Most of you will know I have not been much of a Winston fan and that I think his days are numbered. I confess to voting for him in 1996 when he came into government with his sunglassed Maori mates and was thrown out of government in disgrace. I swore I would never vote for him again, but in 2017 I seriously considered it. I strongly supported his immigration policy and also his promise to remove the Maori seats. But once in the ballot box, I remembered how unreliable he has been about keeping electoral promises and voted two ticks blue. Once he formed a government with Labour and the Greens, that was it. I couldn’t believe that he could betray his voter base like that but he did, and there was no turning back from there.
As we approach another election, Winston is up to his old tricks, but it won’t work this time. Sure, he still has some loyal followers, but not enough to get him across the line and those that voted for him last time, wanting to ‘send National a message’, won’t do so again. This time it is different, but Winston is still playing the same games.
Maybe it is his age. He’s 75, and is probably getting a bit old for the rough and tumble of politics. He has had some minor health issues recently, so to hear him claim that David Seymour wouldn’t last 10 seconds in a boxing ring with him is pathetic in the extreme. There was once a time when you might have believed some of Winston’s outrageous claims. But, like promising to be the first one down the Pike River mine, the ridiculous hyperbole is fooling nobody these days.
His approach to the media has also gone too far. Winston has always had a love-hate relationship with the media, but his taunting of them was, at times, amusing. Not any more. With him calling Jack Tame a “slow learner” and his bitter complaints about the way the media treats him (completely ignoring the disrespectful way he treats them in return), he seems to have lost the media’s tolerance. This is hardly a surprise, but if he is going to get back into parliament, Winston needs the media more than ever. The image that I get in my head now is of him driven into a corner, spitting and kicking like a feral cat at anyone who comes close. This will not get his party above 5%.
Distancing himself from the parties he put in power will not gain him much favour either, because he put them there. If he really thought a Labour-Greens-NZ First government was going to be the best thing for the country in 2017, then he needs to stand by his convictions and talk up their record. Distancing himself from the government that he was a significant part of is only going to remind people that he put the government in place out of utu. Putting personal preferences ahead of the best outcome for the country is political suicide, and Winston is going to pay the price now. Referring to them as the government of “pixie dust” is all very well for an opposition party leader, but Winston created this government and has been part of the “pixie dust” all the way through. He cannot disassociate himself from it now.
I don’t understand what he is playing at anyway. Both Todd Muller and now Judith Collins have reiterated the National caucus decision not to work with Winston post-election. Judith quite dismissively points out that she doubts that he will be back after the election anyway. To then spit tacks at the people that he has been working with in government for the last three years is madness. He may think that National and Labour will come crawling back to him like cockroaches, but he has to be in the kingmaker position for that, and current polling suggests that won’t happen this time around. So, his latest policy seems to be to alienate everyone and hope for the best – not a great strategy in an MMP environment.
His current election campaign also lacks fire. “Back Your Future” makes everyone think of “Back to the Future”, a movie that took us back to the 1950s, which is obviously not the message he wants to portray. Him repeating it three times in his speech just made me think of Harry Potter, or worse still “Candyman”. The Harry Potter image is probably appropriate, both for the pixie dust analogy, but also because Winston probably needs some magic to save him this time.
And then for the hoary old chestnut. In 2017, Winston promised to control immigration and to get rid of the Maori seats – two policies that were very popular with conservative voters. Once in government, of course, both policies were fast forgotten. Now, he is promising to reduce immigration and to hold a referendum on Maori seats. Does he really think we are all going to fall for it again? See what I mean about “Back to the Future”? Did I see Winston leaving the party conference in a De Lorean? I’m sure I did.
Then there were the Brexiteers. A couple of weeks ago, the media reported that NZ First had signed up the “Bad Boys of Brexit”, Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore to run their election campaign. Winston did his usual trick of denying the story, spitting tacks at journalists and calling them fools and liars. Now it seems he has signed them up after all. Again, this does nothing for Winston’s image. It is just more of the same old games, and we have heard it all before. It will also raise more questions about donations and funding for such campaigns. Mind you, if “Back Your Future” is the best they can come up with, I guess he is not paying them very much at all.
All things must pass, but for me, Winston’s legacy is one of huge potential that was lost. He could have been our first Maori prime minister. Instead, his inability to separate his personal feelings from the bigger picture of politics has cost him dearly. Thinking about his cruel attacks on Simon Bridges, his inability to put the good of the country ahead of his personal feelings towards those he believed had deliberately leaked his superannuation information shows he is someone who had a long career but was never as good as he could have been. He constantly allowed himself to be sidetracked from the real game. Yes, there are those that say that you should never write Winston off. Maybe. But to make it back this time, he doesn’t need “Back to the Future” as his slogan. Something to do with Lazarus would be more appropriate.
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