Wake-up call for red-faced Labour

So far so shambolic. If this is a taste of things to come in the new Parliament, get ready for a wild ride. Labour has run hard up against the reality of dealing with the biggest single Opposition party yet, and the panicked scenes as it tried to bargain its way out of an embarrassing vote to elect the new Speaker are a memory it will want to bury quick smart.

While Labour was still scrambling to recover from that debacle, Foreign Minister Winston Peters dropped a bombshell, serving legal papers taking broad aim at a bunch of Opposition MPs, political staffers, a government department chief executive and journalists before heading overseas.

It’s a fair bet that this is not what Labour’s strategists and senior ministers wanted day one of the rest of the next three years to look like.

The desperate discussions captured on the floor of Parliament as Labour’s leader of the House, Chris Hipkins, tried to salvage a bad situation from turning into a train wreck are just the sort of images Labour doesn’t need.

Those images have catapulted what would normally be an inhouse procedural stoush into a defining moment. They fit the Opposition narrative – that this is the same party that only a few months ago was divided, and defeated, that Labour wasn’t ready for power, that the next three years are going to be a shambles.

The first vote on the first day of the House means none of those things of course. Labour was never actually at risk of losing the vote to elect a new Speaker – but what’s important is it thought that it might, after National spotted the absence of a number of Government MPs, and threatened to elect its own Speaker. And that was enough to force Labour into an embarrassing backdown over the more arcane issue of how many MPs sit on select committees.

Some might call National’s act blackmail, and they aren’t far wrong.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s face as events played out spoke volumes.

She insists Labour knew it always had the numbers, but wanted the Speaker elected by consensus rather than a vote. That may be so, but Labour can’t say it wasn’t warned.

National MPs are still angry about the way post-election negotiations dumped them out of Government. And what they saw as Labour high-handedness over the select committee row just rubbed salt into the wound.

They have already warned they plan to use their numbers to make the Government’s life difficult.

There has been a lot of posturing about the select committee issue in recent days, but Hipkins’ refusal to even return National’s calls seems to be what got the Opposition particularly incensed.

So Labour was in for a rough ride until the end of the year as National threatened to filibuster, to delay the new Government’s 100-day programme.

Ironically, the debacle over the Speaker’s vote has actually saved Labour that frustration, because National now has what it wanted – an increase in select committee numbers from 96 to 109.

But Labour should take it as a lesson to live by for the next three years. National is a new phenomenon in Parliament – a large, wellresourced, and popular Opposition that has a hard-earned reputation as a formidable and well-oiled machine.

A lot of that reputation was earned through its exploitation of the huge resources that go with a Beehive office. The loss of those resources will be telling over time. But if Labour expected National to come back weakened and demoralised from the election loss, it has been given a big wake-up call.

Like winning a scrum against the run of play, yesterday’s victory isn’t going to change the score board.

But it is a big morale boost for National’s MPs. And it will set the tone for the rest of the year.

Welcome to the 52nd Parliament.