Political Satire Is Having A Renaissance During The 2026 Election Campaign

Ross
McNaughton Senior producer/reporter

Fuelled by social
media and AI, political satire is having something of a
renaissance during the 2026 election campaign

Two of
the most prominent examples are ‘Beehiving Badly’, a
satire page featuring South Park-style animated videos of
New Zealand politicians which that appeared on social media
in July, and Carpool Coalition which first began
posting content in August.

Both pages explore similar
territory, critiquing and satirising the key figures of the
coalition goverment.

RNZ asked Winston Peters what he
thought of his depiction in ‘Carpool Coalition’ where he is
shown as grumpy, sweary and perpetually smoking.

“I
haven’t seen it. It’s a lie, and I don’t smoke,” Peters
said.

While he may not have seen the social
media-based satire pages, Peters has witnessed and been
featured in New Zealand satire dating back to the 1980s
including ‘Public Eye’, a satirical puppet show and
‘Facelift’ which used actors with extreme
prosthetics.

Peters isn’t a fan of the modern
iterations. “It’s just plain nasty. It comes from the same,
usually from the left or sometimes from the extreme
right.”

Peters has a point about the political
direction the satire comes from. ‘Carpool Coaltion’ and
‘Beehiving Badly’ both almost exclusively target the
coalition government. Neither page agreed to be inteviewed
for this story and RNZ hasn’t been able to establish who
runs the pages.

Dr Nicholas Holm is an associate
professor of media studies at Massey University and said
when satirists relied on mainstream television broadcasts,
they literally couldn’t afford to have visible political
leanings.

“I’d say the ultimate gatekeeper here is
money. In a media environment the size of New Zealand, you
can’t call half your potential audience idiots because it’s
not economically viable.”

But social media and
artificial intelligence has changed all that, meaning
creators can make
their content quickly and cheaply.

“The beauty of
that is that you can adopt hyper-partisan positions that
lead to a very narrow audience because you don’t need their
money.”

Some satirists don’t rely on animated content
though. Ben Uffindell has resurrected his ‘Civilian’ website
for the 2026 campaign. The Civilian focusses on written
articles and takes aim at politicans all along the spectrum.
It began in 2013 but has only posted sporadically since
2021.

“When you write enough satire you sort of run
the well dry a little bit”, Uffindell said. “The news is
like a series of the same stories occurring over and over
and over again and you kind of feel like, oh, I’m just
satirising the same thing.

The reason I felt
comfortable coming back is because the environment has
changed so much with social media and the way we talk about
politics today that I felt like there’s enough material here
to really move it forward.”

Uffindell said targets
weren’t as easy to come by these days.

“I actually
feel like this is a bad period for satire because leaders of
the parties are not exciting.They’re not interesting.
They’re not people ripe for satire. When I was writing
originally, we had John Key and he was very ripe for satire.
He was like a low hanging fruit almost. I don’t think we
have that now.

“At the same time, we do have a very
interesting political environment. So I think what’s right
for satire is the environment, is this kind of dynamic of
having our first true MMP election with our major parties
probably being under 30 percent. But we don’t have like a
singular figure who’s interesting or dynamic and in its own
way that’s ripe for satire, but I don’t think there’s a
leader who’s ripe for it.”

Holm said a lack of
profitability was one of the reasons satire shows appeared
and disappeared relatively quickly, but there were also
deeper issues.

“We don’t in our national conversation
have much appetite to talk about politics in a sustained
way, whether it’s serious or satire. We don’t really have
political conversations about big ideas and satire kind of
needs those, to really work. So I think satire is most
successful when it’s trying to do something ‘thinky’ and
big, and it’s just not really the tone of our political
conversation most of the
time”

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