Prof Marewa Glover
Behavioural scientist
Last week, new ACT Party candidate Paul Henry appeared on Radio Hauraki and was asked to play a supposedly humorous, satirical forced-choice game. The presenters named three political leaders – Christopher Luxon, Chris Hipkins and Winston Peters – and required Henry to assign one of three actions to each: shoot one, shag one and marry one. Henry answered that he would “shoot Hipkins”.
What followed was not a measured political disagreement. It was a rapid cancel-culture pile-on. Labour MPs, led by Ayesha Verrall, condemned the remark as a “death threat”. Left-leaning media outlets produced a wave of clickbait. Questions were raised about whether ACT should sack its new candidate. The episode was treated as a serious scandal.
But the real story is not Henry’s answer. It is how the media created the trap in the first place – and how quickly a Labour politician used it to paint the public as dangerous.
Paul Henry did not invent the game. He did not change the previously used verb from kick to shoot. He did not force a new political candidate into a crude, lose-lose choice on live radio. The presenters did all of that.
The “shag, marry, kill” (or “kiss, marry, kick”) game has floated around for years as crude party banter and shock-jock filler. In 2023, New Zealand party leaders, including Chris Hipkins (Labour Party leader), willingly played a milder version of it on The Project. Hipkins declared kicking David Seymour (ACT Party leader) a “no-brainer”. No one called it a death threat. No one warned about “nutters out there”.
This week the same left-leaning media simply escalated the violence in the language, handed the loaded options to Paul Henry and waited for the explosion. Answer and you’re a menace. Decline and you’re a humourless wowser. That is not journalism. It is a trap.
Ayesha Verrall then stepped into the manufactured moment with the line that should concern us more than Henry’s joke: “There are nutters out there who feed off these sorts of things.”Notice what she did not do. She ignored that the game was a comedic interlude. She did not criticise the presenters who deliberately hardened the language. She did not note that senior politicians had played the softer version on national television only three years earlier. She aimed the moral condemnation squarely at a political competitor. Classic capitalisation on a beat-up.
That “nutters” framing is not an isolated slip. It reflects a deeper and increasingly dominant attitude inside parts of the public health establishment (that Verrall hails from): language communicating health information must be simple enough for 10-year-olds to understand; satire is too complex for ordinary people; the public are not citizens to be informed and trusted – they are a risk to be managed. Education and persuasion are treated as insufficient. Regulation, bans, mandates and the removal of informed choice become the preferred tools. Anyone who resists is pathologised as irrational, extreme or dangerous.
This shift has been happening slowly over the last few decades, but it accelerated during the pandemic. Health promotion was sidelined. Coercion and contempt took its place. Protesters were dismissed as a “river of filth”, “cookers” and “nutters”. Legitimate questions about proportionality and bodily autonomy were treated as evidence of moral or intellectual deficiency.
I am firmly in the health-promotion and education camp. Treat people as capable adults. Give them clear information. Respect their right to make informed choices – even choices you disagree with. And have faith that they can recognise when people are trying to be funny. The alternative is a permanent posture of elite disdain dressed up as ‘protecting the vulnerable’ and policing anything that might be misread.
Last week’s manufactured outrage was never about protecting democracy from violent rhetoric. It was about left-leaning media setting a trap, opposition politicians seizing the chance to smear a rival and the same old public-health paternalism revealing itself once again in the language of “nutters”.
The voting public are not children. Stop treating them as such.
This article was originally published on the author’s X account.
