Some observations as we enter week two of the election campaign of 2026.

Firstly, it's not really week two. This thing has been going for ages, which doesn’t help. It feels long and boring already.

Secondly, what do we make of the small party promises you know are never going to see the light of day?

How much time and energy do we place on a thing you know will never happen?

In theory of course, in a democracy, anything can happen. The Greens could get 31 percent of the vote, beat Labour, and therefore become the lead party in a coalition that would then introduce a variety of taxes to make all their weird promises potentially real.

But we all know that that isn't going to happen. So what's the energy requirement on nutty ideas, the latest of which was their overnight train down the North Island.

If you'd forgotten, we have actually had a variety of overnight trains down the North Island. Guess what happened to them, and why.

Given that, why are you trying to re-heat failures of the past? Not even Winston 'train-freak-extraordinaire' Peters could see it as remotely realistic.

Thirdly, the bus. The bus, the malls, the stupid questions, the inane chatter - do they actually achieve anything? On an energy-in, energy-out basis, what's the point of it?

Trump doesn’t do malls, he does rallies. At least at a rally there is a speech, there are policies and there are ideas. Nothing happens at an ice cream shop, so why do they do it and do it for days on end?

Is the belief really that if you run into Hipkins, or Luxon, or Seymour, and you had never met them because most of us haven't, that their magnetism would lead you to vote for them?

Fourth, this country has a debt problem. That's the real issue - a massive, debilitating, potentially catastrophic one. And the campaign is littered with ice creams, selfies and promises of even more expenditure and debt on things that will never happen, but very little mention of our plight and the seriousness of it.

In serious times don't we want, or deserve, serious debate?

Or is the tedious circus that passes for a multi-week pitch to the voter via selfie and one-liners about as good as we can expect?

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