Judith Collins Memoir

PoliticsJuly 14, 2020

Here comes Judith: What does Collins’ book tell us about her leadership pitch?

The Bulletin editor
Judith Collins Memoir

In every discussion about who could lead the National Party since John Key resigned in 2016, one name has always figured high in speculation: Judith Collins.

The controversial yet popular MP for Papakura has put her name forward twice – losing to Bill English and Simon Bridges. Since then, Collins has pledged loyalty to the leader, insisting she is happy being a local MP and portfolio holder. 

With Todd Muller’s shock resignation opening a vacancy suddenly, however, could Collins’ day finally have come? She wasn’t ruling it out when asked by reporters as she made the trip from Auckland to Wellington today.

If she were to throw her hat in the ring again, what might Collins’ pitch to her colleagues be? Readers of her recent book, Pull No Punches: Memoir of a Political Survivor, would point you to the final chapter, headed “Moving Forward”. There, Collins lays out what today reads very much like a manifesto for a Collins-led National Party. Here’s some of what she says.

Be realistic

Collins kicks off the chapter with what reads like a repudiation of colleagues and party members who moaned and sulked about National missing out on government despite winning the most votes of any party. 

“We in the National Party must understand what went wrong for us in 2017,” she writes. “There is no point blaming and being bitter about how we were pushed aside by Winton Peters’ NZ First Party. We could remember that the Green Party did not want a bar of us either. Only Act was willing to work with us.”

Which leads her to …

Make some friends

“We need to understand that [The National Party] are only in office if support parties are able to get there too,” Collins writes.

On current polling, that is an understatement. With the Act Party sitting around the 3% mark, leader David Seymour would bring another three or so friends in with him. But even then, that’s not enough.

“No party, after 24 years of MMP, has ever been able to govern alone. Friends are gold under MMP. And we need those possible friends to want to be our friends. It all sounds so easy.”

Fix the RMA, fix the housing problem

The very mention of the Resource Management Act is enough to put countless New Zealanders to sleep, yet it’s a major point of contention among politicians. In her book, Collins reckons renovating the 30-year-old act is the key to fixing our housing problem. 

“Sort out the RMA, split it into an environment bill and a planning/development bill, take it by the scruff of the neck and we are halfway to solving the housing problems.” 

Collins says the RMA needs replacing – not just amending – and says she’s spent 18 months considering what is wrong and what is right with the current system.

Given the failure of Labour’s marquee KiwiBuild programme, and Collins’ very effective opposition criticisms of Phil Twyford, it’s no wonder she’s keen to push this one. 

Use social media 

Collins is critical of her own party’s overuse of press releases, saying they are too long and take too much time to be constructed and sent. Social media is the answer, she says.

But you need to go back less than two years to see Collins involved in her own Twitter gaffe, tweeting out fake news from a website known for its Russian propaganda.

“I don’t believe in censorship on people’s ideas,” she said at the time.

Still, she could have a point about the use of social media in getting cut-through with the New Zealand public. Jacinda Ardern is an infrequent user of Twitter, but her Facebook and Instagram posts almost always go viral and generate their own headlines each time.

Don’t underestimate Jacinda Ardern 

This should be obvious, but Todd Muller and the team that propelled him to the leadership could very well stand accused of failing to grasp the magnitude of the challenge.

Collins says the prime minister’s weakness is detail, and the National Party is better than that. “We are engaging on policy issues in a way that outstrips anything that has been seen from any other opposition.” 

While both Bridges and Muller were both taken to task for doing “opposition for opposition’s sake”, Collins may be signalling that she wants to talk to real New Zealanders, about real issues.

Be authentic and show conviction

“We need to be authentic,” writes Collins. “People need to know what they are voting for and, with all the mistakes and triumphs of our MPs, that we mean what we say and say what we mean.”

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Earlier in the book, Collins praises Margaret Thatcher, and even has a word of admiration for former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which is a clue to her view of conviction politics. In a newspaper column during her stand-down from John Key’s cabinet, she writes, she had “pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn’s political views might be completely bonkers but at least  he stood for something. That got a few tut-tuts from people who thought that being a good, quiet MP who said and did nothing would see me reinstated to Cabinet.”

If Collins is making her case to caucus this evening, her message is more than likely to be: this is no time for good, quiet MPs; this is time for strength.

Pull No Punches by Judith Collins (Allen & Unwin NZ, $37) is available at Unity Books.

Keep going!
Jacinda Ardern doing an anime run at the Labour Party conference (Dianne Manson, Getty Images)
Jacinda Ardern doing an anime run at the Labour Party conference (Dianne Manson, Getty Images)

OPINIONPoliticsJuly 14, 2020

With National in disarray, who will hold Labour to account?

Contributing writer
Jacinda Ardern doing an anime run at the Labour Party conference (Dianne Manson, Getty Images)
Jacinda Ardern doing an anime run at the Labour Party conference (Dianne Manson, Getty Images)

After Todd Muller’s shock resignation, a crushing electoral defeat for National looks all but assured. But is a historically weak opposition really something for the left to celebrate, asks Danyl Mclauchlan.

It probably doesn’t matter who takes over as leader of the National Party. Todd Muller’s sudden resignation after weeks of internal leaks, infighting, scandals, blunders, gaffes and resignations suggest that the party – which sometimes styles itself as “the natural party of government” – is all but ungovernable. Even in the best of times a party in such a shambolic state would repel voters. In the midst of a pandemic and economic crisis it seems unthinkable that the National Party in its current condition should be allowed anywhere near the Beehive. Just as Labour made a foolish mistake when it replaced David Shearer with David Cunliffe, the Muller coup now looks like a catastrophic error of judgement, creating such bitter enmity within National that the party – currently the largest in parliament, but not for much longer – cannot function. National are unfit to govern.

What will happen to its votes? Back in 2014 just over 600,000 people cast a vote for David Cunliffe led Labour, even though it was experiencing a similar internal collapse. What National is going through right now feels worse, but its disintegration began from a larger base than Labour’s.

Some of its support will probably go to ACT, who won’t be able to believe its luck. Some may go to New Zealand First and keep that party alive as a check on Labour as a possible coalition partner. But most will surely go to Labour, who might now win an outright majority and be able to govern without any coalition at all.

Every incumbent’s best campaign strategy is to govern well. Labour hasn’t done that, exactly, but it’s done so where it counts. We are one of the few countries in the world that is free of community transmission of coronavirus, and the more the world learns about the disease – its high level of communicability, its potentially dire long term health impacts, the diminishing likelihood of a herd immunity – the more fortunate New Zealand looks, and the more prescient Ardern’s “go hard, go early” strategy appears. (And the more deranged the demands that we open up “for the good of the economy” sound). By the metric of the virus we are arguably the best governed country in the world. We would have to be fools to change that.

During the lockdown Labour enjoyed a series of polls that had its support in the mid to high 50s. Any result of over 50% (or even slightly lower, depending on other factors) means it’ll be able to govern alone.

But no one expected those poll results to endure. Commentators agreed that the economy would get worse and the government would wear it, while the prime minister’s radiance would dim, just as it did after the March 15th attacks. But now, two months out from the election, the economy is not as bad as predicted (the wage subsidy extension for most applicants will expire – not coincidentally – shortly after election day). The prime minister’s star has not only failed to dim, it is a supernova compared to the leadership vacuum currently running the opposition party.

National’s collapse into irrelevance raises the question of what a potentially unrestrained second term Labour government will look like. Labour’s re-election strategy is to imitate John Key at the height of his popularity and present a “small target”, with minimal policy announcements. When you’re this widely adored, telling the public what you’ll do if re-elected can only damage your chances. It would also remind the public that Labour announced many fine policies during the 2017 campaign, but failed to deliver on almost all of them.

That approach no longer feels credible. Labour are going to win. Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson may be just nine weeks away from forming the most powerful government of the MMP era. New Zealand introduced this new political system with the explicit aim of preventing exactly this outcome. The current crisis is so extraordinary that we may entrust Labour with the power we’ve denied every other government for the last 24 years.

But we deserve to know more about what they’re going to do with that power. What is Labour’s long-term plan for border control? The current ad hoc arrangements of overlapping departments ministers does not seem very robust. The tourism sector has collapsed. There is still a housing crisis. There is still a climate crisis. The two tier welfare system is unfair and fiscally unsustainable. National cannot present itself as a credible alternative solution to those problems, but that doesn’t mean the problems themselves don’t exist.

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