No Bennett, no fun for Nats
Todd Muller would have to perform juggling tricks on a monocycle to grab my attention now that one of the Nats’ best girls is leaving the lifeboat. Even then I’d yawn.
Paula Bennett and Judith Collins both rated as contenders for leadership in the past and stand out among the rest, but now Bennett is calling it quits, as who wouldn’t.
In the political game of snakes and ladders, Muller shoved her down a long snake and walked off with two small blondes who have to crane their necks to look up at him on the ladder. It’s a look a certain kind of man appreciates, little realising it’s the least flattering of all camera angles. Maybe that’s why they don’t look ecstatic.
Petite Nikki Kaye is now deputy leader, and Amy Adams, a former contender for leader, is now third in National’s ranking, enough to make her backtrack on leaving politics before this year’s election. I hope they’ll turn out to have megapersonalities like Bennett and Collins, and stage a coup. His ratings are dismal.
In a roomful of women I’d pick Collins to sit beside, expecting entertainment. Mischief restrained seems to lurk behind her blandest facial expression, as if she’s ready to unleash a wisecrack, or having a private laugh. They’re a type at all-girl schools, women like her: brainy girls who seem to conform while concealing rebelliousness, and not missing a trick.
Cool girls steered clear of them, scared of the mockery they could unleash. I liked them. Hierarchies and rules didn’t impress me either. They made girls like her prefects only to neutralise them.
It was a rotten trick of Collins to jump on a boy racer’s confiscated car, gloating for the cameras at a car yard before it got crushed. She drove the law change that made it happen.
It was not impressive that she was friends with Cameron Slater, aka Whale Oil, either, though politicians routinely cultivate media people in the hope of influencing them to pursue their private agendas. She’s been provocative, too, about issues to do with ethnicity.
Maybe politics isn’t her best place. Too much schmoozing, long-term games of boring strategy, and much suffering of fools. I’m surprised her new book didn’t signal she was quitting too. As for Paula Bennett, who has a book out too, I’ll miss her snappy dressing, red lipstick and immaculate silver fox hairdo. She looked like a credible deputy leader next to Simon Bridges, even if the hair product between them was on overload.
I like her Tiggerish energy, and if only she’d got Bridges to have elocution lessons he might not have been rolled. You don’t have to sound posh, but you do have to care enough to make yourself understood. She had no problem with that.
The National Party has always attracted pleasantly dull men who look vaguely suitable, and who offer up pedestrian solutions to problems they almost grasp. Muller may prove to be another, and a bouncy woman like Bennett at his side would only have showcased his deficiencies. Few leaders share the spotlight with a rival.
Bennett was seen as betraying class loyalty when she tightened up the welfare system for solo mothers, having been one herself. But I doubt she’d have taken a Covid handout of $170,000, like National MP and multimillionaire Alastair Scott has for his freehold winery.
Former party leader Jenny Shipley once told me the worst welfare bludgers were the affluent middle class. Scott, a former investment banker, will have been entitled to the handout, but that’s not the point. No-one will miss him.