Will John Oliver expose New Zealand’s Trump tribute act?
America’s favourite foreign-election meddler has spent a decade mocking us — and our election lands four days after the US midterms.
Here is a prediction, dated and on the record. Christopher Luxon set the general election for Saturday 7 November — four days after America votes in its midterms. In the fortnight before those midterms, Last Week Tonight will be hunting for the story that shows how Donald Trump’s politics are spreading abroad. The best exhibit on Earth is the country John Oliver claims to love most.
The question is not whether New Zealand deserves the attention. It is whether a country that has spent a century asking famous visitors what they think of it is ready to hear the answer.
Contents
His favourite country
John Oliver has been laughing at us for more than a decade.
It began with Eminem — or rather, with the National Party’s 2014 campaign music, a sound-alike track that had literally been named “Eminem-esque”. Oliver’s advice was that anyone ripping off an artist should at least not put the artist’s name on it. The High Court later found the track breached copyright and ordered National to pay $600,000.
Then came John Key’s ponytail-pulling, his interview on Radio Hauraki, Laser Kiwi in the flag debate and the sex toy thrown at Steven Joyce at Waitangi. When Bill English told Patrick Gower that some of Oliver’s material “isn’t very funny”, Oliver answered with another monologue about New Zealand politics. When Ikea left us off a world map in 2019, he offered a cut-out New Zealand to stick on any map that needed one.
In 2023 he went further. Discovering that anyone with an email address could vote in Forest & Bird’s Bird of the Century, he put up billboards from Mumbai to Tokyo for the puteketeke. The contest’s previous record of 56,000 votes fell within a couple of hours. His bird won. Asked why he picks on us, Oliver said New Zealanders “take it with remarkable good humour” and that he would happily rename his programme New Zealand Tonight.
What he has never done is turn his full attention to how we are governed. That may be about to change.
The shop window
New Zealand prime ministers have always craved American late-night television — on their own terms.
In January 2009, after David Letterman remarked on air, while interviewing Nicole Kidman, that he would love to visit, John Key recorded a personal video pitch listing ten reasons the host should come. When Letterman didn’t, Tourism New Zealand lobbied to get Key onto the show while he was in New York for the UN General Assembly. American PR firm Hill & Knowlton had been hired months earlier to broker and prepare the appearance. Key’s Top Ten list included Auckland Airport’s new Cinnabon.
Jacinda Ardern went further. She sat on Stephen Colbert’s couch in 2018, fielding the Trump questions everyone expected. A year later she collected Colbert from the airport herself, hosted him at a barbecue with Lorde, and called his week of segments “an amazing opportunity to do something for New Zealand”.
Colbert’s Late Show ended in May. He is now co-writing a new Lord of the Rings film, and Peter Jackson says he has already made trips to New Zealand to work on it. A fellow alumnus of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show now has every reason to be in Jackson’s Wellington.
Incumbents get the airport pick-ups and the barbecues. Scrutiny, when it comes, arrives uninvited.
“So, what do you think of us?”
No country asks that question as often as we do.
Te Ara records that, until the jet age, the arrival of any famous visitor brought an insecure nation’s inevitable question about what they made of the place — and that criticism from the Rolling Stones, John Cleese and Paul Theroux made scandalised headlines.
Little has changed. When Oliver mocked Ikea’s map, Air New Zealand publicly invited him to come and see us. When he adopted a grebe, the national carrier flew his puppet here for free. The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire summed it up: Oliver may be fixated on New Zealand, but we are even more fixated on his fixation.
That hunger for outside approval cuts both ways. A country that treasures a foreigner’s praise will feel his contempt twice as hard.
America interfering in foreign elections
Oliver doesn’t just mock other countries’ elections. He campaigns in them.
In 2014 he mock-endorsed Doug Ford for mayor of Toronto so the world could keep laughing, and gave Scotland’s independence referendum a main segment days before the vote.
On the eve of Canada’s 2015 election he told viewers to reject Stephen Harper. Because section 331 of the Canada Elections Act bars non-residents from inducing electors, he and a Mountie-uniformed Mike Myers threw $5,000 — the maximum fine — into the air. Elections Canada later indicated he had not broken the law. Harper lost.
In June 2016 he made Brexit his main story, arguing Britain would be mad to leave; Sky held the segment back in Britain until the polls closed to comply with Ofcom’s election rules. Britain left anyway. In April 2017 he turned his set into a French bistro and, in French, pleaded with voters not to elect Marine Le Pen, comparing her to Trump. Emmanuel Macron won.
Flooding our bird ballot in 2023, he described his own method as the essence of democracy: America interfering in other people’s elections.
His strike rate is mixed. His appetite for foreign democracies is not.
The playbook
Trump’s second term has been a loyalty test for his allies. Luxon’s government has leaned in.
When the US and Israel struck Iran on 28 February, New Zealand officially neither supported nor condemned the attack. Emails later published by the NZ Herald showed Luxon had asked to follow Canada and Australia in giving the strikes explicit public support — a request Winston Peters’ office rejected. Luxon’s office says the emails mischaracterise his position and that he was testing the advice he received.
In Washington, Trump directed Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade to manufacture more Republican seats. Here, the Electoral Amendment Act banned prisoners from voting and closed enrolment 13 days before election day — changes the Attorney-General found inconsistent with the Bill of Rights. Different tools, same instinct: shape the electorate before it votes.
RNZ found more than $1 million in donations since 2022 from people and entities linked to fast-track projects, almost 90 per cent of it to National and NZ First. In 2025 alone the coalition partners received $400,000; Labour received $8,620. Ministers maintain that party donations do not create a conflict of interest for individual ministers, and the Auditor-General opened an investigation into ministerial conflicts of interest under the Act. I have traced that pattern before.
Trump’s Washington runs on access. So, increasingly, does Wellington.
Add Shane Jones’s “Drill, drill, drill!” and a plan to scrap the Broadcasting Standards Authority that officials warned carried significant risks, and the family resemblance is hard to miss.
None of this makes Luxon Trump. It makes him a follower — and followers are exactly who Oliver likes to point at.
The scorecard
The world has noticed, even if we pretend not to.
New Zealand scored 91 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2015. In 2025 it scored 81 — two points down for the fourth year running, now equal fourth with Norway. The number of countries scoring above 80 has shrunk from 12 to five in a decade.
Transparency International’s global report names the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand together as established democracies in decline, blaming weaker standards and enforcement. The US now scores 64. Analysis in The Conversation found much of New Zealand’s fall came from business concern about how public contracts and licences are awarded — the fast-track’s home ground. The remedy, an independent anti-corruption commission, has been on the table for years.
A top-five ranking still looks good on a tourism poster. The trend line is what a comedian puts on screen.
The coat-tails
Luxon didn’t just copy Trump. He timed his election around him.
Announcing the date, Luxon said voters would decide who could govern in “a very volatile and uncertain world”. Chris Hipkins said the late date suggested a prime minister desperate to hang on. Since then Luxon has survived two party leadership votes, and 1 News–Verian’s August poll had National on 29 per cent to Labour’s 30.
Trump heads into the midterms with approval stuck at 33 per cent, warning supporters he will be impeached if Republicans lose the House. He needs cheaper petrol before 3 November. Ending the Iran war would deliver it — and, as I argued in September, New Zealand’s pump prices would follow before 7 November, handing the coalition a late, unearned cost-of-living win.
A government that needs Trump to win is a government that can no longer afford to criticise him.
The segment writes itself
Oliver’s timing problem is also his opportunity.
In 2024 he complained of being forced to spend eight main stories on America’s election instead of the stories he wanted. This season he has already covered the Iran strikes and the redrawing of congressional maps. His episodes of 18 and 25 October will reach New Zealand just as advance voting opens.
A segment on Trump’s influence abroad has an obvious cold open: the country that once sent Oliver Laser Kiwi and a bird contest is now sending him a prisoner voting ban and donor-linked fast-tracks. The man who campaigned against Harper, Brexit and Le Pen would not need to tell anyone how to vote. He would only need to show Americans what their president has been exporting.
If he runs it, remember where you read it first. If he doesn’t, every word of the evidence still stands.
Last time John Oliver meddled in a New Zealand vote, he backed a puking bird. This time, he’d only need to hold up a mirror.
