a stock of usual tactics or methods straight from his opponent’s political playbook.
hmerriam-webster.com
In this instance, Judith Collins is wise to avoid anything remotely connected to her opposition’s playbook, simply because their tactics don’t work for them and won’t help her either.
Collins, bless her heart, takes an intelligent and diligent approach to her work, unlike other politicians we could name but don’t need to because we know who they are.
Instead, she took a leaf out of the political playbook written by the master politician of social media, the great and one and only Donald Trump the Tweeter.
Collins has been on Twitter for a while now, but lately, I have noticed more tweets than usual.
This week she called out our part-time PM for unfairly berating Scott Morrison over climate change and then reprimanded Andrew Little for calling ACT and the National Party politicians fascists. “Not funny”, Judith said, quite rightly, particularly when the fascist label fits Andrew Little so much better, but of course Collins is far too kind to say so.
Collins is indisputably increasing her public profile and getting her voice heard where it counts, which is outside the MSM. Still, the MSM give her a fair amount of coverage but Collins is right not to trust them. She knows however nice they are, they can turn on you like rabid wolves at the first smell of blood. She won’t have forgotten the time they sent her scuttling off to the backbenches. Retreat is not in Collin’s nature, but in those circumstances retreating and licking her wounds was the lesser of two evils.
‘Crusher’ Collins is a strong woman and a fighter and the National Party know it. Wouldn’t you think they would be grateful for her strength and loyalty? Not so, instead of slobbering all over her in gratitude they simply use her to prop up their ailing party, keeping her at arm’s length and us in the dark about how far they will let this gifted woman rise.
Not far, it appears while Simon Bridges clings to leadership like a drowning sailor hangs onto the mast of a yacht in a storm. Although, it was a relief when his partner in the art of murky politics stepped away from the helm.
The National Party are dead in the water but oblivious to the fact. They think their history of success and the CoL’s appalling performance will rocket them back into power at the next election. They are wrong.
The Nats reek of dirty politics. At best they have been feeble in opposition, ignoring the free speech debate, throwing their support behind expensive and bogus climate change legislation, supporting the badly written gun reform law and in short allowing arguably the worst government to ever grace the beehive get away with ruining the economy. Judith Collins has been standout in calling the CoL to account on housing but the only other serious opposition the CoL faced came from David Seymour on free speech.
It is slim pickings for conservative voters at the next election. Collins in the rank and file is not enough to persuade traditional national voters to support them again, but Collins in leadership is much more compelling. It’s a great pity she may be forced to go down with the ship, with Bridges still clinging to the mast.
