A Tale of Two Parties
The past two weeks certainly have been interesting in New Zealand politics. Buccaneer Brash sails into the Act caucus and makes Rodney Hide walk the plank one week and Hone the Horrible blunders through the political landscape in true barbarian fashion in the next. Suddenly, the rather colourless election looming in November looks like it may well be more entertaining than anticipated. National’s dogged “don’t scare the horses” approach to government verses Labour’s “stunned mullet” approach threatened to make the month of October stupefyingly boring.
Of course, boring is exactly what National promised in 2008. It is ironic that the most telling criticism of National – that it is sitting on it’s hands; changing nothing – is precisely what Key told the public that National would do. Possibly the entire reason why National’s and Key’s popularity remain unusually high is because neither have done anything to earn the public’s opprobrium.
While National and Labour are running neck and neck in the most uninteresting party stakes, you couldn’t get a sharper contrast between the revitalized ACT party under the urbane Dr. Brash and the fledgling Mana Party under the mercurial Harawira. And yet, despite the vast difference between their political ideologies, there are more similarities between them than either of their leaders would care to admit.
Both parties consist of a rag-tag collection of extremists from widely differing political persuasions. The disparities between Hone Harawira and John Minto are undoubtably as wide as the disparities between John Boscowen and Heather Roy. This is an inevitable feature of the parties at the far ends of the political spectrum. They always attract people who view small differences of opinion as major differences in platform. National and Labour also consist of collections of people with very different opinions, but the differences are viewed as more minor. Note that it is not the actual size of the differences that matter, but the perception of those differences.
Both parties have leaders that are there, not because they best reflect the parties values, but because they have brand recognition and can attract votes. Brash was accepted meekly by the ACT caucus simply because he is probably the only person on this side of the political spectrum who can, in all likelihood, generate the required 5% of votes to procure political survival. Harawira provides a likely safe electoral seat, ensuring the probable place of the Mana party in parliament. Neither, however, should consider themselves indispensable and are likely to be replaced at the earliest convenient time.
Neither party will do well in government. The voters most likely to vote for then are from the extremes of the voting spectrum and are as likely to accentuate their differences as the party members themselves. Consequently, compromise with one of the bigger parties always sees a drop off in votes for these minor extreme parties. Only ideological purity is rewarded. I think it likely Brash will be in government in November. I also think he will not be there for long.
It is anyone’s guess how long Harawira will last (but I would suspect a short sojourn). Judging from the inappropriate Bin Laden remarks and his recent debate with Hitler Don Brash, Harawira has a much bigger problem with his mouth than with his fellow party members. On the other hand, it remains to be seen how long a group of activists as opinionated as Harawira himself can stay together without exploding.
Politics has just become interesting again.
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May 9 11 11:37 am
Both parties consist of a rag-tag collection of extremists from widely differing political persuasions.
Please. Don Brash is not extreme, neither is the 2025 Taskforce, neither was Roger or Ruth. What’s extreme is borrowing up to $1 BILLION dollar every week. What’s extreme is a 28% corporate tax rate when even Canada is now down to 8%.
I think it likely Brash will be in government in November. I also think he will not be there for long.
Brash will be in government, and on currently polling will be Finance minister. He’s explicitly said his model is Ruth Richardson: jut one budget, get all the changes in fast, and then leave it be. It worked in 1991 and it will work again in 2011.
Unfortunately because Hellen undid almost every change put in by Roger and Ruth, we have to go through all that restructuring again, but in a much worse economic position. It’s not going to be pretty – but it is going to be done.
May 9 11 9:46 pm
Don Brash is not extreme
Perhaps not. But the extreme ends of the political spectrum attract extremists – which is my point.
May 9 11 10:17 pm
Regarding your contention that Brash / ACT won’t get many votes, I would pay attention to the Close-up poll last week where 80% of 40,000 mobile phone voters agreed with Dr Brash’s contention that Maori should not receive special treatment in NZ. This of course is ACT’s biggest draw-card in the next election – Key has earned an overwhelmingly negative reaction from nzers over his handling of the foreshore & seabed reforms, he will lose support from that, and Brash is seen as the only politician to say anything at all against the pro-Maori line so he will capitalise on this.
Moreover the crew at NZCPR have a great deal of support (with at least 10,000 paid supporters I hear), and Brash will have made some significant inroads to getting votes from his articles posted there. To say that Brash has no connection to ACT values, or that only extremists would vote for him, is to ignore the content and popularity of his messages I think.
May 9 11 10:46 pm
I did not say that Brash would not get many votes – I think he will get at least 5-6%, possibly as high as the 10% he is aiming for. I doubt if he will get the 15% he probably needs to get Key to roll English in favour of him. I think that is a pity, because Brash would actually make a much better Minister of Finance than English – bearing in mind that Key will not let Brash do all the right-wing things he would like to do.
I also did not say that Brash has no connection to ACT values, merely that he may not be the best advocate of those values. Bear in mind that Brash was part of National until last week.
Finally, I did not say that only extremists would vote for Brash, I said that parties at the extreme ends of the political spectrum attract extremists and these are the seeds of destruction for these parties.
May 10 11 11:57 am
The point is that Brash’s ACT “Coup” – if anyting, takes ACT away from the extreme and back towards the Centre.
We can be sure Brash wouldn’t have bothered if he didn’t think he could be Finance Minister come November:
the planning for the emergency budget is well underway by Brash’s supporters. Remember that it was Key
(alone) who threw Brash out of Cabinet: he has support of at least half the current National caucus to be
Minister of Finance, probably more.
All he requires is that he has a majority of the ACT caucus (all of whom would back him) combined with the National caucus – he doesn’t even need a majority of National MPs to support him – and then Key is faced with either having Brash as minister of Finance, doing a deal with some random mix of small leftist parties, or doing a deal with Labour, or going to another election (sooner or later).
Increasingly I think we need to see ACT as Nationals italian-style “civil list” party – a proxy for the “dry” wing of the National party whose aim is to get the party vote, and put the parliament into overhang to counteract the Maorimander.
I don’t think Brash will attract half of National’s vote- but a third, say 15%, seems quite doable. National would then be mostly electorate MPs, with “their” list MPs coming in under the ACT brand.
May 14 11 3:18 am
Right….and at the end of the day it is night time…..your point was…?
May 11 11 3:35 pm
All the comments so far are around ACT/Brash, and rightly so, as Harawira is a nonentity unworthy of the media hype surrounding him, and the Mana Party is to date nonexistent. Sure, they have a website, but as of yesterday, the Electoral Commission was saying that no such party has been registered. I wonder if they even have enough members to do so? More to the point, we are assuming that Harawira will stand by his decision to resign and force the byelection. He hasn’t done so yet, and the deadline is rapidly approaching. It would not surprise me at all if he backs off from the byelection and decides that he needs until November to try to get his party off the ground.
May 11 11 5:48 pm
Just heard that Harawira HAS resigned with effect from 20 May, but it seems this time frame leaves some doubt on when the seat actually becomes vacant, i.e the date of his resignation, or when the Electoral Commission issues the writ declaring the seat vacant. There has been a comment from political commentator Barry Soper that perhaps he’s cutting it a bit fine. Interesting.