Putting the Con in Control

Part One: A Giant Sucking Sound

The year was 2023, the month was September, and the man with the shiny pate had been sat down by his minders to record a hostage video¹.

Why was the mood so tense? He was going to win the election in six weeks’ time. He had ACT to work with to lead the country and get New Zealand back on track. Yet a beaming face, creased by a thousand battles, loomed in his mind.

Here’s Luxon:

“My strong preference is to form a strong and stable, two-party coalition government between National and ACT. I believe that government would be in the best interest of New Zealanders at this very uncertain time. 

However! 

If New Zealand First is returned to Parliament, and I need to pick up the phone to Mister Peters to keep Labour, and the Coalition of Chaos, out, I WILL make that call. 

And frankly, I think Chris Hipkins will ultimately do exactly the same thing. That's not my first preference - we all remember 2017. New Zealand First hasn't gone with National in 27 years. But that decision is ultimately up to you, because at the end of the day, elections are about choices. So if you want to change the government, then I'm asking you to vote for change and choose a better New Zealand. I'm asking you to party vote National.”

It was a Rosetta Stone for this political term. ACT had already emptied their quiver into their own foot². Chris Bishop wrote down his decision on paper, and it looked sensible there, but when Chris Luxon read his lines out all of a sudden any meaning evaporated. What was this weak, reactive leader offering to voters considering NZFirst? The threat that NZFirst might go with Labour - but he definitely would. 

Others erred, and Winston Peters smiled wider.

He didn’t get as many votes as ACT. Nor as many as in 2017. Only enough to force Luxon to include him in coalition talks. Just to ensure that everything would be, as it always must, about Winston.

Three years later, I hear that grin crackling its way wide again.

Everything about the on-off War for the Straits screams NZFirst. The war is a foreign crisis. Just compare our Foreign Minister’s statesmanship to Luxon’s best efforts to give a Joe Biden impression. The war is a foreign crisis that threatens our economy. NZFirst’s nationalist song of self-sufficient autarky has never sounded so sweet. The war is a foreign crisis that threatens our economy because we use far more fuel than we produce. Shane Jones has spent three years drilling through every lock and block on barreling towards peak oil. NZFirst are floating towards cloud nine, fuelled by National voters hoisting new colours.

For three years, National Party stalwarts argued that the traditional party of the economy would be rewarded for keeping its head down and focusing on the stuff that mattered. By not being sucked into ACT and NZFirst’s distractions, National could claim credit for the economy. As Mike Hosking recently pointed out, Luxon has done an excellent job at not stepping in and disciplining his coalition partners. Peters and Seymour have run away with attention-seeking behaviour while National have failed to turn the economy around. National might be sinking, but they’re doing nothing to drag their partners’ fortunes down with them. How generous.

Nobody puts baldy³ in a corner. Luxon has tugged on his gloves and let Nicola lace them up. Before he even entered Parliament, Luxon was dogged by comparisons to John Key. Perhaps we should have been looking to a different National Prime Minister. Luxon has been knocked down; but he has gotten back up again. And he has thrown an absolute haymaker.

At his own second. The Minister of GSD.

¹Amusingly, Jenna Lynch reached back for the exact same touchstone. It was my Birnam Wood independent-discovery fiasco all over again. However, her focus on Bishop’s October discussion of a second election is, in my eyes, misguided. Voters knew that the government was about to get ousted in a landslide and were not thinking about another election any time soon. Winston’s rise was the kind of thing to get much more traction outside the beltway.

²Specifically, by threatening to govern from the crossbenches - that is, negotiating their support individually for each separate government bill, with the option to collapse the government at any moment - and because so many of their candidates were turning out to be crackers.

³There is nothing wrong with being bald.

Part Two: Building…A Blockade

Chris Bishop has become a threat. Setting aside rumours, we concretely know four things to be true:

1. Chris Bishop would like to be Prime Minister.

2. Chris Luxon would love to remain Prime Minister.

3. Chris Bishop and Chris Luxon cannot both be Prime Minister.

4. Chris Luxon is the kind of unpopular that parties replace at the first viable alternative. 

The earlier skirmishes in their war can be easily summarised. Bishop’s first jab late last year failed to land a knockout: Luxon was not only cheered on by his conservative stalwarts like Paul Goldsmith and Mark Mitchell, he was helped back to his feet by Bishop’s fellow liberals, Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford. If Bishop got to be Prime Minister, then Nicola couldn’t even stay as Deputy Party Leader. And so on. Luxon wilted under the jeering of the crowds early this year as National dipped into the twenties in support. (The only time that’s happened this decade was during the Judith Collins disasterclass.) With the War for the Straits kicking off, it’s hard to see the trend line turning back up.

To avenge his bruises and regain his feet, Luxon finally got around to reshuffling his government just to weaken Bishop. Attorney-General is a terrible fit for Bishop’s skillset. Tama Potaka and Chris Penk are both more qualified candidates. Bishop is a policy guy who gets stuck in to proactively advance change. AG is fundamentally a reactive role like Emergency Management. Luxon has cut off his nose to spite his face.

Bishop will, at the current trajectory, be leaving Parliament before the year is out. In 2023, National won considerably more electorate votes than Labour, unexpectedly seizing Labour heartlands. Even then, Bishop took Hutt South by barely two thousand votes. When Bishop has been busy as a bee with policy - now that the balance of support for the major parties has flipped - Labour’s Ginny Anderson must be considered the favourite to knock Bishop out of his seat. National can expect to have extraordinarily few spots on the list to spare⁴. And at this point it’d be shocking if Luxon didn’t demote him down the list to make certain of this. Who would he rather see in his next government: a threat like Bishop or a loyalist like Goldsmith?

Luxon didn’t even count to ten after the threat in front of him fell. He vaulted over the edges of the ring and kept whaling. James Meager, hailed as one of the rising stars of the National Party, did not enter Cabinet - all because he worked for Bishop’s coup team-in-waiting. (Curiously, I never heard of Luxon ever keeping the backers of Judith Collins or Simon Bridges out of his shadow cabinet…) Instead, Mike Butterick enters as a voice to finally represent what the National Party had really been always missing: North Island farmers tempted by conservative contenders⁵.

Half a decade ago, when Christopher Luxon claimed the leadership of the National Party, I praised him for genuinely striving to assemble a team of the best talents in the right places, rather than the most politically convenient arrangement. As Luxon has floundered as Prime Minister, some of these bets on talent have paid off. (Bishop! Housing!) Luxon has now settled on the exact opposite course: actively worsening his government, hurting the future of the National Party, and leaving Kiwis in crisis, in order to protect his own job. It’s shameful.

In fact, Luxon has most recently been demonstrating behaviour that makes me think less of the leader of a nation of five million, and more of the shambles of Te Pāti Māori. In an astonishingly Looney Tunes sequence, Luxon - no longer satisfied to simply deny the self-awareness necessary to step aside - has been actively avoiding being in the same room as his own party whip, so that he doesn’t have to face the facts on caucus’s loss of confidence. 

Not only is that colossally negligent behaviour for a leader, it’s just embarrassing on a personal level to attempt to cling to such a paper-thin layer of plausible deniability. Luxon has never looked more desperate - more like a deer in the headlight - more like a fundamentally spineless man too afraid to face up squarely to any kind of critique and dispatch it with a solid response. 

Back to the reshuffle. Luxon has torn down the Minister of Building Townhouses. He has constructed his own firewall. 

And its name is Simeon Brown.

As the Minister of Energy, he is poised to lead the way on the response to this crisis. That’s full of risk, but ask Chris Hipkins whether it hurt his political fortunes to take over the critical ministry⁶ during a crisis. Brown is Bridges come again: a young scrapper from Auckland with three years of experience in government, who has thrown red meat to the base by finding flush funding for Roads of National Party Significance. 

Even Bridges collapsed under the weight of the fights he chose. Brown is no Bridges; with no such impressive pre-political background to speak of, Brown is half a decade younger than Bridges was and looks like he’s still getting carded at the door. And Brown is now in charge of the entire reelection campaign. Win or lose, if he wants to go further than being Christopher Luxon’s busybody hatchetman, he has to run this election right. The blame must end at Luxon’s edge, or Brown’s career will have thunked into an exceptionally early ceiling.

⁴The only change in this equation has been in Tāmaki. Brooke Van Velden’s withdrawal tips the scales in favour of National. Whatever assets James Christmas will bring to ACT by the list, you cannot tell me the great apostle of Chris Finlayson should be marked down as the automatic favourite in a retail campaign. So National is set to add one more electorate MP - and lose one more spot on the list.

⁵The second-most discriminated against minority in our country, after gamers.

⁶Health, in 2020.

Part Three: A New Strategy.

National’s brand has not been coherent or compelling for the past term. I would generously summarise the Chris Bishop case as “competence and reform”. In 2023, National argued that Labour had blown the books with feel-good distractions and public servant maxxing. National would be the sensible adults: a middle path back into prosperity, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater as ACT might. National have not made the argument that they have transformed the country; under MMP, the major parties never like to do that. Instead, National has focused simply on getting back on track. A few figures like Bishop lead the way in making it easier to GSD in this country.

That strategy is now in tatters. Bishop’s efforts have fomented a NIMBY backlash - in Auckland, but also in rural communities that will fight tooth and claw against any fingernailhold by the subdividing developers. The Blue Wall of electorates shall hold, but the party vote is going down the drain. That’s on their own turf - never mind how cooked the party is with the swing vote in other urban centers. Public servant sackings; electorate redistricting; selling social conservatism to Wokeopolis Now: National will win zero electorates across Greater Wellington and, I predict, their worst party vote there since 2002. 

All of this placed them in a poor spot, but at least they could argue that the economy was starting to get better. Until Israel and America blew up free and safe travel through the world’s oil conduit. Now they get to do Robert Muldoon 70s cosplay. Brown is adapting his pitch to that along a theme is “crisis and choices” - god knows he doesn’t want the election to turn into a referendum on the government’s performance. Instead, it’s going to be all about bashing how bad those last three years of Labour got. One issue: what’s he going to say that Bish and co. weren’t ready to? As meaningful as the distinction between National’s liberals and conservatives is, a National liberal is not a Labour rightist - National’s liberals sneer just as spitefully at the wastrels of Labour.

Where Brown might be willing to go that the likes of Bishop avoid is fluffing up the culture war against various different minority groups. Trying to divert from economic issues is almost always a losing game to play when voters are concerned about them day-in, day-out - that power lies much more in the hands of the media. Hipkins has kept his Labour Party obsessively focused on substantive economic issues and around the universal provision of public services like healthcare. It’s hard to play divide and rule against a Blairite like him. On these issues, National can at least try to win back NZFirst and ACT voters…

But Brown is only the one crafting the message. The messenger is still going to be Christopher Luxon. We all know he can’t get it done.

Could somebody else?

Part Four: A New Voice?

Any change of Prime Minister would be very late in the day. The last pre-election Budget has to be announced six weeks from now. I’ve been wrong before in thinking that the window for change has closed. Panic does magical things to caution and patience. Bishop must weigh up if he has any chance of ever becoming Prime Minister if the voters kick him out at this election and he tries to return in 2029. Doesn’t running now sound like the safer option⁷? 

Say Bishop doesn’t. Who does?

Put yourself in that caucus room. Look around at the heartland rump of farmers and blue ribbon bearers from the North Shore. Will they elect Nicola Willis - so closely associated with the failure of Luxonomics? Her only pathway to become Prime Minister is for this government to win a second term (comfortably enough that she returns to Parliament) and to finally preside over a growing economy, vindicating her work at Finance.

What about Erica Stanford? Is National really ready for a liberal young woman if they’re not even ready for Bishop? She still looks good in the event of any loss for the policy work she’s done. Mark Mitchell has been firmly overtaken in the conservative lane by Brown and could basically only become Leader if Luxon directly anoints him while stepping down - perhaps not even then. Nobody else is in the conversation. Brown has no reason to move against Luxon - he already has everything he could ask for right now. Any vote of no confidence at next Tuesday’s caucus meeting could create an awkward vacuum where Bishop cannot win - leaving the door open for a conservative substitute to step in. I predict that National’s next leadership team is likeliest to be Brown-Stanford. (If they really want to own the libs, make that a Brown-Upston, bartender. And don’t check my ID⁸.)

The under 30% is the ominous number every MP who will be filtering into that caucus room shall be looking at. There’s one other fuse burning down in the corner ready to set off a far more tectonic explosion. The most recent poll puts Luxon at a scanty 20% for preferred Prime Minister. 

Winston Peters is at 15%. A 3% swing would put Winston in the lead. How can National MPs possibly continue to stand by their leader if he becomes less popular than their own coalition partner?

⁷Incidentally, if a YIMBY Wellington lib like Bish took the leadership without consulting coalition partners, if ever Winnie were looking for an excuse to break up the government like he did in ‘97, this would absolutely be it. I don’t think he is, I’m just saying…

⁸Can we really be certain that Simeon Brown isn't an overly motivated Youth Parliament kiddo with a gift for bluffing?

Part Five: NZFirst, First

This is going to be only the second election in which a minor party in government has ever grown its share of the vote. They’re on track to enter a second consecutive term in government. Above all, this election could produce a historic result for NZFirst. In 1996 - Peak Winston, an era in which he was arguably the most beloved leader in New Zealand, the last time he would ever go to the polls free of any reputation for untrustworthiness and duplicity - NZFirst won 13.35%. They’re now polling at 15%.

The wave of far-right populism around the world has somehow swept along with it the far more centrist NZFirst. Old dogs - Pauline Hanson and Nigel Farage and even Winston Peters - really can learn new tricks. God knows how - though if you want my gut take, with apologies for my most handwringing liberal view I hold, it is absolutely screaming social media - but the NZFirst brand looks like the hottest commodity in New Zealand right now. That attracts a hodgepodge across the spectrum looking for their chance to get into Parliament.

Stuart Nash has totally embarrassed himself, and it’s still unclear whether NZFirst will actually accept him as a candidate. I wouldn’t rule out his potential. Nash and Taine Randell can run arm-in-arm across adjacent Hawke’s Bay electorates, supporting one another through their respective weaknesses. Where Nash is a political animal in need of common decency, Randell may be a bit unsteady but can present the moderate, forward-thinking face of the party - and what a face it is. This guy could mog Reacher. NZ politics has nothing like the "central casting" slickhairs of American politics, but he could really grab attention on the telly.

Most intriguing of all is the addition of Alfred “Who?” Ngaro. Once one of National’s “Four Amigos”, Ngaro had drifted over to leading a Christian fundamentalist minnow. Though he’ll never have the stature with the general public of a Nash or a Randell, this is clearly a guy who can well and truly walk the walk and talk the talk with the nation’s Christian conservatives. 

They are a constituency who have gone largely forgotten and snubbed for the past decade. That’s despite the Conservative Party turning out a solid 4% of the nationwide vote in 2014 on their backs. You don’t turn your nose up at that. His addition to the NZFirst list stands to pay for himself and then some. While Todd Muller has moved on, Ngaro may well be able to put past ties to Chris Bishop and Mark Mitchell alike to good use in clarifying the shape of the next government.

NZFirst are on track to beef up their strength in the next coalition - perhaps even with more than half the seats that National have. What of it? Winston won’t be Prime Minister. In 2023, Winston Peters and David Seymour found a mutual interest: pooling their negotiating power to extort what they want out of National. Under current polling, the two could justifiably lay claim to a shocking forty percent of the seats around the Cabinet table. 

They are welcome to keep everything they’ve already got. What are they going to add?

Part Six: To Do What?

With ACT tracking towards a similar result as last time, they cannot extend their demands, but BVV’s departure plus new blood will demand some shuffling around. If the party wants to hold onto Workplace Relations with more changes in mind there, I would hand it to their new Deputy Leader⁹ to build experience.

If they relinquish Workplace Relations, then that gives them negotiating power to demand something else. Not only that - National will lose some ministers this election. They may need to shop around amongst their coalition partners for the most qualified candidates to slot in. Most obviously, James Christmas, who was once talked about as the next Chris Finlayson for National, may have found the safest route after all to become Attorney-General and Treaty Negotiations Minister.

ACT seems to clearly rate Todd Stephenson, for reasons beyond me, so you’d think that he’d finally get something meaningful. A larger role in Health? Corrections? Andrew Hoggard at Agriculture would free up Todd McClay to pick up whatever slides off of Paul Goldsmith and Chris Bishop’s plates (though Justice will surely fall straight into the maw of Mark Mitchell). Simon Court would be over the moon taking Bishop’s jobs on Infrastructure and RMA Reform.

NZFirst can pull off the biggest save of all: Alfred Ngaro as Minister of Pacific Peoples, to end the National Decade of Humiliation as reporters ask about racial representation. There are also other jobs. The obvious plum about to fall into their lap - both freeing up Simeon Brown’s workload, and handing NZFirst their holy grail - is Energy for Shane Jones. That allows him to serve his donors the grateful public, builds his profile to some day take over as leader, and…well, the problem is we don’t actually have much in the way of oil and gas, so not clear what a Minister for Non-Renewable Energy can accomplish, but we’ll cross that Bridge of National Significance when it comes to it. 

The only other big portfolio NZFirst have made noises about seizing in recent years is Attorney-General for Winston Peters. I can’t see him wanting it and I can’t see the party standing to get much out of it. There’s a far more obvious responsibility waiting in the wings, one with “hard-right populist wave” written all over it. Will NZFirst, at long last, finally make a play for the Immigration portfolio? Will they attempt to satisfy their voters by closing off the flow of immigrants? And will their coalition partners tolerate such an economic blow to the kneecaps - to take away one of their few levers to improve macroeconomic supply - to challenge the looming stagflation?

You can list off other positions - Costello and Nash could contest for Corrections, Nash and Jones would both fit in around Economic and Regional Development, Ngaro has actually already been Community & Voluntary Minister, Jenny Marcroft is an experienced hand who could take on the troublesome Media & Communications portfolio, notice how I’m at pains not to mention Andy Foster…of course, though, it’s Winston Peters. This will all come down to what he wants most and what gives his party the most power.

That’s the moral of this story: it’s exciting here and now to speculate about what might happen within the National Party in the coming weeks - and which portfolios might end up in whose hands - how on earth National is going to cope if Nicola Willis gets knocked out on the list (Finance Minister Simeon Brown?? Finance Minister Christopher Luxon???) - but at the end of the day, more than ever before, it’s Winston’s world.

And we’re all just living in it.

⁹ACT’s caucus is absolutely trolling if they don’t pick Nicole McKee. I’m not saying she’s guaranteed to work out with the public, I have no time for her views on guns, but she’s the only one who could clearly and credibly lead a significant player in Parliament.

Part Seven: Putting The Cons in Conclusions

The government is probably going to win, and National is going to lose a lot of MPs. So we're not just talking about in what form they stagger through this year, but who makes up their rank and file for years to come.

Take diversification. National will become a more skilled and competent party if they draw on the best across the entire population, instead of limiting themselves to only ever selecting from pale, stale males, as their local electorate committees love to do. With no viable spots on the list for newbies, there is no avenue for National to effect positive change.

Take every National Pasifika and Māori candidate announced so far not already in Parliament. Every single one is being run in seats that National lost in 2023 and will not win in 2026. Tama Potaka and James Meager will remain the grand sum of representation for Māori, and Paulsifika Goldsmith for every single Kiwi Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Niuean, Cook Islander, Tokelaun...Indian candidates face the exact same problem. The only one with a chance - Mahesh Muralidhar - has been tasked to pull off a team-kill in Tāmaki. 

How about women? Remember them, National? You know, just about fifty percent of the population? There are only three women in National's top twelve right now! Search past that for talent. Penny Simmonds has failed on policy and Barbara Kuriger on personal conduct. Maureen Pugh, Melissa Lee, Judith Collins - all gone by year’s end. Who is the rest of the rising talent? Nicola Grigg, potentially Rima Nakhle…Catherine Wedd? Help me out here? 

It might be worth noting at this point that, under the age of 50, barely one in seven women intend to vote for National. Those are appalling numbers.

This is the party of meritocracy, of rewarding hard-working Kiwis who rise above the rest. This is all that they have found amongst half of New Zealand's population. A generation ago, John Key pushed figures like Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett, Amy Adams and Nikki Kaye, up to the very top of the National Party. Somehow National are working their way back towards becoming staler and paler and maler, meaner and more narrow-minded, two decades later. If they want a future, they can't bleat that they're the party voters trust on the economy. They need to become the party of the future again.

Don’t dare utter that f-word around NZFirst. Will they actually create any kind of lasting policy change? Can they keep pace with the hard-right around the world, as Europe’s reverse-D-Day approaches in France and the UK? Will this populist wave last? Orban’s gone and Trumpism is noisily trashing itself. Above all, is there any chance for NZFirst the day that Winston’s body gives out? What a stupid question to ask. NZFirst is Winston Peters. His success is its success. Right now, he is poised for the pinnacle of his Parliamentary career. This election, more than anybody else's, is his to lose. If the government gets back him, they have him and him alone to thank.

ACT are not in possession of their own future. They pledged constitutional reform that they have not delivered. They promised smaller government to pay down debt. They are party to ongoing deficits and growing debt. What are their achievements? The Ministry of Regulation swelling the government further? School lunch reforms? No obvious flagship policy and, with BVV gone, no obvious successor¹⁰ and several bad ones. I’ve made my snort of contempt for Todd Stephenson plenty clear, I wish the best for Karen Chhour but I’ve only ever see her stumble under media pressure, and as for Simon Court - God may love a wonk, but the voters sure don’t. 

But at least none of them are 66 year old bloviators.

The reshuffle - the polls - the global trends - all tell us that this government is lurching hard to the right. The left have one chance to stop that at this election. Win, and they’re not going to be rewarded with all that left-wing of a government. Hipkins spent a year as Prime Minister watering down Labour's weak 2020 manifesto, and the next three insisting that Labour needed more ice in its drink. With TPM in disarray on the crossbenches, the Greens are going to have one hell of a time trying to convince Labour to be much bolder than this government in a red coat. 

Lose, and NZFirst and ACT get their turn to push the government even further - backwards on social policy, and in many cases in opposite directions on economics. The question then becomes how far each can push and for how long before they tear their own government apart. Funnily enough, there is one question that applies equally well both before this election, and for the three years to come; whether you’re talking about National and Labour, or NZFirst and ACT. The question has very different implications in each case, but in every single instance, it is the most important one to be asking.

Who will blink and change leader first?

¹⁰Please, God, though, Nicole McKee.