Does David Seymour Eat Instant Noodles with His Bare Hands?
The year is 2023. Not yet crushed under the weight of a failing economy, and with my hairline still mostly intact, my friends and I set out to stop David Seymour from being elected the only way we knew how — with libel and slander.
A Coalition of Chaos
Andre Moffat stands in front of Parliament House — back straight, head held high, and the suit they last wore at their high school ball draped over their wiry frame with the swagger of a movie star on the red carpet. Together, we are about to embark on a mission to start a rumour so heinous that it would make David Seymour completely unelectable.
With the help of our producer Lachlan and a film school education that had just barely afforded me a news camera from 2014, we set out to change the course of New Zealand’s history and save our country from Seymour, or at the very least, the “16-year-old libertarian who is currently inhabiting his lifeless, bloating, dilapidated, fuck-wit corpse.”
Friends of the show will be familiar with my longstanding distaste for New Zealand’s yellow bandits and their ghoul of a leader’s stance on crime, regulation, and pretty much everything except for cannabis, that sacred centre of the Venn diagram shared between champagne socialists and the subsection of the right who read Atlas Shrugged and decided that universal healthcare was gay. Enemies of the show will also tell you that I’ve always been a bit of a wanker. And here I was, presented with a chance to finally weaponise my (alleged) dickheadery for good.
In this instance, I would be punching up at future Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour, finally able to flex my natural talents without being sent to the principal’s office or marched up to my workplace’s HR department.
We explored several potential rumours, namely (a) David being caught having sex with an All Black in a public space, or (b) reportedly farting out loud on a Metlink bus, or (c) being exposed as the mastermind behind the tragic bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.
The first two were discounted as being too silly, and the third was explicitly vetoed by our producer over “ethical concerns.”
Regardless, we eventually landed on something that was salacious enough to turn people against him, but not so damaging that we’d have to defend it in front of a jury of our peers: “Does David Seymour eat instant noodles with his bare hands?”
Rūpahu News
After receiving some legal advice, we decided to disseminate the rumour through a freshly minted publication we named Rūpahu News — which roughly translates to “fake news” in te reo Māori, New Zealand’s only de jure written language. This worked both to obfuscate our own personal involvement with the rumour and to clearly label the story as parody. It wasn’t our fault that people like Seymour had worked tirelessly for hundreds of years to make sure the general population didn’t have a comprehensive enough understanding of te reo to read said label. So, we mocked up an article, printed a few hundred copies, and hit the streets of Wellington to hand them out.
Reactions were a mixed bag. Some people hated David Seymour, and some people really fucking hated David Seymour. It became clear to us that we were operating in an echo chamber, and that if we really wanted to get our message across to the class of thumb-sucking, short-term thinkers that Seymour was grooming, we would have to go to them. But where did these empathy-void bootlickers skulk about when they weren’t yelling at Māori teenagers to pull up their pants? Of course.
The internet.
Co-hosting a news show under the incredibly clever moniker of Richard Cummington, my team and I embedded the noodle rumour in what was clearly a comedic sketch, and then cut a clip of it out of context and posted it in isolation. That way, if we were sued, we could say we were joking, even though we were not. Or were we? We were, right? Or did David Seymour really eat instant noodles with his bare hands? He definitely seemed the type, as noted by several Wellington residents as they took our pamphlets in their comparatively spotless hands. Did he wait for the boiling water to cool first, or did he plunge his gnarled little sizzlers into the broth with the same reckless abandon that would later lead him to drive a Land Rover up the steps of Parliament House? The lines between satire and reality were blurring, but I had to remember — as a wise man once said in reference to his statements about committing an act of terrorism against the Ministry for Pacific Peoples — that I was only joking.
Needless to say, our posts did not go viral. We tried showing the snippet to pedestrians around Lambton Quay, but were brutally dismissed as charlatans peddling an obviously doctored video — an accusation I resent, considering how long it took me to teach myself basic compositing and animation for the short clip.
Election Night
By citing my prior experience working as a cameraman and editor for the Parliamentary Service team — an organisation no doubt psyched about being associated with this post — I had managed to secure a spot filming a speech Seymour was doing while on his election campaign. However, once we arrived, a member of the ACT Party approached me and mentioned they were a fan of some of the sketches I had posted on YouTube. Knowing he had possibly smelt a rat, I tried my best to explain that our documentary was solely about the election (technically true), and not a part of my comedic pursuits (technically a lie). Having been exposed as incredibly funny and smart, we soon found our tentative access to filming the election night event at ACT was not approved, and the party of free speech and just-joshing squashed us under its yellow boot.
Instead, we spent election night alone. Our defeat was broadcast nationwide, with the news of David Seymour’s victory and assumed coalition finding us in the cramped quarters of our tiny office in Toi Pōneke Art Centre. In the following months, Seymour joined the newly formed government as co-deputy prime minister, his older brother Winston promising him a turn on the PlayStation if he waited a year and a half and got him a blue V from the dairy. Much and more has been said about Seymour’s actions once he got his filthy paws on the DualShock, so I’ll leave the political commentary to the experts and let this post remain objective and unbiased.
I often find myself thinking about this little adventure of ours, questioning the ethics of what we attempted to do under the guise of a joke, pondering if dropping down to David’s level was the right thing to do. Ultimately, I have no regrets. But one question keeps nagging at me, pecking away at my brain in the wee hours of the night, unrelenting and unfettered by sleeping pills or gummy-based edibles.
Does David Seymour eat instant noodles with his bare hands?
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