As I wrote yesterday, the big question overhanging from the election is whether National can learn from having their faces rubbed in electoral reality, or whether they will stick with Christopher Luxon. If the party thinks they can carry on as usual and get a different result, they’re kidding themselves.
At least some of them are determined to kid themselves.
Outgoing Banks Peninsula National MP Vanessa Weenink says her constituents hate her party, and it has swung too far to the right.
Has it occurred to her why she’s outgoing?
Firstly, Banks Peninsula has occasionally flip-flopped, but its history is mostly solidly Labour with a Green tinge. Even Weenink only held it by the barest of margins. Using this as a metric for your political judgement is like using Ted Bundy as your metric for gender relations.
Weenink lost the marginal Banks Peninsula electorate at the election on Saturday and was talking to the media on her way back into parliament for a farewell caucus.
She said her party had swung too far to the right in the coalition with ACT and NZ First, and it risked going further this way as it was losing “urban liberal squishy centrists” like herself.
If that was true, then National’s vote should have bled solidly to Opportunity or the left: Labour and the Greens. But it didn’t. Two-thirds of their nine per cent swing went to the right: ACT and NZ First. The lion’s share of that went to the ‘far-right’ NZ First.
As for the ‘centrists’: even with the legacy media’s non-stop cheerleading, Opportunity barely scraped up more of a swing than NZ First. A swing that bled from both sides.
This makes Weenink’s comments even more delusional.
“I think [Press columnist] Mike Yardley called me a squishy centrist, and yeah, I would worry for the party that they don’t have enough squishy centrists or you know woke liberals like Chris Bishop, you know, all those people that [Paul Goldsmith] would call woke liberals,” Weenink said.
Remind me again: what happened to Chris Bishop?
This deluded prattle is exactly what the ‘moderates’ in the Liberal-National coalition here in Australia have been saying for the last 11 years, ever since they knifed conservative warrior Tony Abbott for woke liberal Malcolm Turnbull. How’s it worked out for them?
The results came in almost straight away: Turnbull cost the coalition an astonishing 14 seats at the 2016 election, almost completely erasing Tony Abbott’s 2013 landslide. The coalition have never recovered: their primary vote has declined at every election since. In all, the ‘moderate’ coalition has shed nearly one-third of its primary vote, to the 2025 election. It’s only got worse since: polling now puts their primary vote at the worst in its history: just 22 per cent. That’s less than half the highest vote under ‘dry’ arch-conservative John Howard. A total vote-shed of 25 points.
And how have the coalition reacted to each loss and poll downturn? With exactly the same demented delusion as Weenink: ‘we need to move further to the left’.
It’s tempting to say that these people are out of their minds. And maybe they are. But their biggest problem is myopia: they think their own little, bourgeois echo-chambers are the entire electorate. They’re like Pauline Kael, who sniffed that she’d only ever met one person who voted for Nixon, even as Nixon notched up one of the biggest landslides in US history. Here’s the kicker, though: Kael was probably (even if sarcastically) telling the truth: in the circles she moved in, nobody would have voted for Nixon (or at least, publicly admitted it).
Weenink is making the same mistake.
“There were people there telling us that [sic] literally hate us, and then other people would tell us that: ‘Look, you guys have lost your way. You know, you used to be much more reasonable, and you’re listening far too much to those other people in your coalition.’”
Well, her constituents would say that, now wouldn’t they? After all, they’re the classic ‘woke liberals’: mostly early Millennials, overwhelmingly white, wealthy, white-collar and university-educated. Weenink deludes herself that, if she was just more woke, they’d start liking her. What she is apparently too thick to realise is, why would they vote for a ‘woke liberal’ in a blue tie, when they can vote for Labour or the Greens, who really mean it?
Although, she appears dimly aware that some of her constituents have an opposing view, she only acknowledges them to sneer at them.
“But I’m a squishy centrist woke lefty that’s been infiltrated into the party, from the position of some of my members.”
Perhaps she’d be better served by listening to them, instead of looking down her nose.
Weenink also revealed that Opportunity had attempted to recruit her as a candidate.
Well, that says it all, doesn’t it?
Here’s something else both National and Labour should be taking note of and looking across the ditch with trepidation: the two major parties together recorded their lowest combined share under MMP (under 59 per cent). Both fell below 30 per cent at the same election, for the first time.
This is what has happened to both the coalition and Labor, in Australia. In 2025, disaffected conservative voters saw nowhere to park their vote. So, Albanese won a massive majority on a near-record-low vote. Within a few months, that changed: voters re-discovered One Nation and decided to stop listening to the establishment finger-wagging.
One Nation are now the leading party in the polls.
National: take note.
