Ban all fireworks. Give everyone fireworks. Rewrite the national anthem. Stop politicians blocking me on social media: parliament’s online petitions page is a trip inside the nation’s raw, unfiltered political id. 

If you asked people to point to the centrifugal force powering New Zealand’s democracy, most would name the parliamentary biscuit tin. Our MPs’ members’ bills are drawn at random out of the crumb-encrusted receptacle every second Wednesday while parliament is sitting. Some of the most interesting and important bits of legislation in our nation’s history have been plucked from its grubby innards. Gay marriage, legal prostitution, parents no longer being allowed to whip their children with a belt; all began with someone rummaging around inside a cookie jar.

There’s something uniquely New Zealand about orienting our democracy around a Shrewsbury container bought from DEKA in the 90s. This country runs on a heady concoction of the crap and the sublime. But for all its folksy charm, there’s still a trace of elitism to the biscuit tin. It’s only accessible to parliamentarians. Normal people can’t put their pleas in its hallowed orifice. The tin isn’t giving a voice to the smallfolk. Neither are our general elections. Thankfully there’s still one place where our MPs are exposed to the true, unfiltered force of the nation’s political id. 

Click the URL petitions.parliament.nz and you’ll be teleported directly into the eclectic, often deranged, occasionally profound, political soul of the nation. The page contains 4,409 petitions, with requests ranging from the macro to the microscopic. One calls for our entire tax system to be replaced with a 1% tariff on every transaction. Another appeals for a four-day work week.

But many more seem to be last-ditch Hail Mary attempts to fix highly specific personal problems. Corina Shields has won 385 signatures for her cause of banning politicians from blocking her on social media. “The reason for my petition is that over the last three years I have been blocked by a number of members of parliament across various social media platforms,” she writes. “I believe no abuse has been shown towards these representatives and that this has been done to shut down the voices of those who question what our MPs are telling us.”

Several students have written in asking the government to give them back their phones at morning tea and lunch. Another man wants a law stopping neighbours from blocking views.

Some petitioners dip their toes into ultra-specific and nation-shaping causes simultaneously. Abhishek Tirhekar’s sagacious call to give checkout staff in every supermarket or minimarket a chair has eight signatures. A concurrent push to abolish income tax sadly only has four backers. 

That’s still at least three more than one of the nation’s most prolific, and least successful, petitioners. Family First’s national director Bob McCoskrie has a total of two recorded votes between the four petitions he’s lodged. Signature counts from 2013 don’t seem to be recorded but in at least one case it appears McCoskrie hasn’t bothered to sign his own proposal. 

Maybe he’s onto something. Some petitions are just best left unsigned and unremarked, buried in an unmarked grave beneath the detritus of their contemporaries. The stupid ideas are many and varied. One petitioner calls for us to exit the United Nations for sanctioning the Covid-19 vaccine, which she falsely believes to have been made using organs harvested from live babies. There are lashings of bigotry. A petition with no signatures calls for banning calls to prayer nationwide. Another proposes sending “pro-Hamas” supporters to a “bootcamp in Palestine”. 

For all the gobs of prejudice and delusion, many more people come forward with clever ideas that would actually fix a few things in this darn country if we took them seriously. If only we’d listened to Kirsten Van Newtown in 2021, when she asked to save the maternity sector from crisis. But the ideas don’t have to be earth-shattering. Tom Wood makes the inarguably intelligent call to extend daylight saving time year-round. Terry Barr wants a solar/crank radio in every home to use in case of natural disasters. Desiree Thompson wants to legalise marijuana.

These people are trying to improve the nation’s future through the proven medium of online signatures. But sometimes even sensible ideas run into a dark current of hostility, and the resulting conflict can create a petition-off. Multiple entries on the website call for the government to ban fireworks, while a competing petition aims to expand their sale. One person wants to ban the police from using pepper spray, while another wants to let anyone use it for self-defence.

It’s a cacophony of democracy. The temptation is to go through all of them and sign, sign, sign. Public election of Reserve Bank governor? Tick. Abolish school uniforms? Absolutely. Establish the Motueka ward as a territorial authority? Uh, sure. 

There’s something unitive about this great mess of ideas. As Don Wollerman says in his petition to change the lyrics to the national anthem: “Every creed and every race / We are one in freedom’s place”. It’s true: all of us are one in this online sarcophagus of batshit suggestions and brilliant brainwaves, joined in the Sisyphean task of getting a random online suggestion into law. Wollerman’s petition contains a Vimeo link to New Zealand soprano Jenny Wollerman singing his proposed rewrite. “Forge ahead, New Zealand,” she trills, where normally the song would talk about God engaging in defence. It’s the call of the parliamentary petitions website. Forge ahead, with exiting the UN, abolishing income tax, and passing a law stopping the neighbours from blocking my views. There’s got to be better than this out there. Forge ahead.