0 More poll agony and ecstacy

In three months and three days, New Zealand goes to the polls to elect its 51st Parliament. And if the Labour Party wasn't already worried enough about poll trends, the Herald has heaped more misery on this morning.

The latest Herald-DigiPoll is out, and like other polls in the last couple of months, it's pretty emphatic. Herald deputy political editor Claire Trevett has the details:

The Internet-Mana Party would get two seats in Parliament based on the first major poll since the two parties cut a deal to stand together.
But, three months shy of the election, Labour is still struggling and the left bloc is well adrift from National, which could easily govern alone based on the Herald-DigiPoll survey.
The results for the Mana Party, Internet Party and Internet-Mana Party totalled 1.4 per cent in the survey - a modest start for the newly launched party which was the centre of attention in the lead-up to the polling period.
That is enough to get new Internet Party leader Laila Harre into Parliament if Mana leader Hone Harawira holds his Te Tai Tokerau electorate.
But the votes appear to have been at the expense of the Green Party which dropped to 11 per cent, down 2.5 points since the last Herald-DigiPoll survey in March.

That will worry the Greens, especially if Internet-Mana, bankrolled with $3 million from Kim Dotcom, starts to pick up more momentum.
Polling began on June 6, soon after Mana and Internet agreed to stand as a joint force to try to maximise the number of MPs Mr Harawira could take into Parliament under the "coat-tailing" provisions of MMP.
Although the deal was criticised by many commentators and rival political parties, 39 per cent of those polled said the Internet-Mana arrangement was a legitimate use of MMP while 43 per cent said it was an unprincipled rort.

That MegaMana is starting to cut into the Green vote is no surprise. Readers will remember that when Russel Norman visited Dotcom's rental property at Coatesville last year, he urged the Large German Gentleman to consider not starting a party for that very reason.

But the Greens' worries are small compared to those of Labour; Trevett continues:

With a party vote based on the poll of 50.4 per cent, National maintains a strong lead and is 20 points ahead of Labour which is up one to 30.5 per cent. National would have 64 seats, enough to govern without any support partners and 10 more seats than the left bloc of Labour, the Greens and Internet-Mana.
Labour leader David Cunliffe has rallied slightly, although Labour's efforts to beat the anti-immigration drum just before the poll began do not appear to have had much traction. Labour inched back over the 30 per cent mark and Mr Cunliffe's personal ratings as preferred Prime Minister have nudged up from 11 to 13 per cent since March.
He is still adrift of his high of 17 per cent immediately after his election last September and continues to poll lower than former leader David Shearer did. NZ First was steady on 3.6 per cent - not enough to return to Parliament though its support tends to lift during the campaign.
The poll indicates Prime Minister John Key has escaped the fallout from the trial and resignation of former Act MP John Banks, which broke the day before the poll began. Mr Key held steady at 66 per cent as preferred Prime Minister. Those who believed the Government was heading in the right direction lifted to 56 per cent - the highest since just before the 2011 election.
The poll of 750 eligible voters was taken from June 6 to June 15 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.6 per cent. There were 12.2 per cent undecided voters on the party vote.

This must be terribly discouraging for Mr Cunliffe and his Labour colleagues. They've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at National and Judith Collins in particular, and it's barely made a blind bit of difference. John Key remains the preferred Prime Minister for two thirds of those surveyed, whilst David Cunliffe is the preferred choice of less than one in seven New Zealanders.

And when Parliament resumes this afternoon after a two-week recess, sans John Banks, Labour will be on the defensive again. Instead of being able to attack the Government, Labour has its own donation woes, and if what we were hearing yesterday from a variety of unrelated people is true, yesterday's story is only the tip of the iceberg.

The clock is ticking on Labour. After Friday (i.e. three months out from the election), Labour can change leaders without going to the membership for another Labour's Got Talent tour. Have the polls yet reached the point where they might do a Mike Moore (1990), or will they stick with Mr Cunliffe then cut him adrift after what is looking likely to be a third successive defeat at the polls?

These are interesting times indeed, and the Herald-DigiPoll has just made them a whole lot more interesting!

0 Beware the Ides of June

Claire Trevett had an interesting column in the Herald yesterday. She made lots of comparisons to the TV programme Game of Thrones. Not having watched the programme, most of her references were over our head.

But then DPF drew our attention to the closing paragraphs of Ms Trevett's piece, namely this bit:

There is some suspicion about the influence of Cunliffe's chief of staff, Matt McCarten, who has past allegiances to the Alliance Party, now reborn through Laila Harre under the Internet Party banner, and Hone Harawira's Mana Party. He could well believe a deal in Te Tai Tokerau was a good idea. The MPs in question did get some return fire on David Cunliffe's Facebook page from Labour supporters.
But Cunliffe can't afford to ignore such strongly-held views in his caucus. He is about to head into his own danger zone. From June 20, Labour's caucus has a three-month window to change the leader without having to go through the party's new primary-style process giving its membership a vote.
If Cunliffe was thriving in the polls, he'd be on much safer ground to make such calls about the Te Tai Tokerau seat and the Internet Mana Party. There might be some grumbling but little else because there would be too much to lose by changing the leader. As things stand, it might not take much to spark a revolt whether a rival contender is ready and willing or not.

We weren't aware that Labour's amended leadership rules had a Get Out of Jail Free card. Is it possible that, should the next round of polls be as bad for Labour as the last one was, they might do a Mike Moore and kick David Cunliffe to touch to stem the bleeding?

There is of course one significant difference this time around. In 1990, Labour was in government, but the tide had gone out after David Lange's cup of tea, and Geoffrey Palmer's year of anonymous leadership. The SS Labour was already on course to crash into the Opposition benches, and Mike Moore's job was nothing more than to soften the impact a little.

Is there anyone in today's Labour Party who would be willing to be the sacrificial lamb? Grant Robertson is generally regarded as being next in the pecking order, but he may prefer to bide his time until October, when the dust has settled on the General Election. He would then be well poised to challenge David Cunliffe for the leadership, should Labour not be able to form a government, and should Cunliffe not fall on his sword as Helen Clark and Phil Goff did after their defeats.

We doubt that Labour would change horses so close to an election, but it is fascinating to know that they can, should polling go from bad to worse. That in itself will make any polls after 20th June much more interesting.

David Cunliffe needs to beware the Ides of June! 

0 Quote of the Day - 26 April 2014

Claire Trevett from the Herald provides this perspective on the Shane Jones departure:

Whether it is truth or simply perception is irrelevant: Jones was seen as the last bastion of the centre ground for Labour as well as providing an important buffer from the view that the party was more obsessed with identity politics and political correctness than everyday grafters.
He was certainly the one who articulated it best.
The party now has to work out how to at least hold those voters and shed the perception it is lurching ever leftwards without Jones.

Josie Pagani - a Jones supporter and former Labour candidate - says it needs to do that fast.
"With Shane gone, it feels like the message to people who think like Shane, or identified with Shane, none of those people have received a message saying you're still welcome in the Labour Party. I think that's the problem."
She said the anti-Jones brigade among Labour's activists erupted in celebration on social media without appearing to realise they were effectively sending a message to others that if they identified with Jones, they were not wanted in Labour.
"All you have to do is look at the parade of people popping champagne and saying 'good riddance' in the blogosphere. Are we really saying to people who look and think and sound like Shane that they may as well go and vote National because you're not welcome in Labour?"

Josie Pagani will get no love from the left-leaning blogosphere. But she is just being honest. Readers with long memories will remember that Mrs Pagani copped a serve from factions within the party when she described the difficulty of selling Labour's policies at the 2011 General Election; especially the daft policy to extend to in-work tax credit to people who were not in work. 

The Labour Party seems hell-bent on self-destruction, and the divide between the party's liberal Left and those who still purport to represent Chris Trotter's mythical Waitakere Man is wider than it has ever been. Who are we though to dissaude the Labour Party from imploding?

0 Quote of the Day - 17 April 2014

Claire Trevett from the Herald gently (or not-so-gently!) mocks David Cunliffe this morning:

Former Labour Finance Minister Michael Cullen's 2006 prophecy of "jam tomorrow" will come to fruition today, although it may not quite be the kind of jam people were hoping for.
It will be a traffic jam.
Realising there are votes to be gained from angry holidaymakers stuck in traffic for hours, Labour took measures to try to harvest them this week by releasing a groundbreaking holidaymakers' transport policy.
Labour has long been driven by a drive to reduce inequality. So it announced it would drop the need to register caravans and trailers and cut road user charges for motorhomes and campervans.
The coup de grace of the policy was the ban on trucks from using the right-hand lane on three or four lane motorways - an attempt to peg into the futile rage that swamps drivers whose aims are thwarted by said trucks.

As "Kiwi families" loaded up their surfboards and fishing rods, David Cunliffe's Caravan of Love was here to help. "Fun can quickly turn to frustration when the family realises the rego for the caravan has expired or there's a big truck hogging the fast lane."
Cunliffe declared, "Kiwis are sweating the small stuff too much."
Somebody else may be guilty of that as well.
The trouble with delivering something to entice voters while sitting in traffic jams is that it also gives them time to think things through to their logical end. Once they get to that end, Labour's policy could well be counterproductive. That logical end is even bigger traffic jams.
Encouraging the use of caravans and campervans by making them cheaper to run is only likely to make those jams worse. It is also debatable whether banning trucks from using the right-hand lane only on three or four lane motorways will make any difference at all. It is not the large motorways, but rather two- or one-lane places such as the Brynderwyns where motorists get stuck behind trucks trying to overtake each other for weeks on end.
Then there was the us and them mentality it risked encouraging. The caravaners can console themselves with knowing that the $34 saving on registration helps pay for the extra fuel used up in hours of idling in those traffic jams. But for bach owners, tent campers and hotel users, banning caravans and trailers altogether would be more beneficial. There is a further blow for bach owners. Not only would they get stuck behind more caravans and motorhomes with happy families inside beaming at the extra dollars in their pockets, but they would also have to pay the capital gains tax Labour intends to impose on baches.

Oh goodness; the mere thought of the words "David Cunliffe" used in combination with "Caravan of Love" is almost enough to cause us to regurgitate our breakfast. We apologise profusely to anyone else who experienced a similar outcome!

But Ms Trevett has made her point extraordinarily well, for which we applaud her. And who knows; if Labour sees a large hole appearing in the National Land Transport Fund, it's Capital Gains Tax may suddenly be extended to include caravans as well as baches!