The Deep Dark Mire of the National Party

 

I remember sitting in Jack Elder’s West Auckland home on the 14^thof June 1984, watching Rob Muldoon announce live on television that there would be a general election the following month. Muldoon was visibly drunk and his judgement severely impaired, but everybody from Elder’s campaign team in Elder’s house that night was initially stunned by the announcement and then openly ecstatic. There was no way Muldoon, then in his third term as prime minister and up against the eloquent and popular David Lange, would win a general election.

Nor did he. He and the National Party lost in a landslide. The fourth Labour Government was ushed in. David Lange became Prime Minister, and Jack Elder was appointed Minister of Police.

That night, June 14, Muldoon committed political suicide. Did he know then? I think he did. I have watched footage of the announcement. There is resignation in his eyes and exhaustion about his demeanour that suggests he wanted out, and Marilyn Waring was a convenient scapegoat and diversion. 

Of course, the comparison with last Wednesday is obvious. Did Judith Collins know what she was doing? Or know the likely (some will say inevitable) ramifications of demoting her chief rival over an innocuous issue that occurred five years ago? I think she did. She is too astute and too experienced not to. And unlike Muldoon, she was not, as far as I know, drunk.

So, why did she do it?

I don’t think we will ever know that. Collins’ appalling lack of judgement (if that indeed was what it was) defies logic. And any proffered explanation by others is, to this point, speculation. We may get an answer from the inevitable autobiography, but that I think will be tarnished by varnish. I don’t think Collins then as now will be in any mood to share the true or whole motivation for what she did. Why should she? She owes us nothing.

Why she did what she did will remain a mystery, like so much within the deep dark mire of the current National Party.

Political leaders come and go, but the National Party is haemorrhaging them—five of them since the 2017 election if we count Bill English and Shane Reti.

Why is that?

Because the party lacks vision and back-room leadership.

The National Party has long considered itself the rightful party of power, and that any loss of power is both temporary and an aberration. On the rare occasions they have been out of power, they always assumed there was a way back, and it was just a matter of time and patience.

The party would pull through.

But none of that exists now. And hasn’t since the party lost for a second time and in a landslide in 2020.

Lacking imagination and leadership, the best they have managed to come up with is cycling through a group of parliamentary leaders in the vain hope that one of them will capture the public’s imagination and combat the charismatic Jacinda Ardern. 

None has, despite in my view Ardern leading the most incompetent government in New Zealand history.

Now the party has run out of time and options. Looking at the group of potential front-runners for the leadership, none stands out, and there are two who, in my view, would be worse than Collins (deputy leader is a different story, there are a couple of women there who would be magic but not yet ready to take the helm).

So, how did the party get to this parlous state?

If changing leaders doesn’t work and the party is directionless, we are left only to consider the common elements that have prevailed through this decay in the party’s persona and progress.

Peter Goodfellow.

Peter Goodfellow is the President of the National Party and hugely influential in its management and machinations.

I know him. I have had lunch with him. He seems to be a—well—a good fellow.

But in my view, he is a disaster for the party. He had his day in the sun when he was basking in the supernova of John Key. But since then he has presided over the sharpest decline in the party’s history.

And it is not only him. Much of the management team he leads have struck me, and I have met many of them, as arrogant, authoritarian and deeply out of touch with the electorate and even the party membership.

It is a mystery to me why they have lasted as long as they have.

I have heard that Goodfellow’s saving graces are he is a good fundraiser and well connected in Remuera. But given where the party he leads is now, are those “graces” enough? And as for the rest of them—their time has come and well and truly gone.

They oversee a time when the party nearly destroyed itself and may still do.

The National Party can change all the leaders it wants (at its peril), but nothing will change until it changes its failed back-room.

The country needs that to happen.