Chloe Swarbick and Winston Peters are the same person in different pants

Monday, 29 June 2026

Verity Johnson is an Auckland-based writer and business owner.

OPINION: Has it ever occurred to you that Chloe Swarbick and Winston Peters are basically the same person? Yep. Ok. Alright. Slightly different dress sense. Slightly different centuries.

But still. Same person, different pants.

In showbiz, they’re both what we would call a niche star. There’s two types of stars. There’s the universal, O type blood star. Their blood type is accepted by everyone in the audience. Everyone likes them. They’re John Key with a spray tan.

Then you’ve got niche stars. AB Negative stars. Their blood types suit a smaller, sharper subset of the population. (And likely to cause tissue rejection in everyone else.) They are liquorice stars. Blackcurrant jelly snake stars, who have the rare ability to articulate the dark, prickly parts of the human experience. Those stars look at a room and see the elephant in it and think,

“Saddle up, dumbo, let's go for a ride.”

In other words, in this election, they’re really good at reading New Zealand’s anger.

They’re excellent at understanding why people are truly pissed off. And not any old people. But normal people. Everyday people. They’re fluent in what, in another time, we’d have called working man’s anger. Well, Winston would still call it that. Chloe would call it the everyday life of being a normal Kiwi right now.

Different audiences, same appeal. They understand ordinary, 70k a year anger. And that is the defining force of this year’s election.

This November is the Angry Election.

In the Helen Clark Foundation’s 2026 social cohesion research, only 56% of New Zealanders said they were happy last year. (That number is 79% in Australia.) It’s not hard to see why.

The report also found that financial stability is the defining influence on social cohesion; specifically, how well you feel you’re doing financially.

And only 34% of us are satisfied with our present financial situation.

In other words, a helluva lot of us feel poor and pissed off. More deeply ducked off than the ceramic birds above your Gran’s fireplace.

And the two parties that understand, and are fluent in, everyman anger are NZ First and Greens. Now before you tell me that the Greens is a party for comfy, upper middle architects with a conscience…Nope.

Maybe back in the day. But now? The social cohesion report showed that 28% of Kiwis feel alienated from society, and nearly half of Green voters fall into that segment. (As do 7 in 10 NZ First voters.) Both parties are now the home for those feeling isolated from the home owning, lanyard classes status quo of Labour and National.

Speaking of the two of them, I’m still not sure either main party has understood the depth and breadth of the average person’s fury.

We kicked Labour out for failing to get it, back in 2023, but it’s not like they’ve changed since then. And we got National in, specifically under the proviso that they make things better. And, ah, yep. Well. You can see how well that’s going with them at 29% in the polls.

Now, yes, you can argue that when the economy is rubbish, everyone’s mad at the Government.

True. But I don’t think that’s the issue. Kiwis can handle that. They know pandemics are expensive and out of your control and cause lasting fiscal head winds.

What Kiwis struggle with, is sustained inaction on something that Governments can control. Like the grocery duopoly. (Or the gentailor cartel. Or house prices still being severely unaffordable….) But take supermarkets. Because that’s what punches you in the nose every Sunday. We’ve known we’ve been getting screwed for years.

In 2022, the Commerce Commission looked at data starting in 2015, and told the (then Labour) government that “ competition in the retail grocery sector is not working well for consumers.” What happened? We got a code of conduct.

In 2025, Nicola Willis realised we hadn’t fixed the problem and promised to open an express way to break up the duopoly. What happened? Tesco, Aldi and Lidl ignored it.

So really, in the decade since 2015, what has actually improved? Statistically, in December of last year, Grocery prices were up again year on year, bread was 53.2% more expensive than in November of 2024. So. Ah. Well….um.

It’s a fury that stings behind the top of your nose each weekend. A wee friendly reminder how broke you are. It’s also anger National and Labour can’t really speak to, not without admitting that neither of them fixed it.

They’re also hamstrung by the fact that neither Chris seems to understand how to articulate anger in and of itself. They’re not fluent in it like Chloe and Winnie. Who, quelle surprise, are up on 13% and 11% respectively. (ACT isn’t experiencing a bump because David Seymour speaks to rich anger, not median salary anger.)

Now, I don’t like the idea of this being the angry election. I’m not sure any of us actually like the idea that this November is driven by a black mold of rage spreading over the tiles of our soul.

But here we are. Sometimes you have elections driven by exciting change and vision for a new country. Sometimes it’s driven by being really, truly pissed off.