Collins taps into a simmering mood

It is more than 15 years since Don Brash’s infamous after-dinner speech to the Orewa Rotary Club declaring ‘‘one law for all’’ as National Party doctrine. recall being in the audience that night; Brash delivered it in his somewhat scholarly monotone. He hardly set the room on fire but the aftermath was explosive.

I re-read Brash’s speech again after Judith Collins delivered a speech on race relations to a National Party meeting in Auckland this weekend.

All these years later, much of Brash’s speech reads like a cry from another age; he’s the embarrassing relative around the Christmas dinner table, the one who shouts down every argument with the usual tropes about whether there are any full-blooded Ma¯ ori anyway, and rattles off phrases like the Treaty grievance industry, racial separatism, one law for all, and the Government doling out money according to race not need.

I don’t think the words ‘‘special treatment for Maori’’ were ever explicitly used in the speech but that was the message his target audience heard anyway. It catapulted National 17 points up in the polls and sparked a divisive debate on race relations.

With National back in the doldrums again, and the rumour mill circling about the leadership, is Collins channelling Brash?

Collins’ speech might only be a pale imitation of Brash’s but it plays on some of those same fears, notably that the Government’s health reforms, including the establishment of a separate Ma¯ ori health authority, will lead to a twotier system of governance. And not just in health, but in education, justice and elsewhere – or ‘‘one for Ma¯ ori and one for everyone else’’, as Collins put it.

And like Brash, whose speech tapped into fears about iwi veto powers, Collins has picked out the new Ma¯ ori health authority’s veto powers as racially divisive.

On its own, the Ma¯ ori Health Authority probably doesn’t have the same power to stoke racial disharmony as Brash’s divisive iwi/kiwi billboards, which played up the racial divisions over the foreshore and seabed.

And there are legitimate questions about the Government’s ability to deliver such sweeping and radical change across the board in health, though no one would deny the current health system is failing Ma¯ ori.

But will returning to race relations do for Collins what it did for Brash? National’s pollsters – and my inbox – suggest there is a simmering mood out there, particularly among some older New Zealanders, who are finding themselves increasingly marooned on the wrong side of generational change.

They find events like Anzac Day confronting because ceremonies are more likely to start with a karakia these days, and they get angry when people call New Zealand Aotearoa.

But they were probably not among the voters who deserted National at the last election anyway.

So it’s possible Collins will find her constituency. But it may still not be enough to save her job.

Some older New Zealanders are finding themselves increasingly marooned on the wrong side of generational change.