The National Party’s board of directors have launched a review of the party’s dismal 2020 election campaign. This review could well become a whitewash if rumours floating around about how it is being conducted are true.
National’s much-depleted caucus of MPs are having to travel to different electorates all over the country to listen to feedback from party members. This feedback will be nuanced and homogenised to come up with a collective blame where no one in particular is held accountable.
The board’s incentive to manage a review this way is obvious: the majority of board members are responsible for countless instances that have drained the party of support and diminished its public standing.
A case in point is the debacle in Auckland Central where some members of the board attempted to shoehorn Nuwanthie Samarakone into that seat after she was hand-picked by the board to contest Manurewa. That attempted manipulation won the party some of the worst headlines day after day. Auckland regional chair Andrew Hunt allowed the media to report on his grossly unfair chiding of delegates and members on the night Samarakone failed to win the Auckland Central nomination.
Now Hunt is being targeted with a campaign underway to run him off the board and out of any leadership role within the party. I understand phone calls with delegates are taking places in electorates all over the country with a line drawn firmly under Hunt’s name. He needs to go before he is rolled when his term ends in 2021.
President Peter Goodfellow is standing for the board again. Goodness knows why as he’s now presided over two losses, one of almost Bill English and Michelle Boag proportions. Goodfellow has become a largely toxic figure and may struggle to be re-elected at next month’s Annual General Meeting. He would do well to leave the board before he too suffers a Hunt-like collapse in support. He could always say he has pressing business commitments and quietly bugger off. Then again, perhaps he’d enjoy the flogging.
Alastair Bell and Pat Seymour have served on the National Party board for many years and must surely recognise the need for a transition. Regional chairs and deputy regional chairs who have filled roles year-after-year will need to stand down.
Sadly, I doubt the review will look at constitutional reform, but it should. Constitutional reform is required to prevent regional chairs from concurrently serving on the party’s board of directors. While they are reforming the constitution perhaps they might like to introduce term limits so that board members actually do something other than preside over the status quo.
The only saving grace is that the board now has leader Judith Collins on it and I doubt she will want to see a whitewash.
MPs who lost safe seats should allow the voter’s will to prevail. Candidates who lost formerly safe seats will face challenges for re-selection in three years time.
Which brings me to the wet ravings of John Bishop, who is obviously obtusely suggesting National would be better led by his now thoroughly drowned son, Chris Bishop.
Bishop Senior suggests that the National Party needs to change its principles and values:
National needs to reshape its values. Perhaps it hasn’t noticed the last 20 years. It struggles to understand and empathise with those who see climate change as the defining challenge of the 21st century, who see diversity as an undebatable totemic value.
Likewise, the Treaty is a living document which is at the core of what it is to be a New Zealander. Gender discrimination and sexual violence are simply unacceptable.
Similarly, our farming and livestock practices must change to match the values of the urban majority regardless of the economic impact on farmers, rural communities, and the economy generally. Life is an attitude of caring about people and the environment.
Leftist politicians have made a profession out of saying the right words; National’s people struggle both to believe and to project the right values credibly. It is not about being woke; it is about being in touch with the emotional mood of the country. National isn’t and Labour is.
Before I start on the mutterings of this self-confessed Labour voter, let’s look at the values that the National Party stands for as professed on their website.
The foundation of our Party is built on the values of ambition and success; with lower taxes, reward for hard work, and equal opportunity for all at its core.
Since the establishment of the National Party in 1936, our values have not just been words on a page. Their meaning drives our focus, our policy, and unites our people in a common purpose.
Empowering individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility, and caring communities is about making sure New Zealanders take ownership of their own future and set a good example for future generations.
Not much wrong with that is there? Yet John Bishop seems to think National needs to change these. The party provides a word cloud of their values as well:
Again, nothing wrong there, yet John Bishop presumably sees a different word cloud in his rather pink tinged view of the world.
Bishop’s article starts off by telling us that in 1972 he voted for Labour and Norman Kirk.
I voted for the first time in the 1972 general election. I voted for Labour’s leader Norman Kirk because I was living in his Sydenham electorate and I admired him. He seemed to embody the moral and political aspirations of my generation.
I voted against National, which was the party of my parents’ generation, of the Great Depression, World War II, narrow, insular, male and farmer dominated, ladies in hats carrying fluffy sponges, white, middle aged, middle class, arrogant, patronising and condescending.
They just didn’t get the younger generation, its values, music, aspirations, and their new view of the world. What was important to the under-25s didn’t rate with the over-50s in National. They were out of step with the ”new consciousness” of the age.
Does that sound like the kind of person National should be listening to as they find a new footing? I don’t think so.
For a journalist he also seems to have missed the salient lesson from history that stemmed from the hope of Norman Kirk. It seems to have escaped his feeble reasoning that Norman Kirk was dead inside of two years and Labour lost the 1975 election by a landslide. He doesn’t mention what happened to the “values, music, aspirations” and the new view of the world that within just three years succumbed in a landslide to Robert Muldoon‘s resurgent National Party.
It seems that just three years after enthusiastically voting for Labour because of their values, he watched National suddenly win in a landslide despite being, apparently, out of touch with the youth of the day. Strangely he fails to account for that in his wet witterings about values.
National went woke, with the aid of his sopping wet son. They installed woke leadership, embraced treaty-ism, lambasted farmers, portrayed liberal urban elite wankery, and where did it get them? The wets contributed significantly to National’s loss. The wetter they were the harder they fell. It was those MPs, the conservatives, who stuck to the party’s core values who held the line. When the going got tough under the wet leadership of Todd Muller, Nikki Kaye and Amy Adams, the wet went home. Only Muller stayed and you have to ask why?
His analysis is very light and shows that he doesn’t actually understand that voters in rural areas punished National for their perceived pro-urban focus. He fails to understand that when presented with two parties that look and sound the same then there is no real compelling reason to change from what they’ve got.
More of the same wetness won’t shift any voters. Showing voters a compelling reason to change their votes will.
National’s problem is not its perfectly sensible values. Its problem is dripping wet fools like John Bishop who hanker for the days of a Norman Kirk led Labour party. The best thing he could do is dry his eyes, shut the hell up, and quietly go and re-join the Labour Party.
If he thinks he’s helping, he’s wrong.
National needs a serious review of its culture, its processes and its board. A whitewash and another woke project aren’t going to cut it. The party seriously needs to listen to its members.
Will they do that? No, I don’t think they will. They really seem to be slow learners, especially inside the party. I also don’t think they are listening to their leader at the moment. That needs to change. Perhaps that will come with some good old fashioned blood-letting at the AGM where board members get their throats cut.
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