McGillicuddy Serious Party

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Please find a collection of four poster pictures, a t-shirt (female and male from young adult upwards) and a Billboard with a different poster on each side available to have fun with in your Sims 3 game.

The poster pictures use a mesh with many thanks by Yarona at Sims Modeli, and the Billboards use a mesh from the much missed Cloudwalker Sims so you do not need any stuff packs for this to work – it’s all base game friendly.

Download

To use, download, unzip, and drop the contained folder into your The Sims 3modspackages folder and they should show up.

Enjoy!

The McGillicuddy Serious Party of New Zealand was the ‘political wing’ of the fraudulent Clan McGillicuddy (formed 1978), whose ‘warriors’, the McGillicuddy Highland Army were involved in the pastime of ‘pacifist warfare’ – a parody of not only warfare, but of self-important warfare reenactment groups and the whole historical revisionist romanticism of machismo the Scottish warrior clan and Maori taua systems. Their usual opponents were Alf’s Imperial Army (founded in 1972 by Ian Brackenbury Channell aka The Wizard of New Zealand).

‘Pacifist warfare’ involves paper swords, paper swords, flour bombs, rotten soft fruit and water pistols. The end result is usually mass confusion amongst spectators, not least of all as it tends to be done flash mob style.

The McGSP was formed somewhat hurriedly in 1984 to lampoon what they saw as an increasingly and wilfully out of touch political class happy to tell voters at election time whatever they wanted to hear before doing as they pleased once elected (particularly over nuclear power, the allowance of American nuclear weapons in New Zealand territorial waters, and the issue of Maori rights).

Led by Graeme Cairns, the party stood candidates in the 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1999 general elections; the 1986, 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1998 Local elections; along with numerous by-elections and of course student elections. Like all ‘loony’ parties, the McGSP paid for their electoral costs by staging fundraising concerts and entertainments (particularly the Big Muffin Serious Band).

The central plank of the McGSP platform was what it terms ‘The Great Leap Backwards’ to return New Zealand to medieval times (the logic being most ‘progressive’ platforms in practice tend to have converse effects in practice, such as China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ which proved so irresponsible it resulted in one of history’s worst genocides from mass starvation). The McGSP promised full unemployment; to raise the school leaving age to 65; and demolish all parliamentary buildings on a last up, first down basis – targetting particularly the ‘Beehive’, New Zealand’s executive building for those running the country. It also promised to break all its promises, a standard trope of ‘loony’ parties.

Due to standing in the majority of contested seats from 1990 onwards, as a potential party of government they were entitled to a party political broadcast – the first ‘loony’ party worldwide to do so – and to state funding, a matter of controversy. The party became a totem of the argument about allowing ‘frivilous’ parties to stand in serious elections, and the problem of declining election turn outs due to a declining choice of parties as costs spiralled to put elections increasingly beyond the reach of those without major financial backers.

1993 was arguably the party’s high water mark. Aside from once more standing in the majority of seats at the general election, they took their biggest share of the vote (a mere 0.61% – but that any voted for them at all was remarkable in itself). They had been helped by the prior events of the 17th April 1993 Tauranga by-election when MP Winston Peters resigned from the National Party he’d become increasingly disillusioned with and on a point of principle resigned his seat to fight a by-election for the right to retain his seat as an independent.

Peters had become a notorious gadfly over the years for his views on government corruption, immigration, Maori issues (being half-Maori) and tax evasion – the 1992 ‘Winebox Inquiry’ Peters instigated but which resulted in no prosecutions despite damning evidence played a major party in convincing many their nation had become a corrupt tax haven.

The main parties – the National, Labour, Christian Heritage and even the Alliance (a combine of the Social Credit Party, Greens, New Labour and the Maoris’ Mana Motuhake) boycotted the election claiming it was a waste of taxpayers’ money so close to a general election (in the event, that never happened until November of that year – seven months later). But most New Zealanders felt this was a feeble attempt to discredit Peters over a by-election all knew they hadn’t a hope of winning.

In the event, the McGSP finished second – one of only two remotely recognisable party candidates which stood, the other being the so-called ‘Natural Law Party’ (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation cult abusing electoral laws designed to help the parties of the rich, allowing it free TV advertising time and free advertising promotion mail-drops under a guise of ‘political activity’). The rest were an array of extremist single-issue cranks (mostly religion or drugs), now acquiring media space and time due to the dearth of candidates.

One of the McGSP’s tag lines since 1987 had been ‘better to vote for harmless loonies than dangerous nutcases’ – whatever the result, the Tauranga by-election gave them a national platform to make that very point. A party of gadflys helping legitimise the principled stance of another gadfly by the very act of standing against him – especially in the wake of the Winebox Inquiry whitewash – also helped legitimise their own right to stand.

One of the McGSP’s most infamous policies came during the 1993 election, during the battle over potential gay rights legislation. Feeling both sides of the argument were exaggerating how much they really cared about an issue they’d ignored for decades out of much the same political expedience, the McGSP announced there would be compulsory homosexuality for a third of the population – upping the ante on those candidates platforming themselves as ‘pro’ and throughly infuriating the ‘family values’ on the opposite side.

The party also claimed ‘… shortly after the McGillicuddy Serious Party comes to power, New Zealand will mysteriously disappear from all maps.’ – twenty five years before this long running routine cartographical omission from world maps went from being a bugbear to an national outcry when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the matter in Parliament, only for it to be pointed out New Zealand was missing even on a monochromatic map of the world on the government’s own 404 web page.

The McGSP eventually disintegrated as costs spiralled to put them and most other minor parties out of business, along with internal controversy over the party being hijacked by anarchist and pro-cannabis groups for their own agenda. In 1999, it’s vote collapsed to a third of its previous share. The party deregistered in December 1999 as an act of penance for their abysmal showing in that year’s general election (party leader Graeme Cairns also placed himself in stocks in Garden Place in Hamilton in December 1999 whilst disgruntled party members pelted him with rotten fruit), but re-registered for the new millenia.

Like many ‘loony’ parties, they’d also offered members ‘lifetime’ memberships in the early years, and scrapping this for renewable annual memberships in order to raise funds felt to many the party was ‘selling out’. The final straw for many was the press printing a ‘party press release’ about the forthcoming 2005 general election unaware it was from a disgruntled ex-member. It was decided to sit out the general election and sort themselves out in time for the next one – it never happened.

Some members went on to become the core of a more professionally run NZ Green Party (which used to run its own ‘pacifist army’), and two former McGSP candidates became Green MPs, one of whom – Metiria Turei – became NZ Green Party co-leader until forced to leave politics in disgrace in 2017 due to a social security fraud.

Although veteran candidate Steve Richards stood as a McGSP candidate in the 2008 general election in the West Coast-Tasman seat and beat the United Future Party candidate in first preference votes (then part of a coalition government with the Nationals), this was unofficial, and at the time of writing, the McGillicuddy Serious Party has remained deregistered since 2005.