National Picks Five Non-locals to Contest Botany Selection

The strategic genius of National is on display again. They are fighting a ground game against a well-known and hard-working local and they go and select five people that aren’t even from the area to compete in Botany.

Although Katrina Bungard will be expecting to cash in on the chit Paula Bennett and Pete Goodfellow wrote for her when they pushed her out to the media as one of the four to throw Jami-lee Ross under their bus, they risk an ugly flare-up if she turns feral on them.

The other four are:

Christopher Luxon – a man pilots don’t speak fondly of, who must also have pissed off the flight attendants with the cancelled and once lucrative for the flight attendants, London flights. He would certainly have been involved in the planning for that, plus the pending redundancies.

There is plenty of negative publicity coming out of Air New Zealand queued up and waiting to hit him hard if he is selected. He isn’t being helped by the pushing of the hierarchy, and he certainly won’t be helped when locals find out he’s boasted in the past of helping the Obama campaign when he lived in Chicago. He resides in Remuera and voting delegates would do well to ask where his kids go to school. They may be very surprised to find out the answer to that question.

Troy Elliot – newly elected to the Orakei Local Board, and cancer campaigner. It’s fair to say he is the donkey in the field and will find it tough to get past the Orakei connection. Also trying to trump Katrina Bungard (the closest thing to a local), in a cancer story competition won’t play well.

Agnes Loheni – West Auckland’s favourite Samoan MP, who deserves an award for thumbing her nose at the hierarchy and entering the selection race over the protestations of the president, the board and the leadership. A sitting MP always has an advantage over blowhard woke business leaders trying their hand at politics.

Jake Bezzant – the Kiwi professional parking attendant from California. He’s known to be Paula Bennett’s pick, and he may well be competing in Botany to have a better crack at Upper Harbour. Being a mate of Paula’s isn’t career enhancing in the long run; just ask Mark Mitchell.

Only Katrina Bungard can remotely claim to be local, also having been re-elected to the nearby Howick Local Board. Asking her where her kids go to school will be a bonus for her that the others can’t compete on. She’d be a shoo-in if she was in Labour because, after having lost her leg to cancer, she’d qualify for their disabled quota. Unfortunately for her, National have no such quotas but she took one for the team in Manurewa, increasing the party vote at the last election.

The election campaign is going to be unbelievably dirty and the reality is that only Katrina Bungard has got the wood on Jami-lee Ross. The others simply won’t cope with the onslaught.

The party leadership will get a rude awakening when the locals shun Christopher Luxon. Members have few opportunities to vent their displeasure at the leadership, and selections and board elections are some of the few opportunities that exist. Members use those opportunities wisely when presented with them. Locals didn’t want a bar of World Cup-winning All Black David Kirk, who ironically made it to work in parliament weeks before Clew Simich eventually won the Tamaki byelection after Jim Bolger hired him to work in his office. Locals moved against incumbent Brian Neeson in favour of John Key, but selections like that are few and far between. In Botany, locals selected Jami-lee Ross against a supposed star in Maggie Barry, so the local history is against carpet-baggers and ring-ins.

National’s hierarchy has tried to be clever but they may well regret trying to get an Obama hugging, Jacinda fanboi, woke, greenie, tosser selected in Botany. Ex-CEO types rarely do well in politics. Again the exception is John Key.

Mark Darrow, the dirty little NZTA leaker, is also the electorate chair and he is causing huge problems during the selection process. His latest rush-of-shit-to-the-brains is to ban any non-Botany National party members from attending ‘meet the candidates’ evenings. This includes MPs and neighbouring officeholders like Pakuranga’s electorate chair who has been an office holder in the party since Adam was a boy. Sources say even the leader and deputy have been banned, the only curious exception being Dan Bidois, the MP for Northcote. You’d think that he didn’t have time to try and manipulate a selection process when he is busily feeding his drip fed leaks to Chris Bishop.