This photo was taken at a public meeting in Botany yesterday. Botany is an electorate where Jami-Lee Ross holds a very strong majority. National party people like to brag about how good their ground game is and they seem to think that they will win the Botany electorate off Jami-Lee Ross easily.
The tiny numbers attending their public meeting last night suggest that they cannot take winning the Botany electorate for National for granted. If you take out the committee members and the local government candidates, there would have been about 15 people at the meeting.
If they can only draw 15 people to a National party meeting in an electorate with one of the largest majorities for National then I’d suggest they have a battle on their hands.
National sources have told us (rather bravely) that the committee are working really hard but it looks like they need some serious help. Jami-Lee Ross is on the ground all over the electorate working very hard as well. Everywhere he goes people are saying good on him for standing up to Bridges and are expressing a desire to see Simon Bridges replaced by Judith Collins. Perhaps Jami-Lee Ross is getting a pretty good reception around the electorate because many of them know a stitch-up when they see one and some of them can see through Paula Bennett’s bad press hit jobs.
I’d suggest that whoever is selected for National is going to get very bruised. We are reliably informed that membership is soaring as prospective candidates get ready for the selection process, reported to be scheduled for October. They are going to need to give up their day job if they are to have any hope of beating the ground game currently being played by Jami-Lee Ross. Irrespective of that, even though membership is supposedly soaring, a paltry 15 warm bodies is nothing to be proud of.
The only person anyone should have any pity for is the hardworking Simeon Brown, valiantly helping out at the neighbouring electorate when the committee can barely organise enough people to run a tiddlywink round robin. I’d hazard a guess that the local housie club draws more members than the National party right now.