At the outset, let me make my political preference clear. Since I took a job as a reporter (and later editor) of the North Wairarapa Herald in Pahiatua in 1948, then the electorate of the deputy leader of the National Party, Keith Holyoake, I have been a National supporter, and apart from my years in Samoa, 1951-58, a National voter (and unsuccessful candidate in Napier in 1969). I joined the party in 1960 in Wellington, and as an electorate chairman in Island Bay, and North Shore, attended many divisional and national conferences.
At one such divisional conference in Wellington, about year 1970, chatting to Holyoake, by then Prime Minister, I asked him what he expected from rank-and-file members of our party. Without hesitation, he replied with one word: “Loyalty”.
I recalled this when I noted on election night last Saturday, that Labour had scored more heavily in the Party List vote in two seats regarded as “true blue”: North Shore, where I live and vote, won comfortably enough by a new MP, Simon Watts, and Papakura, where I am by my choice a co-opted member and conference delegate, again held comfortably enough by Judith Collins, long-serving MP and now Leader of the Opposition. The Party List Vote numbers:
North Shore: Labour 14,292; National, 12442
Papakura: Labour 12,822; National 12,388
Among the commentariat who know what’s what in politics, this reversal is put down to National voters giving their Party List votes to Labour in an effort to keep the Greens out of Parliament.
Well, that didn’t work, did it! As so often with misplaced loyalty, also known as “tactical voting”, that rebounded miserably for the disloyal Nats, to the detriment of the party whose MP they were happy to vote for.
How and why did we get this lop-sided result? The two media comments that have impressed me most were from Richard Harman in his blog Politik and Richard Prebble in the New Zealand Herald.
Both talk about the opposing dilemmas facing both Labour and National.
- Labour, with enough seats to govern on its own, and needing a fairly early decision whether or not to enter into some arrangement with the Green Party, whose co-leaders seem to be itching for Ministerial appointments, either inside Cabinet as part of a formal coalition agreement, or outside Cabinet under a confidence and supply agreement.
- National, with an urgent need, already signalled by Ms Collins, to review its organisation and processes to see where it went wrong.
Nothing can be decided by either party until the half-million or so special votes have been counted, and the election writs returned on 6 November, so we can expect media speculation to continue for a few days yet.
Labour doesn’t need the Greens for the coming term of Parliament, and will have to weigh up the odds of how much support it would lose from the anti-Green voters who went red this year, if it accommodates the Greens and their far-out daydreams of some form of wealth or inheritance tax, and their economically damaging threats to our primary producers from unproven claims of dangerous man-made global warming (these days termed “climate change”) in the absence of any such appreciable warming since the El Nino spike of the late 1990s.
For National, the situation is far more complex, and with eyes on the next election in 2023, far more urgent. Inside the National Party, I have a probably deserved reputation as a stirrer, and much as I regret having to say so, I think our party has lost its way. In its heyday, under Sidney Holland and Keith Holyoake, from 1949 until 1972, apart from 1957-60 when Walter Nash bought a Labour term with his promise of 100 pounds for beneficiaries and then had to pay for it with Arnold Nordmeyer’s 1958 “Black Budget”, National created a reputation as a broad church rural-urban coalition with policies based on principles of freedom and choice, that were represented by the name of its own newspaper, Freedom. Then, another one-term Labour Government under Norman Kirk, who campaigned on the theme “It’s Time – Time for a Change to Labour” that came to an end with Kirk’s untimely death, and Rob Muldoon swept the country in the following election in 1975, retaining power until displaced by the Lange Labour Government in 1984.
There are many in New Zealand today who blame Muldoon for many of the ills that have afflicted our country from then until the arrival of COVID-19. Those critics conveniently forget that the first task of a political leader is to win government, and Muldoon did that brilliantly, especially in the way he harnessed the communicative pulling power of television and private radio. Kiwis of my age can readily see in this year 2020, that Jacinda Ardern looks to have taken lessons from the Muldoon playbook in her use of TV.
Along the way, since about 1990, and more especially since we saddled ourselves with a proportional voting system designed for a large federal conglomeration such as post-World War II Germany, established principles in political life have given way to short-term pragmatism and personalities, nurtured by a money-hungry news media that has abandoned the C.P. Scott (legendary Manchester Guardian guru) mantra: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
The National Party needs to get back to its founding principles of freedom and choice, but not in terms of its founding years of the 1930s or its years of being the natural party of government, 1949-1984. Even before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way of life and work had begun to change to a better balance, with computers and the internet enabling much work to be done from home without time-wasting commuting. Covid has simply confirmed a new and different work-life balance that will influence the way in which a country is governed. As we have in the past with old-age pensions and votes for women, New Zealand can and probably will become the agent of change to the new way.
As Labour grapples with its decision about what to do with the Greens, its own need is to put detailed flesh on the raw bones of what Jacinda Ardern promises us is their “plan”, as well as the funding of whatever that “plan” turns out to be.
National’s urgent task is a total review of its organisation and processes at membership and Parliamentary Caucus levels, so as to make itself again relevant as the broad church rural-urban party needed for efficient government of New Zealand from the 2023 election and beyond.
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