Winston’s Well is Dry

So, the del­e­gates have gone home from NZ First’s first con­fer­ence since crash­ing out of Par­lia­ment 10 months ago. I wasn’t at the con­fer­ence (nor was any­one else by the sounds of it-journalists, observers and even some del­e­gates being lit­er­ally thrown out then locked out) but I did fol­low the cov­er­age keenly from afar.

This is the post I’ve been asked many many times to make but I’ve never really done it. It’s my habit not to com­ment on for­mer clients as a pro­fes­sional cour­tesy, but I will do it now because I hate to see an old friend make a fool of himself.

When­ever some­one asks me about Win­ston Peters nowa­days I have an “oh fuck” moment. Not because the pol­i­tics bore me, but because I know the fol­low­ing line I’m going to hear verbatim :

“You can never write Win­ston off, you know, he’s the come­back kid!”

It’s been quite a few years now since I wrote speeches for Win­ston and did his press releases, so there’s not exactly any chance that I’ll let any cats out of any bags.

What did I think of The Big Speech? To mix canine metaphors: It was a dog’s din­ner, all over the place like a mad dog’s shit. I thought Win­ston now sounds like a man des­per­ately search­ing for relevance.

Nor­mally I smile politely to myself, but tonight I AM writ­ing New Zealand First off as a going con­cern. I can say with 100% con­fi­dence that New Zealand First will not be in the next par­lia­ment after 2011, and any­one who thinks oth­er­wise is delusional.

Win­ston would often quote Thomas Hardy when things went wrong: “once more to the well” he’d say and con­vince him­self first that he could over­come. I’m here to tell you that the well is dry. (by the way, what other politi­cian could quote Hardy these days?)

Please under­stand, this con­clu­sion has not been reached from a point of anger: I per­son­ally like Win­ston. This con­clu­sion was reached after a cold, objec­tive look at the facts. Sim­ply put, Win­ston does not have the resources or polit­i­cal credit to launch a seri­ous attempt at re-election.

Also, please (PLEASE(!)) don’t think that I want to get back into NZ polit­i­cal con­sult­ing for NZ First–they couldn’t afford me.

There is a case to be made for Win­ston to be a polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor or some great columnist–he is the best oppo­si­tion MP of the last two decades. But, now he reminds me of a fighter who has been given the ten count, wakes up at eleven and insists to the ref­eree that he can fight on.

He is past-master at tear­ing down, but the same can­not be said of his abil­i­ties to build-up. It remains a fact that every gov­ern­ment he has been a part of either has dis­in­te­grated or has been elim­i­nated from Par­lia­ment (see National 1990, 1996 and Labour 2008).

To counter this, New Zealand First has devel­oped a “plague on both your houses” strat­egy: in effect con­sign­ing itself to oppo­si­tion before the elec­tion. It makes for a nice sound bite short-term, but long-term they have paid for this strat­egy dearly, mostly because peo­ple tend to vote for gov­ern­ments, not oppositions.

In any case, this strat­egy can­not be end­lessly played: you sim­ply can­not run a neg­a­tive cam­paign for long before poten­tial vot­ers become dis­il­lu­sioned. It’s an unsus­tain­able strat­egy, espe­cially when you have a history.

And that’s what it all comes down to: history.

Vot­ers can be com­pared to a finance com­pany. If we can indulge in an exten­sion of that anal­ogy then New Zealand First, and Win­ston in par­tic­u­lar, have used up all their (polit­i­cal) credit, and now have a bad credit rating.

Winston’s counter to this is to paint him­self as the vic­tim of a con­spir­acy; his amaz­ing speech this last week­end to the New Zealand First con­fer­ence explic­itly states this:

“The rea­sons we had to be taken out in the 2008 elec­tion are now glar­ingly obvious.”

Curi­ously, he then con­tra­dicts him­self by stat­ing later in the speech that they lost because they made mis­takes and lost their focus.

In the minds of vot­ers this is very bad: even if they are com­mit­ted enough to decide to give their one and only vote to a guy who has let them down before, they still won’t have a stake in decid­ing the next gov­ern­ment. Vot­ers like to vote for win­ners: not on the amount their guy loses by. They will quite rightly come to the con­clu­sion that even if Win­ston does return to par­lia­ment it will still be a wasted vote.

Right now Winston’s biggest asset is the respect and weari­ness that his polit­i­cal foes and the media have of him. They too have a fear that he may very well have the pow­ers to be the comeback-kid once again, and aren’t pre­pared to write him off. The result is that they con­tinue to give him token attention.

If they really want to get rid of him then they should sim­ply ignore him. Winston’s only chance of get­ting trac­tion is to be a gad­fly who gets a reac­tion from those with bet­ter things to do, to be an itch that has to be itched.

With­out that trac­tion then the laws of ratio­nal expec­ta­tions applies: if poten­tial NZ First vot­ers believe that NZ First will not get over 5% then they will not be pre­pared to vote for him, and his sup­port will stay low, repeat­ing the cycle– Unless NZ First is around the 5% within 6 months then he has no chance what­so­ever. The chances of that hap­pen­ing, with the coun­try emerg­ing from reces­sion and National so far ahead in the polls are zero. This is why Win­ston made the claim in his speech that NZ First’s sup­port is underestimated.

I would even go fur­ther and say that unless New Zealand First has around 7–8% six months out from polling day then they won’t be back. Con­sid­er­ing that they haven’t bro­ken 1% since the last elec­tion, and haven’t been over 5% for 7 years then this seems extremely remote. They can­not expect to go into elec­tion day under 5% and get back–they do not have the party machine to do that.

There are 3 main rea­sons why New Zealand First will strug­gle to meet this:

* Their support-base has aban­doned them

* Their party machine is incompetent

* Their mes­sage is too tired and con­fused and is no longer sellable

The media love to say that the oldies have aban­doned NZ First. I actu­ally don’t believe that to be true, and there is no evi­dence that this is what hap­pened. Sure, the oldies are an impor­tant ele­ment of the NZ First vot­ing block, but that ignores the two other pieces: the rural vote, and the Bay of Plenty vote.

A close exam­i­na­tion of rural booths shows that the rural vote has declined an aver­age of 20% per elec­tion cycle for New Zealand First, except for 2002 when it was sta­ble. Since then it has declined pretty con­sis­tently. NZ First appeals to the rural vote because whilst it is eco­nom­i­cally to the left of labour, it is socially to the right of National. Quite why the rural vote has declined for NZ First I’m not entirely sure.

About 1/3 of NZ First’s vote comes from the Bay of Plenty–those elec­torates close to Tau­ranga. While Tau­ranga became an alba­tross around Winston’s neck in later years, it was a very effec­tive base for him to increase the party vote.

You can­not do a proper analy­sis of NZ First with­out start­ing at the Bay.

Unfor­tu­nately for Win­ston the demo­graphic of the Bay has changed sig­nif­i­cantly in the same way that Tau­ranga itself changed–it is get­ting younger, richer and sub­ur­ban. What’s more, with Tau­ranga now aban­doned there is no home base for NZ First in their more lucra­tive geo­graphic location.

NZ First relied heav­ily on its par­lia­men­tary wing, both in terms of infra­struc­ture and expo­sure to the media. Look­ing at their line-up online I recog­nise many of the peo­ple that Win­ston now relies on. I also remem­ber many as bat-shit insane flunkies who couldn’t organ­ise a lie-down in a morgue.

Winston’s new part-time media liai­son guy used to be a weath­er­man, and can­not spell “liai­son” (look it up on their site).

NZ First now no longer has access to research, to pub­licly funded trans­port, to tax­payer funded adver­tis­ing, and most impor­tantly by far access to the Par­lia­men­tary Press Gallery.

More than ever Win­ston will be at the whim of edi­tors for cov­er­age who are no longer oblig­ated into giv­ing him “bal­anced” cov­er­age. This is the main rea­son that a party which has been voted out of par­lia­ment has never returned in New Zealand and very rarely returns over­seas. In fact, the only exam­ples I can think of (off the top of my head) are from Israel, and they have a 1.5% threshold.

MMP has changed things in pol­i­tics out­side Par­lia­ment also: with the national vote now more impor­tant than the elec­torate there is a require­ment for greater, far more sophis­ti­cated party machin­ery. NZ First does not have the assets to stay in the game.

Let’s say that there are 2.5million vot­ers. Last year NZ First got 95,356 votes or 4.07% of the vote. Let’s give NZ First the ben­e­fit of the doubt and say that their sup­port is not at 1%, but at 2%. That means that they still need to con­vince a min­i­mum of 75,000 peo­ple to vote for them (or 30,000 more than voted for them at the last elec­tion), at the bare min­i­mum. With­out adver­tis­ing and with­out exten­sive media cov­er­age it’s dif­fi­cult to see that happening.

They also can­not do it with­out a dri­ving issue, and in that regards they are all at sea. I would urge you to read the speech that Win­ston gave to the faith­ful over the week­end. I wasn’t there but I can say that if I had pre­sented the speech as it appears on NZ First’s web­site Win­ston would have quite rightly sacked me on the spot.

It is a ter­ri­ble speech that looks and reads as if some­one has gone through the old speech archive and cut and pasted lines into it. There are no para­graphs, no devel­oped argu­ments, and there is no head­liner issue.

A laundry-list of gripes is not a speech.

There was no issue that Win­ston is claim­ing own­er­ship over: not even immi­gra­tion. Because there was no sound­bite, the main story became the very fact that Win­ston is giv­ing a speech and that NZ First locked the doors on journalists.

Has the rela­tion­ship between NZ First and the media got­ten so bad that now Win­ston is filed away under the curios­ity file? Are his min­ders so incom­pe­tent that they would allow the media to be shut out? The ama­teurism is astounding.

OK, let’s look at what NZ First are trum­pet­ing. Their web­site boasts as their main achieve­ments health-care for under-fives, the gold card, 1000 extra police. The gold card has had a debat­able impact, the 1000 new police turned out to be admin­is­tra­tive staff not net of those police already leav­ing the ser­vice, and the under-fives pol­icy was 13 years ago.

That’s hardly a knock-out pol­icy plat­form, and not one to return to Par­lia­ment on.

The well is finally dry.

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Tagged as: General

Tagged as: General