Campaign Observer column: Is it too late for the National Party to change its leader ahead of the election on November 7?
There’s a full three months to go – and Labour in 2017 famously jumped, with just 53 days to go, from the moribund days of Andrew Little through Jacindamania and on into government.
But Little had led his party to 24 percent in two national polls immediately before he stepped aside and had an obvious successor with star power.
For the National Party, nine years on, its leader Christopher Luxon a) is in Government as Prime Minister, b) has his party still at 29 or 30 percent in polls and c) has no obvious successor with star power.
He also has an economy on what he calls an upswing (but what might better be likened to Newton’s cradle – that desk device of a series of hanging steel balls knocking each other endlessly this way and that, momentum without change).
Luxon and National are carrying into the campaign period the deadweights of elevated inflation, increasing interest rates, 166,000 people unemployed, high fuel, supermarket and service costs and a general malaise of consumers feeling no better off than three years ago.
Each international supply chain threat, each poll assessing New Zealanders’ state of being, carries a grim outlook for a governing party with stalled political momentum.
One hundred and eight days ago, National had its sliding doors moment.
Luxon responded to caucus murmurings and media foghorns by putting his leadership to the vote and was unchallenged.
What if National had foreseen then where they are now, nearly four months on?
Global events and macroeconomic tides would not have altered, but the party’s response, communication and connection to a jaundiced electorate could well have.
And, increasingly, it looks like the person with the political skills to have produced a different outlook is Bishop, the supposed villain back in April for having his name bandied about as a potential challenger.
The man relieved of his responsibilities as party campaign chair and Leader of the House for being talked about as an alternative, and perhaps not doing enough to kill off that speculation.
National could, of course, have gone through a different sliding door at that time and opted for its deputy Nicola Willis, or the Health Minister Simeon Brown, or Education Minister Erica Stanford or even Police and Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell.
Willis and Brown are simply too closely associated with Luxon’s managerialism to have appealed publicly, and a pre-programmed Brown seemingly cannot offer a sentence without injecting National’s campaign slogan of fixing the past and building the future. Stanford never seemed to want it and Mitchell, while blessed with some of Bishop’s flawed Kiwi bloke appeal, professed undying loyalty to the current PM.
Bishop is no star. There’s no evident stardust around him, no magazine cover smile or personal opinion poll momentum. He presents as a guy who, when he was a student, would have spent half his life walking around with food spilled on his shirt.
But he has a shorn-down message, a clear ambition and purpose for his party and government, that few articulate as well. He also exhibits an energy and self-confidence few can match from his own ranks. While he can be sensitive to media criticism, he’s also an MP who can laugh at himself.
As recently as Thursday’s press conference underground in a new City Rail Link rail station at Karanga-a-hape, he showed what might have been, at the higher office.
Bishop spoke in another language to the Luxon and Willises of this world, was natural, uninterested in relitigating the project’s past, set an optimistic tone and injected humour at multiple points of the media Q&A.
The Cabinet powerhouse as minister of housing, transport, infrastructure and resource management reform and Attorney-General was the party’s campaign chair last time, when National won 38.08 percent of the party vote even as Act and New Zealand First shared a further 14.72 percent.
His personal foibles are well traversed: former lobbyist for big tobacco; awkward, naïve snapchat interactions with teenagers early in his time as an MP; a spat with musician Don McGlashan over Māori performance at a concert.
His political style is out there. He’s an impatient iconoclast, as focused on policy reform as he is dishevelled in appearance. A party political mischief-maker capable of finding compromises, as he did over Auckland housing density. A details guy who knows how to skip over the details before a crowd glazes over.
He is quick on his feet, agile in front of an audience, footsure presenting to media. Yes, he can be glib and adopt the ‘that was then, this is now’ refusal to explain changes in stance. And he has the aspiring orator’s propensity for hyperbole (comparing New Zealand’s productivity performance to Eastern Europe and four decades of communism, 30 years after the wall fell.)
Importantly, his policy areas have momentum: fast-track developments are being approved at a rate of around one a week lately, laws replacing the dreaded RMA are before the Parliament right now. The latest version of Auckland’s housing density plan has now advanced towards a hearings panel, the CRL train network is opening with stations upgraded, level-crossings eliminated, and a 30-year infrastructure plan on the books.
Bishop has had political reverses too: on the level of ministerial powers under fast-track, on the two million homes in Auckland, on the eye-wateringly expensive Roads of National Significance. But he’s been politically capable of throwing things overboard and moving on, shrugging off the downbuzz and accepting what he’s called “political equilibrium”.
In Parliament lately he’s faced concerted opposition questioning over his RMA reforms, the removal of iwi-council agreements and the scale of costs which could be imposed on councils and ratepayers by compensation for affected property rights. But he’s seldom been flustered or bested.
His debating is not in the league of a Grant Robertson or perhaps even a David Seymour, but he’s more adept than almost his entire National caucus at a fluid, accessible take on the subject at hand.
On Thursday morning, the CRL event was a happy and apolitical moment for all.
Bishop tried, and probably succeeded, in casting it as a happy moment for the country.
“The City Rail Link is a symbol of our ambition for Auckland and our ambition for New Zealand. A small country at the bottom of the world choosing to be wealthy, modern and prosperous….
“We built this, and we can build more.”
He sketched out wider benefits too.
“This is a multi-decade investment in Auckland’s future but over time, people will see suburbs change in and around the stations.
“Change will be difficult for some people but that is a good thing ultimately, it will drive productivity.
“Productivity is the driver of wages and prosperity. That is our great national challenge, is wages and prosperity. That is what CRL is all about. It’s not just a transport project… it’s so much more than that.
“That’s been my driving focus as transport, housing, infrastructure and RMA minister.”
Is the clarity and self-certainty that Bishop evidently brings, the qualities that National needs right now?
It’s hard to imagine him being such a sitting duck this week as his leader, who has been assailed by three controversies over his remarks about small businesses, Winston Peters’ racism over a Chinese-born MP and the PM’s use of Air Force aircraft.
Luxon has failed to convince under examination over any of the three and has looked weakened by the first two, at least.
Surely National would not have been so supine towards Winston Peters and NZ First these past 108 days had Bishop been on the Beehive’s Ninth Floor. It’s possible, of course, any change back then might have shaken Peters and NZ First loose from that moment, and the election year landscape would have changed.
If politics is a confidence game, both internally in a party and in gaining the belief of the public, this kind of politician could have been a circuit-breaker for a party heading nowhere in election year.
There is the obvious danger that a capable and crafty politico taking over later in the piece could have self-combusted as it did for Chris Hipkins being handed Labour’s leadership in election year 2023.
But National can hardly look back at April now and think There Was No Alternative.
Bishop hasn’t been someone in his portfolios to settle for a form of pre-destined outcome, of stasis.
Tellingly, when asked at a Committee for Auckland event in February about the importance of ending the changes of planning laws to provide certainty for the development sector, he was derisive of those who prioritise “stability”
“You could just leave the status quo, he said, “which is sub-optimal. The easiest way to create stability is never change anything.
“I get this all the time in politics. People go ‘oh you need to have stable policy settings, and [then] everyone complains about policy settings.
“It’s like, the simplest way to create stability is to do nothing.
“But, actually, that’s not what the country needs, not what Auckland needs. [We] need progress, need change.
“So, stability is the enemy of progress, often.”
He wasn’t talking about his caucus, or the political environment or leadership or his party’s fate. But he could have been.
“There’s a transition cost but you’ve got to hope that when you get to the other side, things will be enabled, and you get even more growth on the back of it.”
