National has rolled out yet another election sweetener, promising to extend paid parental leave from 26 weeks to 30 weeks by 2029 if they get another term. Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon stood in a playground and sold it as caring support for working mums and dads. More time with the baby. More flexibility so both parents can take leave together if they want. A long-term vision of 40 weeks one day. All funded carefully so the books can still crawl back towards surplus.
It sounds nice. It is also pure National.
I’m starting to get a feel for National’s election campaign strategy. You’d think they would focus on the opposition. You would be dead wrong. National’s strategy this election is threefold.
First, claim credit for all the good things their coalition partners have initiated. Second, attack Winston Peters and NZ First for everything. It is the default position of the National Party and their supporters. They blame Winston for just about everything they have failed to achieve, hold him to impossible standards they never apply to their own leaders and run him down at every opportunity. Third, blame ACT for the things they could not or would not roll out. In this instance it is an expansion of paid parental leave.
In many respects it is an expanded campaign plan that now includes ACT in the targeting. National just cannot help themselves when it comes to Winston Peters. Michelle Boag was pushing dementia attack lines against him back in 2002. The impossible standards routine is always the same. List every promise Winston has made on the campaign trail over nearly 40 years. They have even enlisted some ACTies to push the narrative. Winston promised to get rid of the Māori seats, they say. David Farrar used that line, so it is a National Party sanctioned hit. They ignore that a party on five or six per cent gets a limited say. They also ignore that John Key and Don Brash both promised the same thing. Brash lost in 2005. Key won in 2008, 2011 and 2014 and did nothing about it. Worse still, he overturned National policy just so he could form a coalition with the then Māori Party. No one in National will ever call that a betrayal by John Key. They say it long and hard about Winston Peters.
Here is the rub. If you are busy blaming others for your failures, you should at least credit others for the successes you claim. That is definitely the case with the Luxon-led National Party.
So far National’s announced policies include compulsory KiwiSaver, a solar policy, and this extension of paid parental leave. All three could easily have come from Labour or the Greens. One was nicked from NZ First. The things that have not been completed get blamed on their support parties. The proposed ideas are stolen from the same parties, or worse, from the opposition.
National has nothing substantial they can claim as their own, other than the fact they are less shit than Labour. That is not a governing programme. That is management of the status quo with better branding.
They promised at the last election to get everything “back on track”. They have clearly failed. It was not because of their coalition partners. It is because National are almost never agents of real change. They manage the decline. They manage the middle. They wait for someone else to do the hard yards and then try to claim the credit while pointing the finger at Winston or ACT for whatever still is not finished.
If National will not change, then voters must. Stop treating the large parties as the only option and start empowering the smaller ones that actually force things onto the agenda. Paid parental leave to 30 weeks is fine. The way National is selling it tells you everything about how they operate. Steal the good ideas. Blame the partners for the hard bits. Hope the voters are too busy looking at the playground photos to notice the pattern.
