The next wave: The Civilian Party

With the general election just three weeks away, whose are the fresh faces in politics? As part of a series of profiles of some of the major parties’ new candidates under 35, The Wireless producer Elle Hunt talks to Ben Uffindell of The Civilian Party.

There are certain things, says Ben Uffindell of The Civilian – or The Civilian Ben Uffindell; it can be hard to tell where the character behind the satirical news site and political party ends, and he begins – that are inherently funny. Like llamas.

“Llamas are a comic object. I think everyone knows this. You’ve got llamas, crayons, balloons…” He pauses mid-spiel, reaching for a word. “A rhombus is a comic object. It’s like an inherent good, right? They’re things that are funny, just by existing.”

I don’t think to run it past Uffindell at the time, but the café we’re in – one of a chain that is apparently popular in Christchurch because of its close proximity to major roads – is only funny at best, depending on how witty you consider literal references to coffee beans in a space that trades in them. But I’m an asshole from out of town and it’s packed: I’d only just managed to snag us a booth.

Facing him across the table, a mic spread out between us on the table, I’m reminded me of the Prime Minister’s infamous ‘cup of tea’ with John Banks before the last election. Uffindell, 23, seems to appreciate the comparison. “I haven’t made any jokes about old people, though – perhaps I should.”

I first met Uffindell last year, three months after he’d started his satirical news site. Born out of the character “Ben Uffindell, Vice-Chancellor” he assumed for a column in the Canterbury University magazine Canta, The Civilian began somewhat inauspiciously: “New Zealanders like pizza, says Key”.

But by late June, the site was attracting an average of 20,000 to 25,000 page views every day, boosted by the threat of a defamation lawsuit [pdf] from Conservative Party leader Colin Craig and Uffindell’s announcement that he was forming a political party. Affable but quietly spoken, he seemed rattled by the attention.

Just shy of 12 months on, he’s visibly more relaxed, though his nails are bitten down almost to the beds. When I last saw him, he says, he was swept up in the media furore over the site, torn between wanting to maintain that momentum and to retreat out of the public eye. “I didn’t run for cover, I ran for exposure. I said yes to every opportunity that came my way. Then I realised what a bad idea that was.”

At his peak, he was writing more than three posts a day. By the end of the year, the site’s profile was such that Uffindell had been invited to cover the Labour Party conference, and named one of the Herald’s finalists for New Zealander of the Year.

LISTEN to Ben Uffindell talk about his ‘Big Year’ on Radio New Zealand National in December last year:

Drained and exhausted, he made a “conscious decision” to dial it back a bit. “It’s very hard to explain to someone who doesn’t write things creatively that … you don’t just sit down and punch out one thousand words and that’s it,” he says. “It has to come from a place of inspiration and if you don’t have one, things just go to hell.”

The short break that he “desperately needed” turned into something longer as he assessed his options for both the site and the party in an election year.

But the iron cooled as he was figuring out how to strike it, and in the time it took Uffindell to shift gears for a more ambitious project, The Civilian fell out of the spotlight. When he announced his first policy on The Nation, early champions of the site were disillusioned or uninterested, and its critics, ostensibly validated – and his vow to “give llamas to poor children” was derided as at best passé.

Humour’s subjective, of course, and I tiptoe around this point – lllamas, really? Isn’t that a bit Sims de siècle?

“See, people look at the llama thing like, ‘Give a kid a llama, that’s hilarious’,” says Uffindell. “But that wasn’t the basis of the joke, that’s what it becomes when people digest it in simple terms.”

The policy was born of a phrase he thought of (“It’ll go on a billboard at some point”): ‘You give a kid a fish, it will feed him for a day. Give a kid a llama, and he’ll be feeding it for the rest of his life’. The “implications” of every child in poverty owning a llama was “quite a good springboard”, he explains, as well as a satire of superficial “Band-Aids” for big issues.

The Civilian Party really has only one “truly basic” policy, and even that’s an exercise in contrast, comical in context. “There’s this really long list of complicated policies, and then shoved in there ‘ice cream’: ‘A Civilian Government will – ice cream’. I liked that because it was simple, and out there from the norm, and about our basic desires.”

Like the site, the party is both satirical and surrealist; the news media just focuses on the latter “because the more directly satirical parts require a few sentences of explanation”. “[Llamas and ice cream], that’s the stuff that the media laps up – the easy things,” he says. “Which is fine, but I’m here to talk about the jokes that matter to real New Zealanders.”

He didn’t actually say that last bit. I just made it up. But he does sound every bit the politician, blaming the reduction of his message – the subtleties of which, he never communicated publicly in the first place – on the media’s proclivity for “sound bites”.

But one outcome of the mainstream interest in the Civilian Party is that Uffindell is reaching a whole other audience than that he did with the site, even at the peak of its popularity last year. He mentions, with faint surprise, the response to his appearances on The Nation and Q+A. “All of a sudden, all these people who haven’t heard of you before hate your guts because they think you’re being serious and that you’re some entitled rich kid who wants to tax the poor. They thought I was serious, that I was absolutely for real. How could you, I don’t know.”

But people not getting the joke is one level on which satire functions. (He’s furious at Facebook trialling a ‘Satire’ tag.) “In a way, you’re using satire to expose their own follies in taking you seriously. People who believe it’s real are as much a subject of the satire as the topic itself. No, it’s not intentional – but I swear to God, half the satire I write is not intentional from the outset.”

There’s a “self-reinforcing cycle”, he says, where “politicians play their dumb games because they know it works with the media, and the media broadcast to people who don’t want to pay attention for more than three minutes”.

“And it’s not just ‘dumb people’ – even people who want to feel like they know what’s going on want to see it in one or two minutes. In many ways, it’s our fault: the media gives us what we want, because it makes money; we get stupider because of it, and demand even stupider things, and they give them to us.” He gives a wry smile. “It’s very hard to break the cycle when we’re all getting dumber.”

I protest, not because I necessarily disagree, but because faced with such cynicism I feel like I have to. It’s either that or wrench one of the inexplicable coffee-bean-filled Perspex grab bars from the wall and club myself over the head with it.

For a moment, Uffindell has the good grace to look bashful. “I don’t think that, we’re not all getting dumber.” He pauses. “I think many of us are getting dumber.”

Still, being able to laugh at what he cheerfully terms “our predicament” is one reason why satire’s important in politics. He’s scornful of the criticism lobbed at the Electoral Commission for “wasting taxpayer money on jokes” in granting his party nearly $34,500 to broadcast election messages.

“It undermines the whole value of comedy in an election where everyone takes themselves so seriously, and everyone’s playing a game anyway,” he says. “It’s vaguely offensive to me when David Cunliffe says ‘It’s a fudge-it Budget’ with a wry little smile. The sad thing about that is that probably, like, five people sat in a room, came up with ‘fudge-it Budget’ and decided that it would make him seem sincere. Which it doesn’t. You’re not generally outraged about the Budget if you’re coming up with fun little slogans for it.”

And no party’s better than any other. “They’re all offering, not in terms of policy, just in terms of style, vaguely the same thing. That’s why I do care about the Civilian Party, from a genuine place in my heart … because I feel like we offer something that does benefit the public discourse, rather than what we get year after year after year, which is just really insincere bullshit.”

The party was born out of dissatisfaction with the current system, says Uffindell – and that’s why it’s important to him that it exists outside of it. “The line is that we’re upper-centre, but speaking earnestly, the Civilian Party doesn’t fit on the spectrum because that’s exactly the kind of nonsense I don’t want to be involved in. There are some policies that in satire take shots at the left, and there are some that take shots at the right.”

But he’s not The Civilian. The Civilian’s not him. “I’ve written some articles that make points that are so contrary to my own opinions, but I don’t have to agree with them,” he says. “I’ve gotten so deep in the rabbithole that I don’t know what my opinions are anymore.”

Disclosure: Elle Hunt considers Ben Uffindell her friend, though he might not feel the same.