Once a year, as the days shorten, a great migration begins. From the warm offices of Wellington and the cafes of central Auckland, the political class sets out for Mystery Creek, where the gates of Fieldays open and the country remembers that it has a countryside.

The suit is shed, the tie abandoned. In their place appears the sacred vestment of the season, the gumboot. Never mind that the wearer last touched mud at the previous election.

For three days gumboots are worn with the solemnity of bishops’ mitres. The standup is delivered. Boots are planted in straw to prove communion with the soil.

There are sacred rituals, too. A lamb must be held, a tractor admired, a sausage eaten outdoors, and a photograph taken in which the politician regards a cow as though glimpsing the future.

Mystery Creek obliges. This year, Fieldays featured a politicians' advocacy hub, a kind of chapel where members of every party take turns at the pulpit. The theme of all their sermons is the same: to assure the assembled faithful that they, personally, have always understood the land.

The Prime Minister opened proceedings and, as is customary, arrived with ritual offerings. There was $51 million for low-emissions technology, $59 million for commercial projects, and a promise to double the QE II Conservation Trust’s funding if his party wins in November.

The faithful were blessed, with millions sprayed across the paddock like holy fertiliser. As Monty Python’s holy scriptures tell us, “blessed are the cheesemakers.”

Labour, not to be outdone, sent its own leader north in his own gumboots. His policy of cheap bus rides for city folk might be of vanishingly little benefit to rural people, but he, too, expressed with warm conviction that he is a son of the soil at heart.

The party leaders’ contest is not over who farms the most. None of them farm. It is over who can stand in a cowshed and look least awkward.

On Saturday, the marquees come down. Boots are wiped and returned to the cupboard. The politicians return to the cities where almost all of them live and almost all of us vote. The cows, who have seen this before, return to the serious business of digesting grass.

But the gumboots looked authentic and the indulgences were dispensed. Everyone agreed it had been a wonderful Fieldays. They will be back next year.