Time the Opposition reached acceptance
There are elements in the behaviour of our newly minted Opposition frankly reminiscent of a child whose ball has gone over the fence into a neighbouring yard, where the neighbour has decided to hold onto it. This follows years of irritation from the same source, accompanied by warnings.
Yelling petulantly across the fence that it’s not fair, throwing tantrums for the whole street to hear, bemoaning his situation to passersby. One can only hope acceptance of his fate is not too far away, because he’s not achieving much, save for getting a rising tide of general irritation rolling.
Unfair? Perhaps; it wouldn’t be easy to accept the loss of the treasury benches for a party that polled comfortably ahead of all the others two months ago, but however National might like to frame the Government we’ve ended up with, nobody else is to blame for its current position.
MP Nick Smith demonstrated the sense of denial seemingly still at play in a newsletter to Nelson and Tasman households claiming ‘‘National won the election but lost the MMPnegotiations’’. Hogwash; no-one has won an election under MMPuntil a government is formed, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel is currently discovering to her intense discomfort.
Smith talks of NZ First ignoring ‘‘the convention both in New Zealand and overseas that the party with the most votes gets to form the Government’’ and thus being responsible for National’s predicament. More fantasy. Such a convention exists only in the sense that it’s ‘‘the way things are usually done’’, but the picture he paints is of an MMPsystem dressed up in first-past-the-post clothing, which flies straight in the face of the reason we have the system.
Now, in the guise of trying to hold the new Government to account, National has deluged it with nearly 6000 written questions, many of them highly repetitive, in its first month in office, a time when new ministers and MPs are trying to adjust to what, for most of them, will be a strange new world.
The party may be arguing, through its newly unveiled attack dog, Leader of the House Simon Bridges, that it’s looking for ‘‘substantive answers’’ from the new Government so it can ‘‘understand their priorities’’, but the tactic seems mischievous at best, and obstructive, in the sense of tying up time and resources that could be far more constructively utilised, at worst.
If it’s suggesting the transparency of the new Government is at issue, that’s hypocritical given the parade of no-commenters media came up against in the recently departed National-led regime, former Health Minister Jonathan Coleman arguably the most habitual offender.
Perhaps what it will take for the Opposition to come to terms with its new role, and focus on the fact its MPs still have a crucial role to play in the governance of the country, is the realisation its popularity is waning. A Roy Morgan poll last week had National and its lone support party, ACT, on 41 per cent support, down 5.5 per cent since early October. If anything is likely to prove chastening, surely that will.