The NZ First leader is throwing his arms open wide to the booted Labour minister, but a waka jump isn’t on the cards.
While the Chrisses of Labour and National competed on who was most outraged by the latest skeleton bounding out of Stuart Nash’s bulging closet of cabinet infractions, Winston Peters sniffed an opportunity. Instead of denouncing a breach of core cabinet principles in Nash’s leaking copious cabinet details to a couple of mates who happened also to be donors to his political campaigns and who happened also to have their own commercial interests, Peters spoke up for his old mate.
“Nash shouldn’t have done what he did as it broke Cabinet rules – but he is now being hung out to dry,” said Peters in a series of tweets. “Let’s not have the hypocrisy & hand-wringing from a number of Labour Ministers who constantly leaked information to media about what was happening inside the Cabinet NZF was in. Labour Ministers blatantly telling media that NZ First was being the handbrake and how we voted inside Cabinet – including blocking the $55m media bribe. This happened frequently and the media all know it. So let’s not have this ‘holier than thou’ routine.”
He added: “The fact is Nash’s comments served no personal gain. He was trying to help hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of workers keep their jobs by extending government support. On this Nash was right.”
Last night, following the cutting of the thread to cabinet – already he was on a “final warning” – Nash by his own account had a “long conversation” with former NZ First cabinet minister and pal Shane Jones. But he had not been offered a place with the rival party, he told the NZ Herald, and was not pondering jumping ship. “I’m Labour to the core – always have been, always will be, Nashes have been for a long, long, long, long time,” said Nash, whose great-grandfather was Sir Walter Nash, Labour prime minister of the 1950s.
Despite the lineage, Nash is widely regarded as so far to the right edge of the Labour Party that – back in the Cunliffe days – there was speculation he could even defect to National. Under Jacinda Ardern, that became in some ways an advantage. He could, for example, mix with Mike Hosking and Mark Mitchell in the laddish weekly politics chat on Newstalk ZB. That didn’t work out, of course. The common thread in Stuart Nash’s blotted copybook is not simply the breaches of cabinet rules, but that he announced them himself on a hugely popular radio station; or, in the leaked cabinet discussions, he sent them via email rather than, say, over the phone.
One of those donors is Troy Bowker. A Linkedin foghorn long before Rob Campbell, Bowker is perhaps most remembered for standing down from his place on the Hurricanes board after lambasting Sir Ian Taylor for “sucking up to the left loving Māori agenda”. His most recent comment on the social media hotbed that is Linkedin blasted “the woke ideology typical of Jacinda and her followers”. Anyway, Nash said he would not take donations from his mate after the “left loving Māori agenda” moment, but Bowker, an investment banker, has been generous in other donations, including, as Richard Harman noted this morning, as “a substantial donor” to New Zealand First.
None of that means, of course, that Nash is about to leap into the embrace of NZ First. His links to Labour are real and deep and it would undoubtedly be a wrench to do so. But don’t write it off. The appeal to New Zealand First is obvious. Nash has a large personal support network in his Napier seat and across Hawke’s Bay. He has name recognition across much of the country, a knack for retail politics and – notwithstanding the occasional career jeopardising divulgence – performs well in media.
Entertain this: Nash swaps his tie, announces himself no longer Labour but a New Zealand First MP and resumes parliamentary activity, lobbing oral and written questions, with parliamentary support staff to prosecute the new party cause. Don’t entertain it for long, though. Owing to the new rules on “waka jumping”, if he were to declare a new party affiliation, the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill kicks in, and a byelection would be triggered.
Nash could, however, stand down as a Labour MP and say simply that he intends to contest the next election as a NZ First candidate. In that case, the ball would be in Labour’s court on whether to invoke the bill. In the recent case of Gaurav Sharma, Labour said it was not interested in doing so; the byelection was triggered by Sharma resigning his seat. To invoke it this time would not be without complications. Not least: does the Napier electorate really need an expensive byelection as it continues to deal with the ravages of Cyclone Gabrielle?
Most of this is probably academic. As of Wednesday morning, the likeliest outcome seems to be Nash announcing he won’t contest the next election for any party. He certainly doesn’t seem sufficiently deluded and vainglorious to go down the route of creating a new “major political force” with a name like the Bring Back Democracy and Progress for our Nation Party. Still, as far as NZ First is concerned, don’t rule out Winston Peters seeking to change his mind. And an ironic footnote, in the lack of an option to transmogrify from a Labour to a New Zealand First MP, is that it is Winston Peters who made it so. The pledge to “introduce and pass a ‘Waka Jumping’ bill” was literally in the 2017 coalition agreement.
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