Opinion
The fumes of possible victory can be a powerful motivating force, and fuelled the most buoyant National Party conference in some years.
National leader Christopher Luxon might have had some trouble convincing voters he is the right man for the job, but he did not need to convince the party base at the conference in Wellington over the weekend.
He did need to convince them he could also convince the voters and that he was capable of replicating the 2008 election result – and getting 45 per cent.
His speech delivered what they wanted to hear, and he spoke well.
There was a leaf taken from America: it was a rally-like presentation, and Luxon spoke with MPs and candidates on tiered seating behind him.
He did not use his speech to tell the members more about himself – that was done last year.
Instead, he delivered what former PM John Key used to call the “red meat” policies – the policies aimed at pleasing the party base and a decent chunk of the voters as well.
That came in the shape of a lock ‘em up law and order announcement: tougher sentences, including bringing back Three Strikes (with some tweaks) and stopping judges from showing too much leniency in sentencing by only allowing them to use their discretion to reduce sentences by up to 40 per cent.
The lock ‘em up elements were balanced out by a focus on rehabilitation – a policy to extend rehab to remand prisoners as well (something Labour had already moved to do, although National did not seem aware of it).
The policy was lacking in solid numbers and fiscal implications – there was no assessment of what it would mean in terms of the number of prisoners and how many would end up serving for longer. There was minimal consultation with the judiciary about reducing their discretion.
It was also lacking in subtlety – and that was the whole point of it. The point is to win an election.
The tough on law and order trope is core National Party stuff, and aimed at putting flesh on the bones of National’s “soft on crime” jabs at Labour.
The audience loved it (though possibly not Sir Bill English sitting in the front row, who famously described prisons as a moral and fiscal failure) and Luxon clearly expects it to resonate with the public as well.
It was connected with Luxon’s wider “back on track” slogan. He spoke of rising crime and rising gang numbers, adding anecdotes from victims of ram-raids and cases in which sentences had been reduced.
He said he feared that what was happening would be seen as “normal”, and he did not accept that. At times he pushed the nostalgia button, sounding a tad like Winston Peters as he spoke of “the New Zealand I grew up in” - a land in which it seems crime didn’t exist.
Helping the energy levels at the conference may well have been National’s most recent internal polling from Curia, which is understood to show Labour take a hit and National ahead by a decent margin (the most recent poll by Labour’s pollsters told a different story, but also pre-dated the Michael Wood debacle).
The hopes are high that the next round of public polls will show the same.
Luxon himself did not launch any direct attack on PM Chris Hipkins or Labour, although the attacks were implicit in his overall theme that the country was going backwards.
Those attacks were instead left in the practised hands of MPs Simeon Brown and Chris Bishop. The pair did a presentation on infrastructure for the members, whispering soothing promises of great lines of smooth asphalt running down the country, roads on which people could drive faster than the 30km/h Labour’s policy allows on city streets, and roads which would be pothole-free.
The pair dubbed themselves the “Infra Boys”, and put on yellow hard hats for the presentation. The end result was a bit like a cross between the Village People and the Two Ronnies (without the innuendo, thankfully).
Labour’s Michael Wood – who resigned last week over his shareholdings – was the new laughing stock at the conference.
Bishop tackled Labour for scrapping National’s transport projects and failing to deliver on its own, using a clip of Michael Wood promising light rail in Auckland from 2017. The members laughed.
Brown put up a slide of a pothole, with the words “fix the potholes” stamped on it 17 times. He said that was because Wood clearly had to hear things at least 16 times before he paid any notice. Sixteen was the number of times the Cabinet Office contacted Wood about selling his Auckland Airport shares. The members laughed at that too.
The members left at the end feeling a lot better about life than three years earlier at the 2020 annual conference, where former PM John Key tore strips off MPs for leaking and bad behaviour – even as if that goal of 45 per cent in the vote was not a pipe dream after all. Conferences have that effect on the faithful.
Candidates in seats that National lost in the 2020 Labour landslide were nervously optimistic about winning them back.
And this time round, National might even escape getting into trouble over copyright issues after flirting with trouble in previous elections and more recent social media clips.
The music choice for Luxon’s entry consisted of generic bass-heavy beats, clearly carefully selected from the stock music catalogue not to sound like any other song at all.
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.