In 2013 on the forerunner to this website, and also on the NZ Herald (back when they allowed comments), I predicted that David Cunliffe would sink without a trace within about 15 minutes due to the fact that, outside of New Lynn and left-wing circles, nobody had heard of him. This was met with widespread derision from left-wingers who assured me he was a “game changer” and inevitable election winner. Needless to say, I was correct; nobody in Timaru, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Dunedin, or Henderson had heard of him and he went on to spectacularly lose the 2014 general election.
Tomorrow the socialist party will attempt to choose a new leader and Prime Minister. Unfortunately for them, they are incredibly racist and any chance of victory in 2023 will be snuffed out. Grant Robertson could probably ‘win’ (i.e. get 37% or so of the vote), but the Pacific Islanders won’t wear it, so he has ruled himself out of contention. In typical upper-middle-class champagne socialist-style, “homophobia” is okay when non-white people do it, and it is bad form to call it out (“…because they’re brown, and you know, can’t help it”). More fool Labour.
The other contenders, without exception, are political pygmies: non-entities of the Bill Rowling variety who are unelectable. It has always been a source of puzzlement to me as to what the Labour caucus – especially various current cabinet ministers – spent their time doing whilst in opposition for nine years. What they did not do is get around the country making speeches, building their public profile, and becoming well known – as, say, Winston Peters and John Banks did in the 1980s, or Phil Goff and Michael Cullen did in the 1990s.
People such as David Parker, Stuart Nash, Nanaia Mahuta and Chris Hipkins certainly didn’t spend time doing anything to build a profile between 2008 and 2017. I think that why they failed to do it is because spending a couple of days per week in “the heartland” (the patronising phrase chardonnay socialists in Auckland and Wellington use to describe anywhere outside of Auckland and Wellington) would be “too boring sweety darling” and take them away from hanging out with the beautiful people and luvvies. Once again: more fool them.
This brings us to the present day, where they have been overshadowed by a one-trick pony (do you see what I did there?). Whatever these people have done in government has generally been ‘bad’ and the average man in the street doesn’t necessarily catch the name of the minister involved. So whoever emerges as the Prime Minister will be unknown to the public and will have to start from scratch.
This is not going to be Jack Marshall in ’72, or Geoffrey Palmer and Mike Moore in ’89/90, or Jenny Shipley in ’97, or even Bill English in 2016; well known with a long(ish) track record and able to seamlessly take the reins.
Let me give an example; assume for a moment it is Hipkins. Nobody really knows him; they know Bloomfield but probably never quite caught the name of the Minister standing next to him. Hipkins has also been Police minister, presiding over daily ram raids: fertile ground for Luxon “he will do to the country what he’s done to dairy owners” to get stuck into. There is also the minor matter of trying to find a Prime Minister who isn’t going to lose their own seat in October. This narrows it down considerably to a pool of even less electable people than might otherwise be the case. More fool Labour.
