The prestigious Listener gongs include the John Key Memorial Schmoozing Medal and the Happy Little Vegemites Medal for Anzac Diplomacy.

It was tempting to cancel our annual political awards this year. After this most tumultuous of elections, half the political firmament are suffering post-traumatic stress or working through the stages of grief, and the other half feel as though they’ve won the lottery and need no further adulation.

It was a year of so many unexpected developments domestically that, at times, local politicos turned to the antics of President Donald Trump for a bit of R&R. The political laws of physics, gravity and pure common sense were summarily rewritten. Even the one certainty – that Winston Peters would have his umpteenth Dr Who-like regeneration – was for a time in doubt.

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Too late, voters learnt that the parties’ slogans were artful misdirections. National’s “We are the Infrastructure Government” really meant that, through public-private partnerships, “We’re privatising roads, hospitals and schools before they’re even built!”

The Opportunities Party’s “Care. Think. Vote.” really meant, “Shut up. Listen to Gareth. Not Sorry Your Cat Died.” As for Labour’s, it was, “Let’s Do This (because God knows we’ve tried everything else).”

Craftiest were the billboards featuring Winston Peters asking, “Had enough?” Missing was the punchline, “Well, tough – because I haven’t.”

During the formation of the new Government, we discovered that Labour’s MOU with the Greens was not an abbreviation for memorandum of understanding, but for move over, useless.

We now have a Government that we still don’t know what to call. It’s either a minority Government, plus the Greens, or “a coalition of the losers”. Richard Prebble said the technical term for it was a coup.

These upheavals have understandably thrown the year-end awards process into disarray. Bill English slipped off a number of prestigious shortlists after unexpectedly failing to keep his Prime Minister gig. Sponsorship for “Winner of the Campaign” could not be found. Worse, English has been banned from Planet Key for returning the World Leader Kit that John Key bequeathed to him barely used – the golf clubs not at all.

Sponsors have pulled out. The Spray & Walk Away people considered Steven Joyce for their top accolade for his masterful disguising of the Crown accounts, which have given the new Government some nasty surprises. But this sponsor got the pip when it learnt the Master Plasterers’ Guild and Selleys No More Gaps were also courting the former finance minister. His consolation is that, for his audacious postulation of a fiscal hole where none existed, the Schrödinger’s Cat Society has nominated him for an honorary doctorate in quantum mechanics.

Applause, please

Still, there remain some achievements to applaud and awards to hand out.

The Lego Certificate of Proficiency: to both the previous and the current Government. The first joined a whole lot of entities together into ever-mutating hybrids (MBIE, MPI and, arguably, the various temporal manifestations of Nick Smith) and generally played Transformers with the public sector for nine years. The new Government has lost little time in pulling them to bits again and even sending parts of them to cities other than Wellington. At press time, however, no one knew whether the batteries still fitted.

The Health and Disability Commissioner’s Inspiration Medal: jointly to Don Brash and Peter Dunne for their equally courageous approaches to battling the debilitating affliction irrelevance. Dunne showed how embracing the diagnosis can lessen the onset of troubling symptoms. His early retirement from the Ohariu electorate battle was followed by a trickle of commentating invitations, which can help a sufferer gradually re-enter normal society and in time achieve a full remission, otherwise known as anonymity. Brash continued his “I’m gonna fight this sucker!” approach, which although it remains medically controversial, does have this to recommend it: he still doesn’t realise he is an irrelevancy sufferer and thus continues to live what is, to him, a perfectly normal life.

The Comic Sans Uptick for Fun with Fonts: to Winston Peters, who made staff enlarge the text of the coalition agreement document so he could read it without the unmanly assistance of spectacles, then oversaw reduction of the type and was thus able to tease the media and Opposition that a secret coda to the deal had mysteriously shrunk from 38 pages to 33. Meanwhile, the Occupy Movement has engraved Peters’ name on its annual Death of Capitalism trophy, but it’s still waiting for verification.

The Happy Little Vegemites Medal for Anzac Diplomacy: to Jacinda Ardern, who got Aussie Foreign Minister Julie Bishop offside before even becoming PM, and without trying. When she actually put her mind to it, she barely raised a sweat, wrong-footing Malcolm Turnbull simply by repeating out loud the previous Government’s tactfully low-balled offer to help with the Manus Island detainees. Undeterred by his polite “Yeah-nah”, she repeated the offer at higher volume, with a public ear-biff over the awful conditions the detainees faced. Can a retaliatory invasion of Queensland fruit fly be far away?

The Endangered Mammal Survival Guide’s Citation: to Andrew Little. Realising he was perilously low in the food chain, the former Labour leader’s initial strategy was to bury all party policy in his burrow so the media couldn’t get a sniff of it, keep very still and try not to look into any headlights. But like any well-evolved prey animal, he eventually did the only sensible thing left: he ran.

The Gwyneth Paltrow Award for Best Conscious Uncoupling: the Greens let co-leader Metiria Turei go with such heartfelt hugs and tears that it was easy to forget that she had just split the party and potentially cost it a place in Parliament.

The Prime Minister’s Science Prize for Advanced Field Studies: to Gareth Morgan for his radical experiment to test whether voters could be publicly shamed, bullied, abused, belittled and insulted into supporting policies they didn’t agree with. Morgan’s clinical trials were rigorous, entailing in-person and online testing of the hypothesis on a daily basis, scrupulously randomised and controlled across the entire voting demographic. Research assistant Sean Plunket doubled back to ensure that no one in the study was left unabused. Morgan has now proven conclusively that rudeness does not win votes. Or, as he prefers to summarise his findings, “Sod you, you’re all f---wits!”

The John Key Memorial Schmoozing Medal: to Winston Peters, who managed to parlay a quick courtesy meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at Apec into the equivalent of M assigning James Bond to a special undercover meeting. That Peters hasn’t been overseas since, let alone done any shaking or stirring in Pyongyang, suggests he’s on more of an Austin Powers trajectory.

Pantene was going to give its It Won’t Happen Overnight But It Will Happen trophy to Theresa May for finally concluding a Brexit deal – till it was realised the actual situation was It Won’t Happen. Brits voted narrowly to leave the European Union so as to be rid of several million EU migrants and throw off the yoke of EU rules. The British PM has struck more of a Hotel California deal: Britain can check out for €40 billion, but it has to “leave” retaining every single EU migrant and having to obey EU rules in perpetuity. May will be consoling herself at making the next Nobel Peace Prize shortlist, as it’s possible she will inadvertently succeed, via a possible Celtic Brexit-exit, in freeing Scotland and reunifying and liberating Ireland.

The prestigious Académie française has nominated Trump for an award for his contribution to advanced linguistics. Ordinarily sniffy about foreign-isms infesting the French lexicon, the academy has embraced bigly, yuge and covfefe, saying the President’s unique neologisms give unprecedentedly nuanced insights into the psychology of today’s geopolitics. The President is also on Lancet’s shortlist for public education about medical afflictions for his tireless efforts to promote awareness of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

The Passive-Aggressive Award for Best Novice Coup Attempt: to New Zealand for coming close to toppling the Government next door without sending so much as a fisheries patrol boat in anger. The dual-citizenship scandal brought down a number of Australian politicians, but it was deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s New Zealand citizenship that tipped Canberra into crisis mode. Although we would have welcomed him here in the same spirit we’ve offered to take in Manus Island asylum seekers, Australia declined to deport him as it does New Zealand citizens of dubious character. He renounced his Kiwi-ness – but he’s to be thanked for showcasing a potential new tool in transtasman diplomacy. We can unilaterally “gift” New Zealand citizenship to any Aussie pollie mate at any time – for any reason.

The Incredible Hulk Diploma of Proficiency for Political Metamorphosis: to Simon Bridges, who has gone from a smiley, hi-vis-and-hard-hat-wearing, cheque-signing Transport Minister to a snarling, frowning, ravening Beast of Bodmin. The Opposition House leader stalks the aisles of Parliament’s debating chamber wielding procedural points of order like the claws of an apex predator. We won’t see those dimples again until he’s back opening new highways – or gets the National Party leadership, whichever comes first.

One of the year’s most prestigious awards is that bestowed by the Monty Python alumni, the No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition! prize: to Jacinda Ardern. There she was, cat-doting, house-decorating and assiduously trying not to outshine former leader Little in her new deputy role – which she secretly only managed to do by hiding under the spare bed in Pt Chev with a stack of Jilly Coopers and keeping very still so no one could find her – when Turei touched off a series of events that brought Ardern to the political equivalent of being fired out of a cannon. She not only survived, but triumphed.

Of pizzas and dunnies

Finally, it was tempting to award Politician of the Year to Morgan, for so vividly, and as it turns out self-sacrificingly, illustrating how not to do politics. But in the spirit of MMP, the ultimate accolade must be shared between Ardern and English. Neither expected to catch the bouquet when it was chucked by departing leaders: English last Christmas and Ardern in August. Both stepped up with warmth, humour and tungsten-grade steel. Both performed wonders for their parties, despite circumstances one Twitter wit described as a hybrid of House of Cards and The Brady Bunch. She was relentlessly positive, he was positively relentless. He proved he can shear a sheep as soon as look at you and rustle up pizza for eight; she proved she could install a working dunny and find time to bake a ginger loaf even during the coalition talks. Either would have done the country proud.

This article was first published in the December 23, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.