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Like many of you, I went to bed Saturday night feeling rather flat. I had secretly held hope that the result would be close and that the Green party would fail to make it past the 5% threshold. I never in my wildest nightmares saw Chloe Swarbrick winning an electorate seat. Both Chloe and Jacinda Ardern will still be on a high today as the scale of their win sinks in and if the cannabis referendum passes in the not too distant future they may even sit down together to toast their win over a puff of the devil’s cabbage.
It is tempting to give in to despair but if you look hard enough there are always silver linings to be found and they are not insignificant.
One of the really good ones is that when the people who voted for Chloe and Jacinda start feeling the effects of an economy in freefall the buck will stop with them. In three short years, there will be no love left to go around. People will be hurting and they will blame Labour and the Greens for their pain.
Secondly, this electoral thrashing will either make or break forever the National party. They will either, under Judith Collins’s leadership, rebuild the party from the ground up, getting rid of all the old and toxic wood, or they will implode under new woke and wet management.
Both options will be good for economic conservatives as one of two things will happen. If they rebuild under Judith those of us who have left the National party can come home to a revitalised party that has returned to its founding values. If they implode under a woke wet leader, that will allow Act under David Seymour to become the second-largest political party in New Zealand with the once-proud National party relegated to minor party status.
Thirdly, either a strong Act party or a revitalised National party can expect to storm home in three years time when people are crying out for competent economic leadership. By then all the cracks in the ship that the Labour-led government have pasted over until now will be revealed as the scale of the damage will be too awful to be keep hidden.
Fourthly there is one aspect of Jacinda Ardern that means that the damage will not be as bad as it could be. She doesn’t actually deliver anything. The fact that she is all slogans and no substance actually works in New Zealand’s favour. She talks about being transformational and yet even her most avid supporters complain that there has been no transformation. Yes, she will oversee the next three years of economic hardship and despair but she is unlikely to do anything revolutionary to affect it. She won’t solve any problems and she will spray money around but apart from Andrew Little’s disturbing goal to curb our free speech with his Blasphemy Hate Speech laws, she is not likely to actually do anything.
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