Visiting National leader not on a roll

JUDITH Collins had one publicly expressed mission on her Dunedin visit on Thursday — to win Taieri for National.

The privately expressed agenda, on the other hand, was to try to get a campaign which was badly in danger of coming off the rails back into the groove again.

If Ms Collins had come to Dunedin the previous week, she would have been on a high — two impressive debate performances and poll results which if not stellar were at least not as dire as National has recorded in recent times.

However, this week Ms Collins was not in such a good space.

The Press leaders’ debate on Tuesday, while not the resounding victory for Labour leader Jacinda Ardern that some have claimed, was not as strong a performance by Ms Collins as she had previously delivered.

That was followed the next day by the surfacing of a leaked email from Maungakiekie MP Denise Lee which criticised Ms Collins’ handling of policy announcements.

Soon after came the disastrous walkabout in Auckland, where ‘‘random’’ passersby greeted by Ms Collins were alleged to be, in the main, prearranged party loyalists.

Whatever the truth of that, it meant Ms Collins spent the next two news cycles deflecting questions about the honesty of her campaign strategy when she would far rather she was being quizzed about her policies.

Dunedin was a chance to put all that behind her, but process issues continued to dog Ms Collins throughout.

The day started with a visit to a very noisy Mosgiel factory, followed by what National said was a highly successful walkabout in Dunedin.

However, the media — while apparently welcome — were also not invited, possibly due to an overabundance of caution by Ms Collins’ minders following the travails of the previous day.

A strangely listless speech at the Chamber of Commerce was followed by a torturous standup where reporters wanted answers to allegations of disloyalty by backbenchers while Ms Collins wanted to discuss ‘‘what matters to New Zealanders’’.

Unfortunately for Ms Collins, what matters to many folk in the South is the cheese roll, that arteryclogging ‘‘delicacy’’ which is the region’s gift to the nation’s cuisine.

A Mosgiel cafe had been detailed to produce a tray of southern sushi for a photo op, but Ms Collins’ noshow guaranteed another ‘‘campaign clanger’’ headline, even though the party’s Taieri candidate Liam Kernaghan did his level best to rescue the situation by showing up in person once the slip was discovered.

Politicians hate these sort of things . . . in the grand scheme of things they mean little, but they end up being mostly what people talk about and remember.

Through a misunderstanding Ms Collins had instead sampled her southern comestible earlier in the day at Starfish in St Clair — again, an event her minders had not invited any professionals with a camera to.

Things picked up markedly for Ms Collins at trip’s end though, closing her day with a lively public meeting at Taieri College.

Perhaps she had just had enough and decided to let fly, but she was back on the sort of jestfilled form which won her the first leader’s debate and earned a score draw in the second.

With a poll at the end of the day showing little movement in National’s ratings, Ms Collins will need more punch and less process to narrow the gap with the Labour Party in the week of the campaign that remains.