OPINION

Political journalists and commentators are often prone to examples of exaggeration. Tova O’Brien is one of the worst, but it is understandable when you work for a niche publication that is so close to failing that its staff resort to calamitous exaggerated headlines to attract readers to their dross.

She is saved somewhat by the question mark, but the rest of the article is rubbish.

She uses the example of Stuart Nash chucking his former colleagues under the bus as evidence of the start of a death spiral for Labour. Maybe.

As every single major political party has taught us while in opposition, you can only get elected or have any hope of convincing people you’re worthy of their votes, if your caucus is unified.

While Labour MPs – actually in the parliament – are holding it together by a thread, it’s former MPs who are starting to create fissures in the facade of unity and raise the spectre of another long stint in the wilderness of opposition for the left.

Such as it is between former Labour ministers Stuart Nash and Kiritapu Allan.

Former Police Minister Nash told RNZ on Monday that he pushed former Justice Minister Allan to go further on laws targeting gang assets but he was shut down by his cabinet colleagues and then-Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.

He wanted Police to be able to seize all gang leaders’ property – cars, bikes and bling – no matter their value but instead the threshold was set at assets valued above $30,000.

Nash then told NZME that when Allan shut the idea down with him directly, he asked to take it to Cabinet:

“And she said ‘No, this is what it’s going to be.’ She obviously went to Hipkins and Hipkins said, ‘Okay, we’re going to leave it at $30,000?. Why? Because it’s anti-Maori. Bulls….”

Nash said he went “toe-to-toe” with Allan at the time but told Stuff he didn’t now want a “tit-for-tat”.

Stuff

It was an interesting insight into the vagaries of lobbying for action inside Labour’s cabinet and caucus, but a signal that the Labour Party is on the road to an ignominious death it is not.

O’Brien then uses quotes from former and current MPs, Kiri Allan and Willie Jackson to support her claims. All it shows is the freedom of not being an MP leads to the truth being told. Sure there are ructions, but are they terminal? I think not.

But O’Brien labours the point:

But this very public fight – debate warranted or not – feels distinctly like a harbinger of things to come.

More bad polls for Chris Hipkins and Labour could very well see the scrap boiling over from former MPs to current ones and what usually follows then, are questions over leadership.

That’s when the opposition death spiral truly begins.

Stuff

It’s not a death spiral, because a party with a history of more than one hundred years of existence has an uncanny ability to rise from defeat again and again and again, albeit for brief stops on the Treasury benches.

Governments lose elections; oppositions don’t win them. All Labour has to do is wait until people tire of the current Government and then they will be back in. Politics is a game of redemption and forgiveness, and you only have to look at Winston Peters and NZ First to know that.

The only parties that enter a death spiral are third parties. They wax and wane, often in a single term. Labour and National aren’t that. Sure they both have issues, but they will never actually die. Commentators like Tova O’Brien are too young to know this stuff. You’d never hear those words uttered from the lips of Barry Soper.

But that will prove out in short order when the organisation O’Brien works for actually does crash and burn after its own death spiral that it is currently, desperately trying to pull itself out of.

Labour is just in a flat spin, and it is recoverable. Stuff is passing VNE (velocity never exceed), the point at which the wings rip off and it crashes spectacularly into a hard surface. Stuff‘s death spiral started some time ago. Now we are just eagerly awaiting the impact.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...