I woke up this morning to find a message from 7:26 a.m.: “Bye bye Judith and Simon 👋”. There had been some rumblings about a leadership coup in the National Party, so I assumed Bridges had run at Collins, failed, and Chris Luxon had taken the top job instead. Then I checked the news.
The current battle is an awful, terrible mess. The long and short of it is former Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges appears to have made inappropriate, sexual comments around fellow MP Jacqui Dean in 2017. Current Leader Judith Collins has selfishly weaponised Dean’s discomfort in order to denounce and demote Bridges, probably because the caucus and media have decided on him as the most likely candidate to topple her and take her job. Yeesh.
What I want to do now, as I wait for her press conference to start, is backtrack and briefly retell the 21st century history of the National Party. I don’t know any “inside gossip”; I’m just going off what I’ve read in the news over the past few years, as they’ve sunk from being almost more dominant on the political scene than Labour is now, to a squabbling, battling party staring down the barrel of breaking apart. This is how we got here.
If you don’t know the history of NZ politics leading up to the 21st century, the short of it is that National PM Robert Muldoon brought us into the 80s with increasingly erratic and despotic government, most akin to how Winston Peters and NZFirst would run the country if they ever took charge. Labour beat him and freed up much of the country's economy and finance to compensate, destabilising Aotearoa in at least the short term. Nationale got voted in on the promise of a return to stability, only to continue dragging the country economically to the right.
All of this meant National had a severe trust deficit. This also plagued their main rivals for a time, until Helen Clark rehabilitated Labour with a low-ambition but trustworthy center-left model. In 2002, Bill English led the National Party to a stomping: under 21% of the vote, and just 27 MPs. This was their worst result since forming. English’s successor, Don Brash, quickly found a way back in; he played that always-reliable card in Western politics, claiming racial minorities are obtaining more rights and privileges than the white majority, and somehow we always seem to buy it. Nonetheless, despite a surge in support to just 2% of the vote and 2 seats behind Labour, Brash lost the election, and then the leadership, too.
As the public grew weary of the third-term Clark government, whoever National selected for their leader would likely become Prime Minister for some time. They settled on John Key. He brought experience in finance - not a ton in Parliament, but he held up impressively well debating against Finance Minister Michael Cullen, possessed youthful energy, and many Kiwis connected to his cheerfulness and “aw shucks” speech. Promising to fix the results of the GFC and Great Recession, he won the 2008 election...and then crushed Labour in 2011, and again in 2014. National had found the Key to victory. What did they do with their wins?
If you consider politicians never getting too controversial and always remaining cheerful a merit, then the "smiling assassin" was your guy. Certainly, this suited at least the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes, and the Pike River disaster. If you wanted someone willing to come up with and implement serious plans to change the country for the better, you were sorely disappointed. Key started his leadership career with a series of speeches on the scourge of child poverty, an issue that continues to plague this country through full fault of his own.
This isn’t just a criticism from the left - plenty on the right, like ACT, were disappointed by the missed opportunities in these years. Their suspicion that he never held any clear principles or ideology seems clearly true, with nothing to disprove it either. That always leaves me baffled at true-blue nostalgia for Key. What did he actually do for us? What’s his lasting legacy to this country, and who can look him in the eye and say they’re better off thanks to him? More to the point, can he look anyone who suffered through those years in the eye and explain why he stood by and did nothing? Were nine years of neglect, to unfurl a tired trope, really worth it just because the man who could do something about the issues was nice to us through all the failures?
His desire to be liked by everybody appears to have been a prime motivator in his decision to unexpectedly and without scandal step down in 2016. Whatever else you think of him, I believe we can all agree this is the right thing to do; we could do with more public servants who know that the people are best served by handing on the reins to someone now better suited to the situation. This departure did raise a question - precisely what legacy would his successor seek to defend? - but his Finance Minister, the aforementioned Bill English, took the reins with a clear plan: social investment.
The basic idea is to use data rather than human bureaucrats to reallocate welfare programs from relatively widespread support to targeting those who would cost the country most by going unsupported. That may sound heartless, but the idea of supporting those most in need, in turn freeing up more funds governments could opt to use to support more people, sounds good to me. Blinglish did an incredible job keeping the Key coalition together, losing less than 3% of the vote from 2014, but his campaign decision to fight against NZFirst sealed Winston Peters denying him a return to the Beehive. He decided he didn’t want to go back to sitting in Opposition for forever and departed.
That sparked a leadership election in 2018, and now we start to get to the beginning of a fateful chain of events that have led us to today. We needn’t concern ourselves with Steven Joyce (you may remember him from Dildogate, or for claiming Labour had a budget hole in 2017; he resigned after the new National leader didn’t give him the finance portfolio) or Amy Adams (who left in 2020 after her Muller faction lost control). Three of them are still around: Mark Mitchell, the perennial “boring conservative white guy”, Judith Collins, and Simon Bridges. Bridges won.
In the Key years, Bridges had looked like a rising talent: he was a young conservative running the Transportation Ministry, and a Māori man in a party frequently perceived to be at ends with most Māori people, from Brash-bashing to threats to abolish Māori electorates, or at least not run candidates in them. Particularly with wahine Māori Paula Bennett, also with experience from the Key years, as his Deputy, this looked like a transformative, history-making team to run the country.
Well, all that quickly went tits up, didn’t it? Besides a plethora of little missteps by Bridges along the way, the big moment later that year was the Jami-Lee Ross scandal, where one of his close political allies, by all accounts a terrible person, blew up at Bridges. The revelations included alleged campaign finance violations, and, more amusingly, Bridges calling MP Maureen “Lightning Conductor” Pugh “fucking useless”.
Somehow, he made a comeback from those in 2019. Bridges’ greatest weakness is also his greatest strength: he is not only not afraid but almost driven to pick fights, like a man possessed. The same instinct that led him down many rabbit holes, from “slushie machines” to singing Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” in Parliament, meant he honed in on standard center-right causes like a tough line against the gangs and traditional infrastructure like roads and bridges for cars. Lots of voters responded to this stuff, and National was polling well enough to have a shot at forming a government if NZFirst and the Greens fell out of Parliament (which would waste their votes, putting the left bloc at a significant disadvantage).
If you, dear reader, know anything about where this story is going, you most probably started to tune in around this point in 2020. I had just moved into halls (and then been caught by lockdown), and I couldn’t believe that matters of import for the country were happening just a few blocks away at Parliament. Simon had had some critiques that time validated about the government’s approach to COVID, but his critical post on Facebook demanding a lowering of COVID restrictions was a step too far, out of touch with how afraid people were of the virus and of its mortal messengers.
After mutterings of a leadership challenge, Bridges called caucus to Wellington and challenged them to play their hand. They promptly did so and rolled him as leader. His replacement, Todd Muller, was a conservative meant to be bridging the divide by surrounding himself with liberals like Amy Adams and Nikki Kaye, Chris Bishop and Nicola Willis. Instead, the first two were largely viewed as mismanaging the leadership, which formulated no clear message and became a “me-too” party auxiliary to the government, providing no new ideas. This brief experiment, which did little to improve National’s standing, ended once Muller’s panic attacks became too severe to bear.
When he stepped aside, there were only really two candidates left who hungered for the leadership but had little to recommend them: Mark Mitchell and Judith Collins. She beat him and took charge. At the time, I was keen on a socially liberal woman with clear principles taking over. Nobody could deny she’d been tossed a hospital pass, especially as more and more National MPs consumed the party in scandal. Few fully blamed her for getting nowhere near the tryline.
However, there was valid critique over her lack of discipline. When we talk about discipline in politics, we mean the ability to pick a few core themes or policies or issues and emphasise them at every opportunity, so no matter how little attention the public is paying, they get what they stand for. Suddenly displaying her Christian faith weeks before the election, or shaming obesity just days before, demonstrated no such discipline.
As we know, the 2020 election was a landslide loss for National, the worst since 2002. Regardless of leadership, this was going to happen with this many scandals and with the COVID election. What points the finger at the leadership is the lack of recovery since in the polls. Collins has found nothing clear to campaign on - her closest attempt was a poor reprise of Brash’s attempt to place Kiwis and iwis in opposition to one another.
That, of course, has led to murmurings of leadership challenges, and her response has been extreme. She has crushed the political careers of MPs long involved with National like Muller and Nick Smith in order to deter other MPs from leaking or opposing her. Both of these activities have continued, but quietly, to a lesser degree. Until she decided to attack the one man in caucus with the single largest faction around him: the loyalists who propelled him to lead in the first place, conservatives ideologically closer to him than the erratic Collins, and pragmatists backing the best horse to unseat her.
As I write, Collins has confirmed media reports that she has fallen victim to a vote of no confidence. The question then becomes: who to lead next? You could go with Bridges, as caucus seemed to be inching towards at least before now, but I think he comes out looking worst from this episode. Caucus seem to keep forgetting the public just did not like this guy. I think that he would be the single most stupid choice for National; everyone else is a gamble, but you just about know Bridges is bound not to work. What speaks in his favour is the unfortunate extent to which an allegation of misconduct against him, which is new and separate from previous lines of critique against him, is being sidelined in favour of the political horserace. I think that that is sad and a bit revolting to see.
Chris Luxon and Mark Mitchell continue to suffer from the fact that nobody knows what they stand for, and they’re exactly the sort of boring white conservative man who will most struggle to reach beyond the party’s base and build a winning coalition of voters. Plus, Luxon is still inexperienced, having only come into Parliament last year. Those three still seem like the most likely options. Keep in mind, though, those doing the electing are those left from last year's massacre, in National's safest seats and highest list spots. Especially with Judith Collins, Simon Bridges, Jacqui Dean and Shane Reti all caught up in this controversy, with the potential they get pushed out of Parliament or retire, these MPs likely do not need to worry about securing a safe, steady leader who will ensure they keep their seats. Instead, they want somebody who can change the game and lead them out of the wilderness, back to victory.
Reti, currently the interim leader, has never made much of a political or public splash, and lost his own electorate next year, but seems good at keeping his head down and getting on with the job, particularly if COVID throws up a new wave of health issues, like a new, rapidly spreading variant the current vaccination doesn’t work against. Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop are both liberal MPs who have done a lot of good work on housing and COVID respectively, but the latter also lost his electorate, and they’re associated with the Muller era. Best to give time some time to tell.
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