The following is a press release from the office of Simon Bridges, leader of The National Party.

Key ora, New Zealand. Happy Maori Language Week.

Look, I’m writing to you today because I want to clear something up.

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle around some things that I said about the Christchurch Call and Everyday New Zealanders.

So I just want to clarify what I mean by Everyday New Zealanders, what an Everyday New Zealander is and what an Everyday New Zealander isn’t, what they care about, and what they don’t. Because I think people might have taken what I said the wrong way.

Everyday New Zealanders are New Zealanders who live everyday lives and care about everyday things.

Everyday things are things that happen every day, or most days. They include driving, milking the cows, and vacuuming. They don’t include exercise, climate change, and white nationalist terrorism. These things don’t happen every day. Just sometimes.

Yes, the worst terror attack in New Zealand history did happen this year, but it only happened once this year.

Let me elaborate.

An Everyday New Zealander cares about what’s in front of him or her: food on the table, petrol in the car, crims in the streets, kids in the sheets (in a non-sexual way. David Farrar said I should rhyme when I can).

And health and measles.

What the Government doesn’t understand is that these same New Zealanders don’t really care about much else. Climate change isn’t bothering them, because it’s still kind of cold sometimes. Conservation of native bird life doesn’t register, because we can’t even eat them. And the Christchurch Call, well, it’s just a bunch of talk, isn’t it?

Because the Government doesn’t seem to understand this, I thought I’d write this press release to help them identify some of the things that Everyday New Zealanders just want them to get away from, so they can focus on the real issues.

So here it is, a definitive list of things that Everyday New Zealanders don’t care about: kale, plastic waste, non-rugby sports, bicycles (except on weekends), the recycling bin, the organics bin, fish (except for eating), carbon emissions, other kinds of emissions, bank profits, the CCP, scooters, buses, trains, Greta Thunberg, academics, chia seeds, fair trade coffee, foreign aid, local body elections, Christchurch Call, online radicalism, talking about online radicalism, meetings about online radicalism, Jacinda Ardern talking, Twitter CEOs talking, extremists talking on their message boards and sharing their edgy memes with kids, who laugh at Pewdiepie jokes about Jews and women, and then maybe get a little curious, maybe there’s something to this, and they get on the conveyor belt, from Pewdiepie to the_donald, the_donald to 4chan, 4chan to 8chan, and ride the conveyor belt into the dark underbelly where nothing is serious and everything’s a joke, watch this cartel murder video, haha, that’s funny, now there’s a shooting in New Zealand, let’s watch that, and they do, and they cheer, because everyone else on this funny meme board is cheering, and now they’re swimming, sinking, spiralling, spinning, twirling, falling into a vortex of hatred from which their undeveloped mind may not return before they, too, are inspired to precipitate violence, and be the wave that ripples outwards from Christchurch to San Diego to El Paso to Oslo and further into the darkness, making their own propaganda for kids on those same boards to laugh and jeer at like cackling hyenas as their fellow human beings are gunned down for their amusement, only so they can make them into memes to further humiliate the dead and haunt the living, while the companies that make these tools available turn a blind eye to their collateral damage, and we sit in our living rooms watching Married at First Sight while our kid is in his bedroom laughing at a Pepe meme.

Also: plastic packaging, lunch in schools, text messages, New Zealand on Air, Pacific islands, Lorde, the Amazon, Kardashians, polar bears, Instagram, foods that come in paper, Taiki Waititi, Shakespeare, the theatre generally, Pokemon, Clarke Gayford, the New Zealand Music Awards, and the insidious and disheartening way this online radicalism filters back into mainstream society, affecting not just our kids but otherwise empathetic adults, who at first felt bad, but slowly turn hostile as they deem the response “a bit OTT”, only to find themselves pushed to a disturbing level of agreement with the perpetrator, a shift at times triggered by the mere suggestion that the name of a rugby team bearing his ideology might not be appropriate, even the mildest suggestion we could do something small to make the victims feel more welcome in our community runs the well of empathy dry and triggers a backlash with rhetoric about “our country” and certain people “taking over”, and then they say “Well it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t shoot those people,” and no, they didn’t, but they sure aren’t helping.

Also whitebait conservation.

Well, I think that about does it. Hopefully that clears up what I was talking about. Some people might not agree with every single entry, but I think it’s a pretty exhaustive list of the things Everyday New Zealanders don’t care about.

No ho my rama,

Simon