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National Party – the Post Mortem
New Zealand voted for slogans over substance. It just goes to show that policy and delivery don’t matter. All you need are glib slogans and aspirations. You don’t actually have to deliver anything.
The National Party should do a post election review. They didn’t last time, and that’s on the president Peter Goodfellow.
Firstly lets look at the electorate highlights:
Epsom: National won the party vote.
East Coast Bays: Erica Stanford has a majority of 8,071 and only narrowly lost the party vote.
Pakuranga: Simeon Brown has the largest majority of any National MP (9756), and only narrowly lost the party vote by just 130 votes. A big credit to his campaign chair John Slater for that result.
Papakura: Judith Collins retained her seat, with a top 5 performance for her majority (5925). Only narrowly lost the party vote (under 500 votes).
Tamaki: Simon O’Connor has one of the largest majorities at 7892 and he won the party vote.
Taranaki-King Country: Barbara Kuriger won her seat and the party vote.
Waikato: Tim van der Molen retained his seat and won the party vote.
And now the electorate low lights:
Auckland Central: Nikki Kaye jacking it in when Todd Muller gave up cost National this seat. Emma Mellow came third. They handed the seat to the Greens and Chloe Swarbrick. They also lost the party vote by a massive 6200. This should signal the end of Michelle Boag homunculus, and campaign manager Hamish Price, whose crowd fakery stunt on Ponsonby Road delivered more bad headlines for National.
Bay of Plenty: Todd Muller lost the party vote by more than 3000 votes. His majority is a similar margin.
Botany: Chris Luxon only has a majority of 4771, and lost the party vote by 2300.
Hutt South: Chris Bishop lost both the seat and the party vote. Another wet disaster.
Ilam: Gerry Brownlee lost both his seat and the party vote.
Maungakiekie: Traitor Denise Lee not only ankle tapped National in the last week, but also lost the party vote by nearly 7000 votes. She is clinging on with a 580 vote majority.
Nelson: Nick Smith lost both his seat and the party vote by a massive 12,100 votes. Another wet disaster.
New Plymouth: Jonathan Young lost both his seat and the party vote. The party vote by over 6000 votes. Clearly, the locals in Taranaki just love their major industry being smashed to bits. They deserve everything bad coming their way.
Northcote: Dan Bidois, another wet, was rinsed and also lost the party vote by nearly 6000 votes.
Rotorua: Machiavellian plotter Todd McClay won his seat with a reduced majority, but comprehensively lost the party vote by nearly 6000 votes.
Tauranga: A much-reduced majority for Simon Bridges, but lost the party vote by nearly 3000.
Tukituki: Lawrence Yule, a supporter of Mark Mitchell, lost his seat to the Hawkes Bay home wrecker Anna Lorck, and lost the party vote by a massive 6000 votes.
Upper Harbour: Paula Bennett’s ring in, Jake Bezzant‘s dodgy CV lost him the seat and the party vote.
Whangaparaoa: Mark Mitchell retained the seat but lost the party vote, albeit narrowly.
National lost their heartland. That should serve as a warning to the wet and the woke. If you play Labour-lite there is no compelling reason to change from the Labour party. Same goes in the urban seats. The wet and the woke got rinsed. The conservatives and Christians did well against the swing, with the exception of Chris Luxon, who was hampered by his wokeness. His loss of the party vote in a deep blue seat should put anyone off wanting him as leader.
Now let’s look at what went wrong for National. David Farrar compiled some bullet points, and I have added to those along with some comment.
Factors beyond National’s control
- COVID-19
- The Government’s response to COVID-19
- Jacinda Ardern
- Jacinda’s 1 pm press conferences
- The media
- The huge infection rates and death rates in other countries
- The fact that no Government has failed to win a 2nd term since 1975
Having a hostile media environment which lacked either the ability or the willingness to hold Labour and Jacinda Ardern to account for the failures of their last election promises certainly hurt National.
The Prime Minister shamelessly used the Covid Crisis to conduct party political broadcasts unchallenged.
The fear and scaremongering have helped return Labour to power but that fear is completely unfounded. By way of contrast, the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed somewhere between 17 million and 50 million. A third of the world’s population were infected (500 million). COVID-19 has killed only 1.1 million so far, and only about 27 million have been infected. 8600 Kiwis died from the Spanish Flu but only 25 have died from COVID-19. If COVID-19 were anywhere near as deadly as the Spanish Flu then with 7 times the world population than in 1918 you’d think the numbers would be a hell of a lot higher. They aren’t, and so we’ve wrecked our economy for a bad ‘flu’. Worse still, we’ve rewarded the economic vandals with even more power.
Factors National has some control over
- Having seven different Leaders and Deputy Leaders in one term
- Jami-Lee Ross
- Three years of leaks to Newshub
- Hamish Walker
- Andrew Falloon
- A fiscal hole
- SFO charging donors to National
- Michelle Boag
- Messy selections (Auckland Central)
- Mistakes such as Goldsmith’s ethnicity, misfiring walkabouts
- Sabotage by Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett, who was the campaign chair before Muller took over.
- The wet and woke experiment
- Denise Lee and Mark Mitchell ankle-tapping the campaign at a critical junction. Their actions literally cost National 5-6 points overnight.
The problems for National can be sheeted home to caucus choosing the poison of Paula Bennett, and Simon Bridges to lead the party. Bennett’s reign of terror, honey-traps and media leaks directly led to the Jami-Lee Ross issue.
Both Bridges and Bennett had a chance to make that go away by sending Ross to the back-bench but Paula Bennett had already loaded the media gun, and she pulled the trigger. Her control over the inquiry process also fitted up Ross as the leaker despite there being no direct evidence of that. The lining up of four women to do a tell-all to her chosen media hit-men at Newsroom finished Ross off, but left him with no option but to drop extremely damaging bombs all over Bridges.
The caucus clung to Bridges leadership for far too long. Any post election analysis should look at the internal polling, especially the net favourables for both Bennett and Bridges.
When the Covid crisis nobbled National the caucus then made another wrong step in going woke and letting the wet dream team take over the party. One thing that is abundantly clear now is that they had a plan to roll Simon Bridges, but no plans for what happened next.
They weren’t helped by the willing sabotage and spiteful exit of Bridges and Bennett along with key staff. They destroyed the campaign plans and strategy on the way out. So when Mark Mitchell wails about the campaign strategy, know this: his pal Paula Bennett was the campaign chair before Gerry took over. What Gerry took over was empty files.
Todd Muller really should have followed Nikki Kaye out the door. The damage that his tilt at the leadership produced was catastrophic and one of the main reasons for National’s poor showing at the election.
The fact that the wet and the woke were thoroughly rinsed at the election should serve as a warning to National. Go Woke, Get Broke.
You can’t out-woke Labour.
Ill discipline and selection processes will need to be looked at. Hamish Walker and then Andrew Falloon show the perils of selecting wet behind the ears candidates. The party hierarchy can shoulder that blame. They also oversaw a complete shambles in the selection in Auckland Central. Andrew Hunt and Peter Goodfellow should be held accountable for that.
Which leads me to the malign and cancerous influence of Michelle Boag. Her actions cost significant support to National when she conspired with Hamish Walker to leak personal details of Covid victims. Her tentacles reached into numerous electorates, most notably Auckland Central, where her homunculus Hamish Price cocked everything up. His leering and obsequious fawning was captured for all to see as his fake crowd delivered more bad headlines for Judith Collins.
In the last weeks of the campaign, National had clawed itself to 38% in their internal polling. Then Denise Lee, a person so thick she still hasn’t realised that she was used by an equally stupid Mark Mitchell, decided to ankle-tap the campaign. Her email was allegedly leaked by Mark Mitchell and those actions caused an immediate and ultimately fatal drop of 5-6 points almost overnight. They never recovered from that. Their treason should be met with an extremely low seat ranking on Tuesday. If she worked for a corporate she’d have been fired.
It is also equally clear that the board, under Peter Goodfellow, has become moribund. If Goodfellow had any modicum of shame in him, then he’d pull his nomination for the board at the conference next month. He has now overseen two losses. The board needs a clean out.
The party should also conduct an independent review of its performance and create a framework for recovery. Perhaps that should be done by a group comprised of two ex-Presidents (excluding Boag) and a campaign professional like Steven Joyce. Change needs to and must be made.
There are some positives that can be gleaned from this result. The wet and woke don’t gain votes for National. Pandering to climate change and the anti-farmer brigade cost National. Conservative and Christian MPs held their own. MPs who showed a point of difference with Labour won the party vote. The best performers were Judith Collins’s supporters, the worst were the wet and woke.
National will rebuild, and in three years time you will see the greatest ever swing against an incumbent government. Labour now has no one to blame when the chill winds of depression blow through the economy. They won’t achieve much more than they have in the past three years, and all the women who voted for hugs and kindness are going to have the biggest buyers remorse you’ve ever seen. When they realise that they are the ones who are going to have to make the economic sacrifices that their saint and saviour has waiting for them, they are going to be very angry.
Sadly those wives and girlfriends who voted Labour have undermined their husbands’ and partners’ businesses. They will rue that.
The other benefit of the election is that there are now no more excuses left for failure by Jacinda Ardern. She can no longer blame Winston Peters for his hand brake. If in three years child poverty isn’t solved, light rail isn’t built, more houses aren’t built, the economy tanks, unemployment rises making a lie of them saving jobs, and there is no material progress on emissions-free, then the only person to shoulder the blame for that will be Jacinda Ardern.
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