OPINION
When it comes to winning an election, it sometimes pays to do what worked before and National Party leader Christopher Luxon has clearly decided his mentor Sir John Key’s 2008 effort is the way to go.
Alas, Luxon’s attempts to replicate that successful 2008 campaign – based on the “ambitious for New Zealand” line - went a bit awry this week.
Key’s “ambitious for New Zealand” campaign was based on optimism - as Key put it: “my naturally sunny disposition”.
Luxon clearly decided it was a two-step process: Tell people they’re miserable until they believe it. Then tell them you’ll make them feel a whole lot happier.
So he set about convincing people that everything was doom and gloom, so he could then promise to offer them paradise – or “the mojo” as Luxon calls it.
He did this by telling a farmer with the television cameras pointing at him that NZ was a “wet, whiny, inward-looking country” and needed to get its mojo back. Telling New Zealanders he thinks they are whiny is not the usual form that sweet-talking the voters takes.
It is also difficult to explain away. Nonetheless, the next day Luxon tried to do just that by clarifying that what he had meant was that Labour was to blame for making everybody wet, whiny and inward-looking.
National would execute a “turn-around” so everybody would be dry as a bone, full of bonhomie and looking outside.
By Friday, Luxon was wisely only talking about the latter part of his Monday utterance, tweeting that he had told a Wanaka public meeting that National would turn the country around, “inserting some ambition and aspiration so we can get our mojo back”.
Thus far the polls would indicate that the bigger challenge for Luxon is not in pointing out the misery – but in convincing voters he is the man to deliver the mojo. A new Talbot Mills poll this week gave him his lowest rating as preferred PM so far and National had dropped back below Labour again.
It may or may not have been a coincidence that the news this week was otherwise dominated by some of the most effective whine-leading groups throughout New Zealand’s history: The farmers who were all at Fieldays and the teachers who were all on strike.
They are partly why PM Chris Hipkins was also on a bid to get his own mojo back.
His hunt was for good news: Any good news would do.
The only good news he got was that Luxon had described New Zealand as wet, whiny and inward-looking. Months of jokes lie ahead for him in that one.
The bad news side of Hipkins’ ledger contained those never-ending teachers’ strikes, a recession, a town being shut down because of a gang, and ministers tripping over themselves. There were problems bedding in key Budget moves of free public transport for younger people and extending 20 hours of free early-childhood care to 2-year-olds.
Bad news often comes with silver linings.
That is tested with the recession - no matter how shallow it is, the word recession is not compatible with election wins. However, Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr will be stoked – his aim was a gentle recession to take the heat out of inflation. Now it is here, and it could end up being good news for interest rates.
The only silver lining about the teachers striking is that it wasn’t the nurses striking. Teachers don’t tend to garner as much public support as the nurses – especially in winter. Parents are also as likely to blame the teachers for the situation as they are the Government.
Hipkins tried to find some rays of sun at Fieldays, where votes would have been as elusive as the good news had been.
Fieldays has become a great gathering ground for politicians and so they all turned up with offerings up their sleeves.
Hipkins was up against it, but showered around all the good news he could muster. He told the farmers he had listened and there would not be a nitrates levy.
He threw money into emissions reduction efforts. He highlighted new free trade agreements and released a report showing very healthy export figures for the primary sector.
He said there was hope yet in the He Waka Eke Noa effort, that collection of government and rural sector groups trying to come up with the impossible: A solution that will please them all.
The farmers nodded politely and promptly gave National five stars for its rival emissions policy instead. That policy was to declare He Waka Eke Noa dead and delay bringing in farm emissions charges until 2030.
It is little wonder the farmers jumped to embrace that. The year 2030 is three elections away.
In Hipkins’ case, the silver lining from Fieldays was that he wasn’t exactly going to lose any votes – it’s hard to lose something you don’t have.
National’s announcements were not aimed at taking votes from Labour. The watering down of its stand on agricultural emissions was clearly aimed at trying to thwart Act’s full-throated push for the rural vote. (Act’s policy amounts to doing absolutely nothing until other countries do).
National’s genetic technology policy also comes at some risk to it. It contains checks and balances but is not exactly (yet) based on in-depth analysis of the benefits and risks – either to the environment or the economy.
As Luxon himself said, he’s the politician, not the scientist. Even some farmers will be wary about what losing the GE-free status might mean. It’s also one of those gut-reaction topics that has been so controversial that people are inclined to feel very uneasy about it.
That – combined with National’s decision to defer charging farmers for their emissions – could well have the effect of helping Labour among the city-slickers who care very much about climate change and the environment.
Hipkins’ last-ditch effort to associate himself with good news led him to the opening of the Puhoi to Warkworth motorway yesterday – a roading project the previous National Government began and which Labour had hammered until 2017 as a “holiday highway”.
Come Friday, and suddenly the holiday highway was “a vital transport link between Auckland and Northland”. Hipkins was even admitting “we were wrong to call it the holiday highway”.
He’s not the first to claim credit for a road that the other side had started: National did it for Auckland’s Waterview Tunnel (although it hadn’t opposed it to start with).
There is a good reason politicians associate themselves with a good road.
Voters drive on roads. Good roads make their lives easier. Sometimes they even move votes.
A recent visit to Katikati showed that a fair chunk of Luxon’s much-talked-about real New Zealanders can be found stuck in cars sitting in the interminable hell of traffic queues on State Highway 2 north of Tauranga, day after day. They are, quite justifiably, whiny indeed.
On a community Facebook group last week, someone asked how long the queue was that day. Someone else replied “life”.
Those people will vote for roads and SH2 has been more prone to the whims of politicians than most.
National knows it and it still has its transport policy to come.
In the meantime, Luxon’s recipe for achieving mojo includes boot camps and that opening of the door to genetic technology, which Luxon possibly thinks can engineer us all into a more cheerful and less whiny bunch.
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor and a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. She started with the NZ Herald in 2003 and has been a political journalist since 2007.
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