasionally accompanied by a pledge to steal some of the Monster Raving Loony Party's other policies as well — so possibly a reference to New Zealand political parties accusing each other of stealing policies, or possibly just silliness.
• Good weather (but only if voters behaved).
• Full employment by carpeting the national highways: This would also save wear and tear on vehicle-tyres
• To break their promises