Posted by Blogger Name. Category:
2014 General Election
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Clayton Cosgrove
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David Cunliffe
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David Shearer
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Labour Party
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Self-preservation
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Sue Moroney
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Vernon Small
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Waimakariri
In just 64 days, New Zealanders will go to the polls. And with the 2014 General Election looming large in their thinking, no political leader would want to wake up to a headline like this; Cunliffe a Labour liability, poll shows.
The headline tops a story written by veteran Fairfax political journalist Vernon Small. It begins thus:
Labour would get an immediate lift in the polls if it dumped leader David Cunliffe, a new poll suggests.
The stuff.co.nz/Ipsos poll reveals that Cunliffe may have become Labour's biggest liability, with a significant number of voters saying they would be more likely to vote for Labour if someone else were leader.
Click here for full poll results in graphics.
The effect is sizeable, making a 13.5 percentage point difference to Labour's vote.
Although a similar effect is seen on National when asked the same question about John Key, it is much smaller.
The finding will plunge Labour further into crisis after yesterday's poll result cementing Labour's support in the mid-20s.
Privately, Labour and the Greens now acknowledge that it would take an unprecedented swing against National to force a change of government on September 20.
That last sentence is telling. For all the bullish talk and the relentless positivity in public, politicians are inherently realists when it comes to polls. Of seven polls in the last six weeks, only one shows Labour at greater than 30% support; the Herald DigiPoll of mid-June had Labour at a whopping 30.5%, and even that poll had National with enough support to govern alone.
Vernon Small continues, hinting at some deep concerns within Labour's caucus that make a mockery of David Cunliffe's pronouncements of unity:
Some Labour MPs were yesterday privately canvassing leadership options, even at this late stage.
But they believe Labour would be even more severely punished by such an outward sign of panic.
Labour's focus now has shifted to protecting its vote from further erosion, and preserving the seats of some of its up-and-coming stars, including Andrew Little, seen as a future leadership contender, and former teacher Kelvin Davis.
Even some of Labour's seasoned hands, including finance spokesman David Parker and frontbench MP Jacinda Ardern, could be at risk of losing their seats in Parliament if party support sank much lower.
Labour MPs are clearly convinced the party has suffered in recent weeks because of a series of headlines that took the focus away from what they saw as a successful alternative economic policy and Budget plan and a suite of popular education policies.
Those distractions included Trevor Mallard's moa resurrection, Nanaia Mahuta's musings about te reo in schools, Little's comments about the reversal of the burden of proof in relation to consent during rape trials, and being drawn into the Dotcom saga.
But they also included Cunliffe's own apology for being a man and his suggestion that opponents in the party were scabs - as well as what MPs saw as unfair treatment of his connection to property developer Donghua Liu.
Small's revelation that Labour's focus has shifted from winning to self-preservation is telling, but not entirely unexpected; check out these photographs:
Sue Moroney has blanked out the "official" Labour Party authorisation on her billboards, and hand-written her own. As you can see in the middle photo, she has also obscured the Labour Party logo. Interestingly though, Sue Moroney is a David Cunliffe loyalist, yet she seems to want to disassociate herself from the party he leads.
And apart from the fact that Clayton Cosgrove is NOT the MP for Waimakariri as his billboard implies, his billboards are interesting to say the least. It looks as though he is distancing himself from the party under Cunliffe's leadership, as he did in 2011 when he lost Waimakariri to Kate Wilkinson. Unsurprisingly, Labour lost the party vote in Waimakariri by more than 12,000 votes, but ironically Cosgrove returned to Parliament via the Labour list, having not campaigned actively for party votes!
Labour is in crisis; so much crisis that there is even talk of David Shearer returning as leader. David Cunliffe is not going to be a happy leader when he returns from his holiday.
