Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Taxpayers' Union's Chris Hipkins AI advert is brilliant campaigning

All right. So the question today is whether the taxpayers union have gone too far with the AI advert about Chris Hipkins. Now, if you haven't seen this ad yet, let me explain it to you. The video starts, a short video, but it starts with a man, a ginger haired man in a suit and a red tie running full tilt down a suburban street. He kicks in a door inside the house as a family having dinner. He runs up to them and he takes all their wallets off the table and then runs off. And then he kicks in the door of another house. A woman is watching telly in there. He runs up, takes her wallet, bolts it out the door. Then he takes a wallet at a reno site and then he takes all the money lying on a table at a barbecue. And then he runs out back onto the street to a clapped out red Toyota, gets in, looks in the rearview mirror and it's chippy. And then the ad says, we can't afford labour. Now, as you can imagine, commentators on the left are absolutely losing their minds over this ad. Hipkins has called it nasty and desperate. And he says it's showing how out of touch the rich boys who run the taxpayers union are, frankly. I think it's brilliant. I think it's a brilliant ad. I saw this ad weeks ago, funnily enough, before the Taxpayers Union released it. I thought it was very, very funny the first time I saw it. It doesn't cross ethical lines at all. No one will think it really is Hipkins. Not just because the AI actor doesn't actually look like Hipkins, but because the behavior is just so bloody outrageous. There's no way this is actually Chris Hipkins doing it. You'd have to be an idiot to think that this is real. The use of AI also is perfectly acceptable. And in fact, political parties would be idiots not to use something this cheap and this effective. And that, I think, is the key thing here. This is the most effective attack ad on Labour yet. This is a thousand times more effective than every single one of the national MPs going nine new taxes on some kind of 1995 strategy in the hope that someone is going to take their false claim seriously. This ad takes an idea... that chippy is after your money, which you know is true, and then exaggerates it to the point of being funny. But because it's funny and because it's visual, it sticks. Now, you might not like the taxpayers' union. You might not like their politics. You might not like their strategies. But you have got to admit that they are some of the best in the business at campaigning and making a political point with a little bit of humour. My advice to Chippy would be stop talking about the ad, mate, because you are only drawing attention to something that thousands of people are now going to want to see and they're going to remember because it's quite funny. For more from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive, listen live to News Talk ZB from 4 p.m. weekdays or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.