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National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)
National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 14, 2022

Jobs for the bad boys

National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)
National leader Christopher Luxon and MP Sam Uffindell (Image: Tina Tiller/Getty Images/Supplied)

They all embarrassed their party during their tenures as National MPs. But what else do Andrew Falloon, Aaron Gilmore, Todd Barclay, Jami-Lee Ross and Sam Uffindell have in common?

Being a politician is a strange job and it takes a strange kind of person to do it well. But many of the people who seek political power are the wrong kind of strange, so parties try to be careful about who they select as candidates. This is a dark and difficult art. They want people who represent their members’ values to the wider public but most members of political parties are also rather weird. So your candidates can’t be too much like them or they’ll scare the voters. And parties have to vet the applicants: dredge up their awful pasts, but this information needs to be held close, not spread around or used to automatically disqualify, because everyone has an awful past – how many of us can truly say we’ve never brutally attacked a 13-year-old asleep in bed, or destroyed our own flat in a drug-fuelled rage? – and if the disclosures were misused no one would ever reveal anything.

It’s all very fraught. Parties try to get it right because once someone is elected to parliament they can be impossible to control. MPs aren’t employees – they represent the voters. They don’t work for their party leader or for parliamentary services or the speaker of the house. They can only be fired by the voters, and they get a handsome payout if they leave after a general election, so if you try to usher them out before then they’ll usually cling to their seat, salary and perks while screaming their lungs out.

The tensions arising from this dynamic twist through our politics like high voltage cables. Most of the time the parties step over or around the live wires. The party whips manage their MPs with carrots and sticks – promises of promotion, threats of deselection, briefings to the press gallery – while party officials scrutinise their candidates carefully. But from time to time the wrong people get through and then they arc and thrash in the media, throwing out cascades of sparks, lighting up their party’s internal failures for all to see. And voters generally respond by punishing that party mercilessly in the polls.

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On Monday afternoon Stuff investigative journalist Kirsty Johnston broke a story about parliament’s newest MP, Sam Uffindell that neatly encapsulated every negative stereotype National’s critics love to perpetuate about it: privileged white guy, elite boarding school, abhorrent cruelty, inept party processes, terrible candidates. Now National is faced with the question of what to do with Uffindell: keep him in parliament and have him step down next year with the risk of additional allegations coming to light? Or suffer the humiliation of a second Tauranga by-election? And whatever they decide is contingent on Uffindell going along with it.

But surely their larger problem is that National – its committees, MPs and officials – still don’t grasp the risk of selecting candidates that direct media discourse onto their party’s negative qualities while also making it harder to communicate their key messages. Here’s Christopher Luxon being interviewed by Guyon Espiner on RNZ earlier this week:

Luxon: We are the party of law and order–

Espiner: So you’re a party of law and order. Andrew Falloon sent a pornographic image to a 19-year-old. Hamish Walker leaked sensitive medical information about Covid-19 patients. Jake Bezzant… I don’t even really want to say what he did. Aaron Gilmore – do you know who he is?

Luxon: (Pause) Yes.

Espiner: Jami-Lee Ross is before the court at the moment so we won’t go too far into that. And Todd Barclay secretly recording his staffers’ phone conversations. Are you the party of law and order?

Sam Uffindell
MP Sam Uffindell in his Tauranga electorate (Photo: RNZ/Supplied)

Back in July, about the time Sam Uffindell won his by-election and began his now doomed political career, Kemi Badenoch emerged as a rising star of British Conservative politics. A 42-year-old Nigerian migrant who worked at McDonald’s while studying at a non-Oxbridge university, Badenoch was a breakthrough candidate in the Conservative leadership contest. She wasn’t senior enough to reach the final round but the right of her party was enraptured by the sight of a Black woman attacking wokeness and critical race theory, and the Daily Telegraph declared that “Kemi Badenoch is the future of conservatism”.

The diversification of right-wing politics is a global trend, part of the Great Realignment in which the traditional left-right coalitions of the 20th century are dissolving and reshaping. In the US it took the form of the red and black wave that broke for Trump in 2020 accompanied by a growing Hispanic drift to the Republicans, demographic shifts that almost cost Joe Biden the election. And if you looked at National during the 2010s, the diversification of the party was well underway. Paula Bennett, Simon Bridges and Hekia Parata were senior ministers; Melissa Lee was an undersecretary, Shane Reti and Harete Hipango won electorate nominations and then seats in the house. (I suppose we should also list Jian Yang, the Honourable Member for Chinese Military Intelligence, although it would be nice to see MPs representing the preferences of Chinese New Zealanders, rather than Beijing.)

But in the last five years the project has been abandoned. National seems to regard diversity and representation as a tedious chore the horrible left-wing media keeps nagging them about rather than a way to improve the culture of their party and the calibre of their MPs while expanding their voter base. Instead of selecting on merit they’ve become a party of identity politics repeatedly elevating candidates that are strange-in-a-bad-way because they reflect the membership’s race and gender preferences, rather than their suitability for public office. It’s a live wire the party keeps grabbing, compulsively. And the repeated shocks could kill its chances at the election.


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Leo Molloy, Viv Beck, Wayne Brown and Efeso Collins. Photo: Tina Tiller. Imagework: Jason Stretch
Leo Molloy, Viv Beck, Wayne Brown and Efeso Collins. Photo: Tina Tiller. Imagework: Jason Stretch

Local Elections 2022August 12, 2022

Closing time for Leo Molloy – and a new shape to the Auckland mayoral race

Leo Molloy, Viv Beck, Wayne Brown and Efeso Collins. Photo: Tina Tiller. Imagework: Jason Stretch
Leo Molloy, Viv Beck, Wayne Brown and Efeso Collins. Photo: Tina Tiller. Imagework: Jason Stretch

Third place in a new poll suggested people ‘didn’t want to go to Leo Land’, said Molloy. He’s now eyeing up 2025, while the dynamic in the remaining field shifts substantially.

“I haven’t fucking died or anything,” said Leo Molloy. “It’s not a funeral.” It wasn’t a funeral, but it did look a bit like a boozy wake. Speaking at his pub-style campaign base, a beer swinging from his hand – and replaced with a fresh one half way through – the self-described “hospo legend” elaborated on the reasons he had decided earlier in the day to quit the contest for the Auckland mayoralty. 

It was the poll what did it. The third Curia survey for the Ratepayers Alliance put him third, behind Efeso Collins and Wayne Brown. “Last night I woke up three quarters of the way through the night, like I invariably do,” he said. He was stewing on those numbers. He was “mortified … we just didn’t see that coming.” He had believed voters from across the spectrum would “want to come to Leo Land”. It wasn’t looking that way. 

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So Molloy convened a morning meeting with his advisers and the decision was made. In “the stare-down of life” they had hoped “Viv Beck would wave the white flag, but she didn’t.” Although, he stressed, it may be better considered “a suspension rather than a resignation”. Turning to point to a Leo Molloy hoarding, he said: “Remember this, he’s running again in 2025.” The term ahead would require an economic repair job, he said. Someone else could do the “three years of misery” and then “in 2025 the city might be ready for someone like me, who’s arguably a more charismatic type.”

Another factor for the timing today was the noon deadline for nominations. If he had withdrawn any later, his name would have remained on the ballot – to withdraw any later would be ethically wrong, he said. 

Molloy had seen key members of his team depart in recent weeks – campaign chair June McCabe and media manager Kate Gourdie – but that was not a factor in the decision, he said. Nor were there “no skeletons in my closet. Sorry to disappoint you.”

Molloy’s approach at times played out like an extended pub yarn. At times it tipped over into ugliness – in saying of Collins “If anybody sights Efeso, he’s an endangered species – there’s space on the wall”, and the appearance on Guy Williams’ show New Zealand today. He was no stock reactionary, however. He staunchly defended, for example, the role of co-governance. Reflecting on the campaign, he said he had “no regrets” but accepted he could “at times be a bit obnoxious” and he would have been better to adopt his “softer, approachable” aside. Rather than the bar-brawl firebrand, the “fireside chat Leo”. In 2025, he wouldn’t be doing the Guy Williams show, he said. "I think I've learnt a lot."

Molloy has resisted endorsing any of his previous rivals, saying only that he didn’t want Collins to win. He did, however, indicate that he would be open to “negotiations” with anyone seeking his nod. 

Molloy’s exit – and the poll that prompted it – change the shape of the Auckland contest. Brown, who brands himself “The Fixer”, said it left Aucklanders with a “clear choice” and he was the “clear alternative” to Collins, offering “a new proactive approach to fixing Auckland and getting it moving again when I am mayor”.

Brown, Far North mayor from 2007 to 2013, is centering his message on frugal spending and low rates. “Candidates need to be honest with the people of Auckland about council debt,” he said. “There is no money lying around waiting to be spent on ‘nice to have’ pet projects. That money comes directly from ratepayers.” 

Brown’s promotional approach so far has focused on advertising that seems almost old-fashioned: print ads in the Herald and radio spots on Newstalk ZB. The reality is that those audiences tend also to be the ones who vote in a city that mostly doesn’t. The last super city election had, remember, 35% turnout.

That will be the challenge for Collins – can he turn his support into votes? Collins, who has not responded to a request for comment, has registered 10%, 17% and 16% in the three polls to date. He has a lead in today’s poll of three points over Brown and seven points over Beck. The critical question is which way those Molloy numbers fall. It’s not inconceivable that Collins picks up some of them – he and Molloy were both pushing free public transport. More important for Collins is coming up with another policy approach that gets the cut-through that transport pledge achieve. 

Viv Beck, meanwhile, is dismissing the idea that the contest now morphs into Collins versus Brown. The withdrawal of Molloy rendered the poll “irrelevant”, she said. "It’s a three-horse race and is still wide open. No candidate can take anything for granted.”

Beck had enjoyed fresh expressions of support today, she said. She too said voters now faced a “a clear choice”. But it was a different one to that diagnosed by Brown. “I am the only true centre-right candidate that will stand up for Auckland and ensure we do not have another Labour controlled mayor,” she said.

The full list of Auckland nominations, for mayor, council and local boards, will not be revealed until later this evening. A spokesperson indicated there had been a large number added to the list in the final hours before the noon deadline.


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