Journalist Andrea Vance's book Blue Blood paints a colourful portrait of Judith Collins' time as leader, but what happened behind National's closed doors was very different, writes the former leader's staffer Julie Johnston.
Opinion: I was Judith Collins' deputy chief of staff from 15 July 2020 until she lost the leadership in late November 2021.
I have first-hand knowledge of many of the events described in Andrea Vance’s book, Blue Blood, the inside story of the National Party in Crisis, especially those that occurred during Judith Collins’ term as leader.
In an interview about her book, Andrea Vance says she interviewed many former staff and she has made extensive use of anonymous quotes and opinions to tell her story.
I believe there is much to challenge in Vance’s book. Below is my account of just a couple of the events she describes: the background to National’s problems with its fiscal plan during the 2020 election campaign and Nick Smith’s resignation.
Problems with the fiscal plan in the 2020 election campaign
There is no doubt that the problems with the fiscal plan dealt a major blow to the campaign, and I wrote about it at length in my submission to the party's 2020 election review.
There is only light coverage of the fiscal plan issue in the Vance book but what is said, via an anonymous source, about the timing and origin of the plan, completely misrepresents what actually happened.
Vance pinpoints National’s electric vehicle announcement on September 11, 2020 as a turning point in the campaign and she suggests that it was at this very late stage, that Judith asked for a fiscal plan:
“Collins also had a new demand, the staffer says. She wanted a fiscal plan to emulate one waved by Ardern in the 2017 campaign. She thought that was great. The team cautioned that alternative budgets almost always go badly wrong. Why would you go there? You don’t have the resources to get something like that right: normally the entire Treasury does a budget. The staffer says the task was given to Goldsmith, as finance spokesman, who entrusted it to a young researcher. Economics agency NZIER was paid to review the figures.”
This is totally wrong. The fiscal plan was requested very early in the campaign in late July and early August, well before the EV announcement.
The book also implies that the request for a fiscal plan was rash, unreasonable and unusual. Unfortunately, Vance doesn’t include any other sources in the discussion of the fiscal plan to balance the opinion of the anonymous staffer.
The reality is that within days of becoming leader, Judith realised that there were serious problems with our economic narrative and finance policy.
On July 16, 2020, the Finance Spokesperson, Paul Goldsmith, had given an economic speech that contained some significant new policies. His speech was given the day before Judith’s first announcement as leader, the $31 billion transport package. This transport package was meant to have been announced by Todd Muller on July 14, 2020. But then he resigned, and it had to be dropped.
No one told Judith about Paul’s speech, either before it was given or immediately after.
She was later told that Paul’s speech had been carefully planned to follow Todd Muller’s speech. But no one had thought to reconsider the timing of Paul’s speech when Todd resigned.
The debt reduction message was also hard to explain when we were at the same time, announcing big spending policies like the $30 billion for transport and $4.8 billion for schools.
At the media stand up on July 17, Judith was blindsided with questions about her finance spokesperson’s announcements of the day before. Those announcements included suspending the Super Fund contributions, setting the 30 percent debt target and others.
Other senior MPs who were with Judith that day said they didn’t know about Paul’s speech either. The finance spokesperson had made a significant speech with new policies and the leader and colleagues had not been briefed or given lines. It wasn’t the best start.
The debt target announced by Paul became a problem immediately. Labour and the media claimed that our 30 percent target could only be achieved by $80 billion of cuts and austerity measures. There was an onslaught of articles about massive cuts to health and education if National was elected.
Many people in National Leader's Office, the leader, other MPs and the campaign team privately agreed with criticisms of National’s debt target. More than one MP and senior staff said that we had a real issue with over economic narrative and credibility.
A staffer had shown her a copy of Jacinda Arden’s debate notes from a 2017 debate that they had somehow obtained. The notes were pretty good on the fiscals and Judith wanted something at least equal. She needed to be able to explain our finance policy quickly and convincingly in the pressure of a debate.
On July 29, 2020, there was an article on Stuff titled “Fanciful debt reduction is National’s Kiwibuild”. A senior member of the campaign team circulated it to a few MPs and staff saying it was difficult to disagree with the article.
Paul subsequently said that he had only said he wanted to outline a pathway back to debt of 30 percent of GDP within in a decade but it was too ambiguous, too late and he couldn’t walk it back. The line that there would be $80 billion in cuts under National put us under huge pressure.
The debt reduction message was also hard to explain when we were at the same time, announcing big spending policies like the $30 billion for transport and $4.8 billion for schools.
Judith wanted and needed a prop
In the end, it was the debate preparation that brought it to a head.
Judith’s debate training sessions started days after she became the Leader and were usually attended by Judith, Janet Wilson, Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop and myself. Labour’s fiscal hole in 2017 was discussed at length. We also recalled how John Key had bested Phil Goff in a 2011 Debate with the line, “show me the money”.
Judith was quite nervous about the debates. She really wanted to do well in them. We spent hours watching old debates and working out the best template for her debate notes for which we slotted time in her diary for her to study.
A staffer had shown her a copy of Jacinda Arden’s debate notes from a 2017 debate that they had somehow obtained. The notes were pretty good on the fiscals and Judith wanted something at least equal. She needed to be able to explain our finance policy quickly and convincingly in the pressure of a debate.
We discussed how Jacinda Ardern had used Labour’s independently-costed fiscal plan as a prop in the 2017 debates to counter Steven Joyce’s claims of an $11.7 billion hole in Labour’s numbers. She had taken a copy of Labour’s fiscal plan into the debate and waved it around as evidence that Labour’s numbers were credible because they had been independently verified.
Judith wanted the same prop and it was becoming increasingly clear that she would need it.
We believed she would be totally exposed in the first debate if she didn’t have an independently costed fiscal plan because just like Labour in 2017, our economic credibility was being roundly questioned by then.
After the first debate training session, Nicola Willis circulated a copy of Labour’s 2017 fiscal plan to senior MPs and staff writing that “it was the benchmark” for us. We all agreed that Judith would need an independently costed plan by the time of the first debate, which at that time was August 25, 2020.
I emailed Paul Goldsmith on August 9, copying in the campaign and media team to ask for an update on our fiscal plan. Judith and Paul and the team had already discussed it many times verbally by then and Paul had seen Labour’s plan that Nicola Willis had circulated. We were conscious that we were working to a tight timetable with Treasury's Pre-Election Fiscal Update (PREFU) on August 20, and the first debate on August 25.
My email to Paul attached Labour’s timeline from 2017 (it was tight too) and I asked if we had a timeline for releasing our plan.
Paul Goldsmith advised that he was meeting with NZIER again around August 22 and that he was confident that we would be in a position to release our verified and fully costed fiscal plan before the first debate on the 25th.
It got worse just before the debate on September 23 as we faced claims that the $4 billion hole was in fact an $8 billion hole due some double counting on transport spending. We had to get it independently verified again throughout the evening of September 22 with Judith receiving an email at 1.30am on the morning of the debate to reassure her that no further errors had been found.
The second Covid lockdown delayed the PREFU and therefore the costing of our fiscal plan and also gave us more time to work on it. It was eventually announced on September 18.
Unfortunately, a lot of the good work in the plan was undone when the $4 billion error was exposed just before the virtual campaign launch.
It was an easy mistake. Paul had used the May Budget Election Fiscal Update (BEFU) Super Fund contributions, not the September PREFU. The PREFU had revised the contributions downwards by $4 billion and he had missed that change.
Paul Goldsmith described it as an irritating mistake that we, and the external checkers had missed. He pointed out that it did not affect the tax relief or our other policies. Nonetheless, it did enable people to say our numbers didn’t add up.
There was considerable media coverage of the error and it totally dominated the reporting of the campaign launch. The next day, Newshub claimed there was another accounting error, this time with the capital allowance. The media continued to claim that there were errors in the plan throughout the campaign.
From the time Judith became the leader, she had had to defend National’s finance policy. The independently costed fiscal plan was meant to shut that problem down.
It got worse just before the debate on September 23 as we faced claims that the $4 billion hole was in fact an $8 billion hole due some double counting on transport spending. We had to get it independently verified again throughout the evening of September 22 with Judith receiving an email at 1.30am on the morning of the debate to reassure her that no further errors had been found.
From the time Judith became the leader, she had had to defend National’s finance policy.
The independently costed fiscal plan was meant to shut that problem down.
To suggest, as Andrea Vance does, that Judith did not give Paul Goldsmith enough time to prepare the plan and that she was mistaken to require it in the first place, is ridiculous. National’s lack of economic credibility at that time meant there was no choice.
Nick Smith’s resignation
Richard Harman was the first to run the line that Judith Collins had orchestrated Nick Smith’s resignation. In an interview with RNZ, he said:
“I’m completely convinced that Judith Collins told Nick Smith that there was to be a media story about allegations of what happened in his office, the so-called bullying incident. And then she carefully set out that the media story was to be on a Tuesday, a day she had already declared off-limits to the media because she was going to her son’s graduation. Yeah, it was a stitch up.”
Other media soon picked it up. Susie Ferguson of RNZ reported that “there were allegations that Nick had been forced out by Judith Collins” and asked a political commentator if they “thought Judith Collins had completely clean hands on this".
Newshub’s headline was “Judith Collins denies forcing Nick Smith’s resignation to bring in political ally” and it reported that Judith had falsely told Nick Smith that Tova O’Brien was about to run a story about his treatment of staff.
In her report Tova claimed that “it was problematic if Nick Smith resigned over false pretences and if Judith had smoked him out to bring in an ally, then that was seriously undemocratic.”
Judith was even asked if “she made it up”.
It was quite the plot.
The truth is that the information that Judith passed on to Nick on a heads-up basis, came from a senior staffer in the National Leader's Office, who in turn had received it from a person who worked for a well-known lobby group. It was this person who claimed that media were about to run an exposé on Nick Smith’s treatment of his staff working backwards from the alleged 2020 incident ... The story would include interviews with numerous former staff of Nick’s who were going to say they had been bullied.
On the day of his valedictory, in a final interview with Tova O’Brien, Nick refused to answer when Tova asked if Judith had misled him. It was not unhelpful to Nick, that all the media focus was on Judith rather than why he had resigned.
In the weeks after Nick’s resignation the media continued to claim that Judith had orchestrated Nick’s resignation: “Veteran MP Nick Smith was ruthlessly eased out”, Judith had “publicly humiliated” Nick Smith. Nick had been “purged”. “We suspect Collins engineered Smith’s resignation” and so on.
In Vance’s account of the Nick Smith affair, she does include a couple of opinions from fellow MPs who do not believe that Judith orchestrated Nick’s resignation.
But Vance gives the final word to an anonymous former staffer who opined that Judith was “back to her tricks of 2014. Getting rid of Nick Smith, in her underhand, nasty way so her friend Harete could get in next on the list”.
Those comments combined with Nick’s own cryptic comments in the book, that he wondered if Judith had stitched him up, that he was suspicious over the National Leader's Office’s interest in the progress of the investigation, and Vance dangles just enough doubt to hint that Judith was behind a devious plot.
The truth is that the information that Judith passed on to Nick on a heads-up basis, came from a senior staffer in the National Leader's Office, who in turn had received it from a person who worked for a well-known lobby group.
It was this person who claimed that media were about to run an exposé on Nick Smith’s treatment of his staff working backwards from the alleged 2020 incident. It is worth noting that Judith was not the Leader when this alleged incident took place. The person from the lobby group claimed that the story would include interviews with numerous former staff of Nick’s who were going to say they had been bullied.
When I found out about it, the Thursday before Nick resigned, I thought the National staffer had a surprisingly specific tip-off but I considered that it might well be credible because of one simple reason.
The person at the lobby group worked with an ex-National Party staffer who I knew had been very involved in dealing with the aftermath of the 2020 incident. In my view, this person would very likely know if Nick’s former staffer had spoken to the media.
Nick wrote his own resignation press release and blindsided the media team with it late in the day on Monday 31 May 2021 giving them less than thirty minutes notice before demanding it be sent.
Any inquiries from the National Leader's Office were simply about managing political risk, not plotting Nick’s downfall.
The day that Nick resigned, Judith was meeting Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Queenstown. She had worked for weeks to get that meeting and was really hoping for some positive media coverage on the back of it. The last thing she needed was a scandalous resignation of one of her senior MPs on the same day.
It might surprise Nick to know that the post-2020 election National Leader's Officer leadership team were actually more sympathetic to him (it was suggested to me that there had been no natural justice for Nick in his dealings with Parliamentary Service) than the pre-election leadership team who just wanted him out.
In addition, Judith had put Nick in charge of the policy again. They weren’t friends but she respected and valued his intellect and vast experience.
In Andrea’s book, Nick said that National Leader's Office’s inquiries over the status of the investigation made him suspicious.
Any inquiries from the office were simply about managing political risk, not plotting Nick’s downfall.
A few weeks after Nick’s resignation, both Richard Harman and Tova O’ Brien, as the most vocal proponents of the “stitch up” or “smoke- out” conspiracy theory, were given the name of the person from the lobby group who had given the information to the National Leader's Office staffer.
Tova was told in person by me. Richard was told by a mutual acquaintance. I was told that Richard knew the person from the lobby group. Tova said she didn’t know them. If Richard and Tova genuinely believed the whole thing was a stitch-up, they were given the information to get to the bottom of it.
