Is it possible to be simultaneously entertained and depressed?  Well, yes. Just try living in New Zealand in 2024.

The entertainment comes courtesy of that most sanctimoniously virtuous of parties, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, which can be relied on to provide a diet of political comedy deliciously laced with irony.

It started last year when tattooed LGBTQ activist Elizabeth Kerekere quit the Greens amid allegations of bullying – this, in a party that prides itself on promoting a gentle, caring style of politics. Kerekere had been caught out making belittling remarks online about fellow Green politician (and now co-leader) Chloe Swarbrick.

That was followed in January this year by the sensational departure from Parliament of Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, a voluble human rights activist and darling of the woke Left, after she was exposed as a serial shoplifter.

We’re not just talking about a furtive bottle of wine or bar of chocolate. At last count, Ghahraman had admitted four charges involving the theft of high-fashion garments worth nearly $9000. When challenged by a suspicious employee after leaving one high-end Auckland boutique with a full tote bag, Ghahraman denied stealing anything – but the following day, an associate of the MP returned two dresses worth nearly $5000 and an Issey Miyake bag with a price tag of $650. In a statement, Ghahraman – who has made much of her background as an Iranian refugee – put her behaviour down to “an extreme stress response related to previously unrecognised trauma”.

The Greens were still reeling from that embarrassment when a much lower-profile MP, Darleen Tana, was suspended from the party after becoming enmeshed in claims that her husband’s cycling business had exploited a migrant worker. The party knew Tana was directly implicated in the complaint but suspended her only after the story broke in the media. And as is often the case, further claims quickly surfaced from other people telling of bad experiences with the couple.

The entertainment continued earlier this month when the Greens’ fourth-ranked MP, Julie Ann Genter, had an extraordinary meltdown in Parliament, striding across the debating chamber and angrily shouting in the face of government minister Matt Doocey. That too brought forth other reports of intimidating and even physical behaviour by the American-born Genter, who’s best known in Wellington for promoting a deeply unpopular cycling policy. Once again, her party’s co-leaders were on the back foot, acknowledging there were no excuses for her behaviour and ordering the MP to work from home while things settled down.

But the Greens couldn’t claim a complete monopoly on political divertissements. Obviously feeling left out of the action, the famously prickly deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, denounced former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr as “nothing more than a Chinese puppet” – this, after Carr had urged New Zealand not to attach itself to the Aukus alliance.

Peters, who’s also New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister, can alternate between statesman and political street brawler in the blink of an eye, and sometimes forgets which mode he’s supposed to be in at any particular moment. In the same week, he tangled with a silent placard-bearing protester while addressing a meeting of the staid Institute of International Affairs. “If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place”, Peters growled menacingly. Borrowed from an old Elvis Presley song, it’s his standard tough-guy response to hecklers, but looked comically over-the-top when directed at the lone, diminutive grey-haired woman who gate-crashed his speech.

So that was the entertainment. But as welcome as it was, it failed to lift the heavy pall of pessimism hanging over a country struggling to rediscover its mojo after six years under an incompetent and profligate hard-left Labour government.

Six months into its three-year term, Christopher Luxon’s coalition government doesn’t inspire confidence. Luxon’s lack of combat experience on the political battlefield is embarrassingly evident in the way he’s regularly finessed by his bolder and wilier coalition partners, Peters and the ACT party leader David Seymour, neither of whom is inclined to defer to him. The tension between the three governing parties, as Peters and Seymour increasingly chart their own courses, is becoming harder to disguise.

The economy is in a parlous state, run into the ground under Labour and unlikely to recover quickly, if at all, in the hands of an inexperienced Finance Minister, Nicola Willis. Productivity has tanked and the government faces frightening debt servicing costs that appear irreconcilable with its pledge to cut taxes. Cuts to the bloated public service, while triggering howls of outrage from the left, will fall woefully short of the savings needed for the government to balance the books.

On top of its economic challenges, the coalition faces a relentless barrage of anti-government rhetoric from journalists and media commentators still sulking over last year’s election result. Having given a free pass to the government of the sainted Jacinda Ardern, the media have miraculously rediscovered their critical faculties and now bombard their audiences daily with accounts of the coalition’s failings, real and imagined. Meanwhile the mainstream media are themselves in a state of precipitous decline, yet remain tone-deaf to the public mood and too self-absorbed to see the obvious link between that decline and the fact – confirmed by opinion polls – that the public no longer trust them.

Perhaps most depressingly of all, the tone of race relations has continued to sour. Far from discouraging the race activists who ran rampant under Ardern, the election of a centre-right government has energised them as they see their unmandated, race-based agenda being wound back. And predictably, their antagonism has provoked a counter-surge of ugly anti-Maori feeling from the other side.

The dire state of the race debate was never better demonstrated than by Maori MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, who hysterically asserted during a parliamentary speech: “No matter my words today, this Government will not waver in its mission to exterminate Māori”. If she had glanced across the debating chamber, Kapa-Kingi would have observed that the government benches include 12 MPs of Maori descent, including Peters and Seymour – presumably all bent on their own extinction.  While statements like Kapa-Kingi’s might be seen as entertaining, simply by virtue of being palpably unhinged, wiser souls regard them as profoundly depressing.