Alison Mau Just what was Judith's undoing?
And just like that, blessedly, it’s over. The unintentionally-longest election campaign ever is done and today we wake up to a Labour Government returned in spades by a Covid-weary populace.
The length of the campaign has bled any remaining cares out of all of us; few have the energy left to examine, in any detail, what the three years ahead will hold in politics. The one skerrick of curiosity I have left is reserved for the fate of Judith Collins; what will happen to her now?
The long home stretch to yesterday’s vote count was both good and bad for Collins.
Good, in that it proved long enough for her to bed-in as leader and, by sheer force of will and the weird, warped timescale of 2020 (surely it’s only April still? Surely it’s 2022 already?) take our minds off the fact that National’s leak-prone caucus had already rolled two other leaders in short order and only picked her out of lack of reasonable remaining choices.
The effect of that force of will should not be underestimated. Despite remarkably stable polling throughout the campaign, Collins couldn’t drag National over the 30 per cent mark, which won’t give her a comfort barrier to allow her to credibly claim she should stay on as leader.
Bad, in that the more she grew in confidence, but did not see support numbers rise alongside that confidence, she became a bit desperate and prone to unedifying gaffes.
Most of those could be forgiven fairly easily (or at least looked upon with bemused indulgence); we don’t live in Judith Collins’ head, therefore can’t really say that she wasn’t praying for real in St Thomas’ Church, or whether she actually did want to throttle Emma Mellow for setting up that mortifying Ponsonby Rd stroll (as the look on her face seemed to suggest).
Embarrassing, perhaps – unforgivable, certainly not. Those of us who enjoy seeing a strong woman do her thing, were enjoying watching Collins take the bit between her teeth and bolt the long, long home stretch. But there’s a big
difference between strong, and cruel; and in the campaign’s last days Collins stumbled in a way that cannot be so easily excused.
At 31 per cent, Aotearoa has the third highest obesity rate in the world, behind only Mexico and the United States. Obesity is an expensive and serious health issue and there are complex reasons for it. Collins dismissed it as ‘‘entirely’’ an issue of ‘‘willpower’’ and in doing so, made herself look mean and perhaps worse, uninformed. Collins does not back away from her firmly held beliefs and therefore had nowhere to go with this one except to try to dismiss it altogether as a ‘‘distraction’’ in the days afterwards, and drag the debate back to the firmer ground of economic recovery.
You can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. Almost a third of New Zealanders, regardless of wealth or ethnicity, now know Collins thinks they are weak and undisciplined. That will hurt on a personal level, and their regard for her may never be truly the same no matter what their political stripes.
Not that Labour leader Jacinda Ardern’s campaign was that spectacular, of course. Steadier and less erratic, it certainly did not reach the giddy adulation of her 2017 run. By design, Ardern ran a mild race until the very end, protected by the genuinely good fist her government has made of New Zealand’s response to the global Covid calamity. It was enough to get her comfortably over the line, but among her core admirers there is unease. Promises made in 2017 have not been kept, transformation has not been delivered.
Ardern is now painting her Government’s failure to fully deliver on core promises like housing and child poverty as a matter of timing; three years was not long enough to do what they promised to do, she repeated in the campaign’s final days.
On Thursday, Ardern flagged her intentions should Labour have lost yesterday’s vote – she would be out of Parliament and of politics altogether. This may be a hint that she has, by choice, only one more term in her as prime minister. Collins by contrast, says she’ll stay on no matter what.
If that’s the case, Ardern has this gift of the next three years to do what she told the public she would do. Free from the tether of a NZ First coalition partner, and with less owed to the Greens, in any normal electoral cycle the Ardern race plan would be to come out of the gates at a gallop in order to secure her legacy.
But this is not any normal electoral cycle. To stretch the metaphor, there’s a determined nobbler (the pandemic) lurking in the shadows ready to bring the favourite down. If Labour can’t keep New Zealanders safe AND engineer economic recovery, voters will turn on them next time.
Collins will be praying fervently she’s still around, and still leader, if that comes to pass.
Those of us who enjoy seeing a strong woman do her thing, were enjoying watching Collins take the bit between her teeth and bolt the long, long home stretch. But there’s a big difference between strong, and cruel...