The lastminute offer that sealed Ardern as PM
Labour’s 2017 offer to NZ First was less than National’s. But Jacinda Ardern’s canny 11th-hour offer to Winston Peters may have been decisive in shaping the next six years, writes Stuff’s Andrea Vance in an extract from her new book.
When Decision Day dawned, it came with a flurry of activity.
The NZ First board had wrapped up its two-day meeting on Wednesday afternoon without making a call. That night, Winston Peters went into final, secret meetings with National leader Bill English and Labour’s Jacinda Ardern.
English went first, back into the negotiating room at 5.30pm. He would later tell a senior MP that the meeting was punctuated with lots of long silences.
Ardern followed, taking a different route to the room from usual to avoid the media pack. She offered him the role of deputy prime minister. While the feeling for many in Labour was that Peters was always going to go with them, offering him the deputy’s role right at the end was significant; perhaps even a clincher.
Still in the dark, English scheduled a Thursday caucus meeting to outline the offer to MPs. Mid-morning, [Steven] Joyce’s phone rang.
It was Peters’ chief of staff, [David] Broome, asking for an extra ministerial post. Joyce got a ‘‘stony response’’ when he returned the call.
A senior MPremembered, ‘‘Steven said to me: ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’ ’’ By early afternoon there was a distinct drop in temperature in relations, which made the Nats nervous.
Peters also called Ardern, with the same demand. ‘‘Winston, that will just look silly,’’ she told him, ‘‘if all of your caucus are in the executive.’’
Instead, it was agreed to extend a parliamentary undersecretary role to Fletcher Tabuteau. But that then required a call to Greens coleader James Shaw. Shaw had earlier had to disappoint his MPJan Logie, who had her heart set on being minister for women.
This new offer would make her an undersecretary with responsibility for domestic and sexual violence issues, a cause she had championed for years.
Shaw, still without a coleader, hastily called a meeting with his seven MPs to outline the revised deal: ministerial posts, which would go to Eugenie Sage, Julie Anne Genter and himself, and an under-secretary.
In his excitement, he’d forgotten to tell Logie. ‘‘Is that me?’’ she asked him in a whisper.
The final deal would have to be agreed to by the
Greens’ membership, a complicated exercise which involved a long teleconference and a vote. It can be a fractious body and is much more radical than its caucus.
But Shaw had mitigated the risk they would reject the deal by forming a reference group, which included respected
former co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, to provisionally advise the party. That group would recommend whether to accept the terms at a special meeting, so
Shaw could offer some assurance to Ardern, who could then do the same for Peters.
After two weeks of twiddling their thumbs waiting for Peters, suddenly the Greens had to activate their process and get their membership to sign off on the deal. This, even though they couldn’t release the deal until Peters had made the call. The tension was enormous.
Shaw, who had just endured a hellish election campaign in which his co-leader and two MPs resigned, said the negotiation period was the ‘‘most stressful experience of my life’’ for a lot of reasons.
‘‘It was the first time the Greens got into government. But the blind negotiation, especially after the horrendous campaign we’d just had, [and] needing to honour the party’s values and vision and hopes and dreams – [all] under less than ideal circumstances. And also a team that was pretty shattered.’’
By the afternoon, the phones fell silent. Labour had been expecting a call midafternoon, and with no one from New Zealand First talking to them, they thought Peters had decided to go with National.
Labour’s most senior heads feared Ardern had blown it by sticking to her guns on the immigration cap. Shane Jones, once a Labour minister who had only recently joined New Zealand First, was urging his former colleagues to soften their stance.
As it turns out, the impasse was actually due to a miscommunication.
‘‘There was a bit of misunderstanding about who was going to call who between Jacinda and Winston,’’ [Annette] King explains in her memoirs.
‘‘So we were sort of waiting for them to have their last talks, thinking Winston was going to ring Jacinda and they thought Jacinda was going to ring Winston. And I sent a text to
Shane saying, ‘All ka pai [good]?’ And he phoned me and said, ‘She hasn’t phoned, she hasn’t called.’ So I said to Jacinda, ‘Winston’s waiting for you to call.’
‘‘So she called, talked to him. I’m not sure what they said. He didn’t tell her he was going with her. I think he asked some questions and then a few minutes later, maybe it was minutes, sometime later he came through Bowen [House].’’
It was expected Peters, ever the showman, would time the announcement of his decision to make the 6pm news bulletins.
Around 4.30pm, Paul Carrard and Marco Marinkovich, an advertising executive with a long association with Peters, were dispatched to assess the podium set-up in the Beehive Theatrette, usually the venue for postCabinet press conferences and significant ministerial announcements.
There was much excitement when a burst of applause came from Labour’s floor. Staff were cheering at quiz show Family Feud, it was quickly clarified.
Media outlets began setting up and journalists took their seats, but the allocated time-slot came and went. Just before 6.30pm, a brief statement was emailed to the Press Gallery: Peters would speak soon.
At 6.50pm he took his place at the podium. Neither Labour nor National knew what Peters planned to say. After eight minutes, in the final line of his speech and 26 days after New Zealanders had voted, he put the country out of its collective misery. ‘‘We’ve had to make a choice, whether it was with either National or Labour, for a modified status quo or for change. In our negotiations both National and Labour were presented with that opportunity . . . We choose a coalition government of New Zealand First with Labour.’’
At 37, Ardern would be the country’s youngest premier in 160 years, and its third female prime minister.
As English stood on the Beehive’s ninth floor watching the TV coverage, he learned his fate at the same time as the New Zealand public. His wife, Mary, and youngest son Xavier were by his side.
English called Ardern to offer congratulations, and then gracefully waited for her to give a press conference before speaking to waiting reporters. Flanked by Mary, and with Joyce, [deputy Paula] Bennett and taki MPNathan Guy behind him, English said he accepted the result.
The statement was livestreamed by most media outlets, the picture framed with an exit sign over his head.
‘‘We will be by far the strongest Opposition party that the Parliament has seen,’’ he said. ‘‘From here the National
Party will regroup, we’ll have a caucus meeting next week to discuss the outcome.’’
Bennett organised a party in her office. English, standing on a desk, gave an emotional and gracious speech. By the end of the night, Bennett was dancing on the table as Joyce played DJ.
‘‘There was heaps of red wine. [Murray] McCully turned up with some bottle from 1996 or something that was undrinkable. People drank it anyway,’’ one MP, a supporter of English, recalls.
‘‘Ministers were emptying the cellars: ‘We don’t need this anymore.’ It was a pretty depressing night because there was a real sense that it was a good government and [there was] unfulfilled potential with Bill.’’
Blue Blood: The Inside Story of the National Party In Crises (HarperCollins) is out tomorrow. RRP $36.99.