Guest Post: What does National have to do to get back into power?

A guest post by John Bishop:

Notice I didn’t say: win the next election. That might be harder than the second leg of the double here. Arguably National “won” the last election but lost the battle to form the government.

I don’t want to relitigate all of that saga, except to say that National’s current position does present it with a strategic dilemma that has been about for a while. Right now, it’s friendless, other than its tame poodle in ACT.

So, what are the strategic challenges and how might National tackle them?

One is obviously to split up the coalition and support party arrangement, or at least to weaken the bonds among the three parties in government.

That can come about by exposing and exploiting their inherent differences and presenting them as out of control and divided. New Zealanders don’t like governments that cannot run themselves. So far, the three-legged stool that is the current government is standing firmly.

The belief that any government with Winston Peters in it will fall apart on its own is just wishful thinking. Too many people in government have found that they like being there, and will fight very hard to stay there, even if they have to swallow some big dead rats.

Secondly, go after the voters who supported New Zealand First and the Greens in the last election. That’s easier said than done, because they are quite different sets of followers, but any erosion of Green or the NZF vote could see one or both tumble out of Parliament at the next election, which can only help the Nat’s cause.

Neither party is likely ever to coalesce with National, or to support a National led government so their absence from parliament will be no loss in that sense.

Thirdly, can National find a new partner? There’s talk of a rural conservative party, but that just looks like cannibalising your own vote. Spreading the National vote across two parties is not to increase the total centre-right vote.

Others talk of a hard right committed to continued economic reform party of the kind that Roger Douglas had hoped ACT would be (and perhaps was in its earliest days). The worth of that argument depends on how many votes one thinks there are for such a programme. It’s hard to find many who will work for, fund and back thorough going reform of the kind that Don Brash might have delivered if National had won in 2005.

Certainly, there is not 5% of the population keen on that, and there is no concentration of such people in one place to make winning an electorate seat an attractive option.

What about a socially conservative party  – the conservatives without Colin Craig, or a Family First oriented grouping without so much religion. The Christian Coalition got 4.33% of the vote in 1996, and Graham Capill led the Christian Heritage Party to 2.38% in 1999. In 2014 Craig’s Conservatives got 3.97%.  

It’s hard to get such a group to 5%, and unless National is prepared to gift them a seat, that strategy may hurt rather than help National.

This is because there is always the counter argument that if the relationship between National and this putative socially conservative group looks too cosy, opponents will say:  vote National and you get the other lot (and their “odious, repressive policies”) too. Just as National used to say about Labour and the Greens.

(I recall in the 2014 campaign Linda Clark, pretending to be an independent political commentator, but really trolling hard for her Labour Party, raising exactly that scare tactic before a large business audience at a pre-election meeting.)

Can National resurrect the Maori Party or something like it, particularly if Labour and/or New Zealand First fail to deliver to Maori? Not impossible, but I would have thought this would be hard.

Again the 5% threshold is a significant barrier, and likewise, which electorate seat would such a party target? Not obvious, even if all the other questions marks about leadership, policy, funding, on the ground organisation and the like were resolved.

The same argument applies to a soft liberal centrist urban party.

So that leaves the option that National’s new leader, Simon Bridges, seems to have chosen by default. That is to drive to the centre, presenting National as women friendly, environmentally and socially caring, having repented its “sins”, made a clean separation from the past (and its attendant mistakes and misdirections) and with fresh faces in key roles.

Might work I suppose, but the centre is a very crowded place, and Labour has successfully manged to position itself as a party of the younger, urban people whose concerns, values, foibles, fads and peccadillos are to the forefront of their policy agenda.

Inherently this strategy is saying that National can not only hold its current vote, but can also win even more votes than it did before. Win enough to get to say 48% or 49% of the votes cast, which might be just enough to enable it to form a government on its own.  Bold, ambitious, even foolhardy, but without friends perhaps it is the only plan available.

To make it work, Bridges needs to move beyond the allocation of portfolios and getting the key people in the team driving forward together. If there is a weakness in his allocation it would be the lack of cross portfolio linkages. Many of the difficult and intractable issues now facing the country don’t neatly belong in one place.

Housing is just one aspect of the problems associated with poverty, but housing isn’t just a matter for poor people. It touches on the Kiwi dream.

Likewise, mental health crosses all borders of race and class. The big one is water, which is a problem of ownership, Maori and treaty relations, of allocation, of rural development, of conflicting claims on usage, touching on recreation, farming, and tourism as well as involving questions about quality and purity. 

Who is pulling together National’s response on this? And who is in charge of organising National’s thinking about the new taxation policies emerging from the Cullen working party? Ditto secondary issues like the America’s Cup base, freedom camping and more.

It would be foolish to leave such matters solely to whoever is the spokesperson, however competent that person might be. There are just too many interests involved and the issues too complex to risk getting it wrong.

Yes, it is true that oppositions win when governments fall apart, but all governments need some help to do that, and that is a very important task for this opposition if it is to return to power anytime soon.

John Bishop is a former political reporter and commentator.