John Key’s fiery ‘Get some guts’ speech in defence of sending troops to Iraq, 2015

PoliticsJune 11, 2019

This belated withdrawal suggests the 2015 Iraq controversy wasn’t all it seemed

Contributing writer

John Key’s fiery ‘Get some guts’ speech in defence of sending troops to Iraq, 2015

If coalition MPs are as opposed to troops in Iraq as they say they are, why are they waiting two and a half years to withdraw them, wonders former National government defence minister Wayne Mapp.

Yesterday’s announcement that the Iraq deployment would be extended to June 2020 before they are finally withdrawn reflects two realities about the coalition government. First, that New Zealand First has the predominant role in international and defence matters, and second, Labour is not nearly as radical as their rhetoric would sometimes indicate. There is much more continuity with this government than some of their members would like to pretend.

In 2015 the initial decision by the National-led government to deploy troops to Iraq was controversial. Who can easily forget John Key’s retort to Labour, “Get some guts”, an indication of just how divisive the decision was at the time. But the deployment was not to invade Iraq, it was to defeat ISIS, who at that stage had just massacred thousands on young Iraqi recruits and who had captured thousands of young Yazidi women for use of sex slaves. The whole world was opposed to ISIS, and the United Nations Security Council had unanimously passed resolution 2249 in November 2015 to support the military campaign to rid Iraq and Syria of ISIS.

Despite the prime minister’s rhetoric, New Zealand had chosen to do the minimum possible with the deployment being mainly to train Iraqi troops for their fight against ISIS. All our traditional partners, including Australia and Canada, were deploying special forces and fighter aircraft to actually take the fight to ISIS. Even after newly elected prime minister Justin Trudeau withdrew the Canadian fighter aircraft, the Canadian special forces remained in Iraq.

However, New Zealand’s contribution was not just a training contingent. In a less publicised role, there were also intelligence specialists deployed to the coalition headquarters, and logistics troops to integrate the New Zealand coalition into the overall fight against ISIS. The RNZAF P3 Orions and the C130 Hercules were involved in both efforts. The reality was, and is, that New Zealand was directly involved in the fight against ISIS, and not just training Iraqi troops.

One could be excused for thinking that Labour in government would have taken the earliest possible opportunity to withdraw the New Zealand troops from Iraq given how emphatic they were against the initial deployment in 2015. That would have certainly satisfied Labour’s left wing base and also the Greens. Both saw the coalition fight against ISIS as just another example of American imperialism in the Middle East, and that New Zealand was little more than a United States lackey. This suited their view of National and of John Key.

The fact that New Zealand’s contribution will ultimately extend across two and half years on this term of the coalition government perhaps indicates that Labour’s opposition in 2015 to the deployment was not entirely principled. That it was more about partisan politics than a deep seated opposition to being involved in United States-led military coalitions. The fact that ISIS had shown itself to be the worst terrorist organisation since Al Qaeda has made it easier for the coalition government to maintain New Zealand’s involvement in the international coalition. Apart from a few particularly partisan activists, the great majority of New Zealanders have thought that the international coalition’s fight against ISIS is fully justified.

But yesterday’s decision says something deeper about the nature of Labour in government. While the current leadership might be of a different generation to Helen Clark’s moderate Labour government of the early years of this century, there is a deep sense of continuity that runs from the Clark government, through the Key government and to the present. The turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s is now well in the past. While each of the major parties may have had their turn in government during this century, it is not difficult to discern the continuity between them.

Jacinda Ardern is in this mould of continuity. She has used her remarkable level of empathy to gently nudge New Zealanders toward accepting change. It is not her style to attempt to revolutionise New Zealand. Her promised transformation is much more incremental than that. As a social democrat she intends to take the public with her, not announce dramatic departures from the past. This is as evident in international matters as it is in any other area of policy.

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colmar brunton reid newshub poll feature image

PoliticsJune 11, 2019

Two polls. Two wildly differing results. What happened?

Josie Adams

Contributing writer

Last night Newshub-Reid Research and Colmar Brunton both released opinion polls. Political pundits, in the middle of a poll drought, waited eagerly for what turned out to be wildly diverging results. Josie Adams talks to Colmar Brunton’s Jason Shoebridge about what happened.

Last night’s polling results had little in common, with the only consistency across both being that Simon Bridges is a very unpopular party leader. In short: the Colmar Brunton poll showed National up to 44%, and Labour dropping to 42%. It showed Jacinda Ardern as preferred prime minister for 45%. The Newshub Reid poll showed National at 37.4%, and Labour at 50.8%. It showed Ardern as preferred PM for 49%.

The immediate reaction from many was to pick the poll they liked best – they couldn’t both be right. However, the divergence doesn’t necessarily mean one is wrong. “Without digging into what Reid’s methodology is and what the details are it’s hard to comment on why there’s a difference,” said Jason Shoebridge, CEO of Kantar, Colmar Brunton’s parent company.

I asked him why he thought there was a difference in the results, and it turns out there’s a simple explanation: “Reid use an online methodology as well as landlines, and we just use landlines and mobile phones. Then there’s a difference of when we were collecting the data – we were collecting later than they were.” Colmar Brunton was conducting their research from the 4th to the 8th June, and Newshub-Reid Research did theirs from the 29th May to the 7th June.

The last Colmar Brunton poll was taken in the days following the Christchurch terror attacks on March 15th, an event for which Ardern was near-universally praised for her handling, so it’s not surprising to see Labour’s popularity declining closer to what it was before the attack. With this in mind, alongside the recent furore around the wellbeing budget, Ardern’s result in both polls could be seen as a win.

One way to tell the accuracy of a poll is how it fits into the over-arching trends, and in general, polls prior to this showed Labour going up and National going down. Shoebridge believes the only true measure of a poll’s accuracy is an election.

“Where the stress really comes in is on election night – that’s the real test,” he explained. Political opinion polling is the most high profile work the company does, even though it’s only a small proportion of their business. “We always want it to be as accurate as possible, and we’re confident in our numbers.”

In the past, both Colmar Brunton and Newshub-Reid polls have had a fairly good track record. During the last two general elections, polling companies predicted results reasonably close to the outcome. Isn’t there a little controversy about polling during election years, though?

“There’s always some commentary about how polling shouldn’t be allowed through the election campaign,” said Shoebridge. “But if we aren’t doing public polls, you can be sure the parties themselves are doing their own polling. It’s in the public interest for us to do political polls.” News outlets, politicians, and pundits alike all have a yearning to know where the public opinion is – and companies like Colmar Brunton and Reid are less likely to massage the numbers than a political party. Additionally, in the absence of public polls, private polls are often leaked or supplied to journalists by partisans, as with a recent Auckland mayoralty poll.

Despite the diverging results, last night’s polls aren’t without impact: 1 News political editor Jessica Mutch McKay thinks the Colmar Brunton poll party results will protect Simon Bridges from an attack on his leadership, but Matthew Hooton is already calling for a coup on Twitter. He suggests Collins should overthrow Bridges and lead the party, thanks to the Newshub-Reid poll showing Collins towering at 7.1% over Bridges’ 4.2%.

With both Mutch McKay’s and Hooton’s wildly different conclusions drawn from polls released on the same day, it’s clear the results are up for interpretation. National MP Paula Bennett is unsurprisingly more a fan of the Colmar Brunton poll, which paints her party in a slightly better light. During this morning’s AM Show, she told Newshub that she doesn’t think their results are accurate. “I’m sorry, I really don’t believe the numbers you put out last night are a true reflection of where it’s all at,” she said. “It’s way better than that.”

One consistency between both polls is the surprising revelation that fewer people want cannabis legalised in 2020 than in previous polls. The Colmar Brunton results showed 52% against cannabis legislation in 2020, and the Newshub-Reid results showed 48%.

Reid Research was not at liberty to release more information to us due to its commercial relationship with Newshub, but said it was confident its poll was correct.