Nats are in better shape than you might think
It might not look like it – in fact, let’s be frank, it doesn’t look like it at all – but the National Party is in good health as an opposition. Or at least better health than you’d think. Before you go rushing to your quills and keyboards to prove me wrong, one must add the essential caveat that any party polling at 27 per cent in the most recent polls on both major TV stations isn’t doing well enough to win the next election, that’s for sure. But behind the chaos, and political psychodrama playing out on the third floor of Parliament House, parts of the party are formulating what the country wants from a future National government.
Covid-19 spokesperson Chris Bishop has set himself to the unenviable task of clearing the party’s reputation on the pandemic, something it lost in the last days of the 2020 lockdown.
Labour has hugged Covid experts throughout the pandemic and appealed to the electorate’s understandable desire for zero incompetence at the border (something National was in no position to promise in 2020). Bishop’s solution seems to be to hug those experts even tighter than Labour, pushing the Government on pre-flight testing in the last days of 2020, saliva testing and closing the few remaining holes in the border.
His colleague from across Wellington harbour, Nicola Willis, has opened up two lines of inquiry on the Government’s housing policy, pressing Megan Woods on the spiralling social housing wait list, and the social crisis faced by people living in emergency housing.
She’s pushed Labour into a corner on supply, arguing the linchpin of Labour’s housing policy, the NPS-UD issued under the Resource Management Act, should be implemented with greater urgency, and she managed to get that party to back the first reading of a member’s bill aimed at bettering the regulations around body corporates.
This Parliament has also seen Erica Stanford step into greater prominence. Previously mediashy, Stanford prosecuted the Government on the issue of essential migrant workers who had been separated from their families. She proved Labour did not have a parliamentary monopoly on kindness, and eventually scored a policy change.
Flying the flag for the party’s social conservatives is Simeon Brown, who’s got the Government on the same page on guns and gangs, taking up the cause of control orders, and carved out a niche in the Corrections portfolio.
The party is also getting tactical with its use of questions. Its reduced headcount gives it fewer opportunities to ask questions in Parliament – as few as four primary questions a day. MPs have instead flocked to written parliamentary questions, which aren’t rationed.
Despite the party nearly halving, the number of written questions asked of ministers has stayed roughly the same – 22,695 questions have been asked this Parliament, compared to 23,994 at a similar point in the last Parliament (most of the questions have come from National, with single National MPs asking roughly as many questions as the ACT and Green caucuses).
MPs are using those questions more tactfully. Done well, written questions siphon data from a government, and can be more useful than the blunt theatrics of the House.
Data from those questions has formed the basis of stories that have led both major TV networks and both large news websites.
None of that matters a jot, however, if people aren’t listening, and the latest poll suggests they aren’t. The party’s problem appears to be one of strategy, rather than tactics. At best, the successful MPs are holding a mirror to the Government and attempting to provide a more liberal, marketfocused, and competent alternative.
At worst, the party is confused and contradictory, exemplified by the decision to split the finance portfolio. David Parker poked fun at that choice last week, joking that, on Tuesday, the finance spokesperson, Michael Woodhouse, asked the Government to keep a lid on debt, while on Thursday, shadow treasurer Andrew Bayly asked the Government to deliver a tax cut.
‘‘No wonder people are confused,’’ Parker joked – and we are. What’s the narrative? Does National want a muscular fiscal intervention like the UK Tories or Aussie Liberals? Or a leaner, streameddown welfare state of the Key years?
The operatic contrast between National’s high and low points this term tells a story of a party at a crossroads. Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated, but if people don’t start listening, it can’t be said to be really alive.
There are lessons here for both National and Labour. This most recent poll doesn’t dampen National’s hopes of an Orewa-style poll bump; what it does do is prove that race isn’t the polling dynamite that it was two decades ago.
But Labour should remember that the examples of Orewa (and Jacindamania) prove parties can very quickly snap back to polling relevance. Of course, it’s finding that new Orewa, finding the new Jacindamania, that is the tricky bit.
The party’s problem appears to be one of strategy, rather than tactics.