0 Mallard's Moa

This cartoon arrived in our inbox overnight, sent to us by a keen-eyed reader:

It really has been Trevor Mallard's week. Plans to de-extinct an extinct bird and have moa wandering freely in the Wainuiomata bush have given Mallard far more profile than anyone else in the Labour Party has had, and at least he hasn't had to apologise for being what he is!

But we still believe that Trevor's staving off of extinction is merely temporary. Tracy Watkins wrote this yesterday:

Labour needed Trevor Mallard this week like it needed a hole in the head.
Mallard's blurt about bringing Moa back from the dead was a gift to National who gloried in the treasure trove of one-liners about dinosaurs and extinction.
Ironically, Mallard's grand Moa plan coincided with a morning tea shout to mark him and Annette King celebrating three decades in Parliament.
Even Mallard's Labour colleagues couldn't resist the Jurassic Park comparisons.
Bizarrely, there was also a school of thought that Mallard might actually be a genius because people were finally talking about Labour.
That must surely be the definition of clutching at straws, but it is symptomatic of the trough Labour has found itself in that generating any sort of chatter round the water cooler - even when it invites ridicule - is an improvement. 

Ouch!

0 Watkins on "flaky" Winston First

Tracy Watkins doesn't mince words today. Under the headline Party in danger of Peter-ing out she opines:

Anyone who kids themselves that there is life after Winston Peters for NZ First only had to watch the party floundering in the absence of its leader this week.
Frantically trying to head off an attack by their former colleague, expunged NZ Firster Brendan Horan, Peters' front bench achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making Horan look good by comparison.
They were clueless in the face of Horan's determination to extract utu from his former party by tabling documents he claimed showed improper use of the taxpayer funded leader's fund.
Whether the documents do show what Horan claims remains to be seen; the Speaker is investigating although the explanation offered by Peters suggests the spending complies with the rules. But we know from long experience that politicians have a collective interest in not inquiring too deeply into the use of leaders' funds.
There is certainly no reason to be confident that they have cleaned up their act since an Audit Office inquiry several years ago found most parties treated it as a slush fund for party political activities. (NZ First was one of the parties pinged for unlawful spending to the tune of $158,000).
Regardless of the ins and outs of Horan's allegations, however, one thing seems clear: Horan is hellbent on using his last remaining months in Parliament to try to take Peters and the rest of NZ First down with him.
Even if he succeeds he will only be hastening by a few years what increasingly seems inevitable.
With its leader knocking 70, NZ First is a clock that has been slowly winding down since the 1996 election delivered Peters the balance of power. 

This is brutal stuff from Ms Watkins, but it is is also brutally honest. There is no way that New Zealand First will survive without its founder and cult leader. The ineptitude of the NZF caucus was there for all to see this week.

Tracy Watkins goes on to profile some of the more "colourful" members of the Winston First caucus:

Since the party's return in 2011, Parliament has been collectively holding its breath waiting for the current team to implode given some of the more eccentric selections - like former North Shore mayor Andrew Williams, notorious for urinating in a public place. 
The implosion hasn't happened yet but there have been plenty of flaky moments. Richard Prosser launched a diatribe against Muslims that prompted hundreds of complaints to the NZ First board. The party's Pasifika MP, Asenati Lole-Taylor, famously asked questions of the police minister in Parliament about blow jobs and has carved out a cult following on Twitter for her bizarre outbursts. Her most recent was to accuse a press gallery journalist of cyber bullying after he referred to her "shooting the messenger". Lole-Taylor thought he was alleging she had shot an actual parliamentary messenger. Horan, meanwhile, was dumped from the party over allegations of missing money from his dead mother's estate.
Horan's bitterness over his expulsion from the party is probably made even more visceral for his belief in himself as the obvious successor to Peters. A former TV weather presenter, Horan was noted for making sure he was always in screen shot when Peters was stopped on the way to the House.
Peters' dislike for his former MP, meanwhile, seems to run particularly deep, with his attack in Parliament on Horan as New Zealand's "Jimmy Savile" - a reference to Britain's celebrity child molester - plumbing the depths of personal attack. 

Asenati Lole-Taylor's Twitter feud with 3News journalist Lloyd Burr was somewhat surreal. It's fair to say that there are a number of MP's in the House with a better command of English than Asenati (perhaps as many as 120 more), but she made an absolute goose of herself, and not for the first time. In the past Ms Lole-Taylor has drawn attention to herself by gleefully announcing on a daily basis how many Twitter users she had blocked that day for daring to have a contrary opinion to hers!

Winston First may squeak back in at September's General Election. However we wouldn't put money on it; Peters himself is a pale shadow of the brash young man on 1996. In recent weeks he has looked far from well and we genuinely wonder if he can pick himself up for one final campaign. He will have to, because none of his current caucus looks capable of winning a chook raffle at the local pub, let alone winning votes in an election.

Father Time has not treated Winston Peters kindly; the late nights, fags and whisky have taken a cumulative toll. And it may well be Father Time who determines whether Winston First survives beyond 20 September 2014.

0 Watkins on Cunliffe

The Fairfax-Ipsos poll came out last week, and it's fair to say that it wasn't good news for David Cunliffe and the Labour Party he leads. 

One aspect of the poll we didn't touch on when we blogged about it on Wednesday was the Preferred Prime Minister rankings; here they are:

David Cunliffe's PPM rankings are poor; they're in David Shearer territory, or worse. And whilst Labour's polling was at just under 30%, Mr Cunliffe's PPM ranking isn't even half that, which means that more Labour voters DON'T rate David Cunliffe as their choice of PM than do. That's extraordinary. So Tracy Watkins has been drilling down through the numbers:

Will the real David Cunliffe please stand up?
That's the message from experts who claim the Labour leader is failing to connect with the voting public because he's not being true to himself.
It's a sentiment reflected strongly in the latest Stuff.co.nz/Ipsos political poll in which people were asked to play a word association game with Cunliffe and Prime Minister John Key.
Asked to sum up the leaders in one word, people opted for "good" when describing Key, but words included confidence, arrogance, charismatic, leader and a suite of words lumped together as "profanity".
For Cunliffe, words like untrustworthy, arrogant and shifty were more likely to be used along with trying, promising and inexperienced.
However, the poll showed visibility is be an issue for Cunliffe, with 20 per cent saying they thought "nothing" when Cunliffe's name came up; compared with 3 per cent for Key.
While Key got 43 per cent positive comments, 30 per cent negative and 27 per cent neutral or nothing, Cunliffe got about 6 per cent positive, 25 per cent negative and a whopping 69 per cent neutral or nothing. The results reinforce the impression that Cunliffe is still struggling to connect with voters. 

We find it interesting that people see David Cunliffe as "inexperienced". He has, of course, been in Parliament longer than John Key, and served as a senior Minister in the Clark administration. He had enough experience to undermine Mr Shearer's leadership.

So Tracy Watkins turns to John Key's former media trainer for some perspective, and to a media professional who has actually worked with Mr Cunliffe:

 

Former TVNZ political commentator turned media trainer Bill Ralston said Cunliffe came across like he "doesn't know himself".
"He always appears to be acting. You know, ‘I'm going to be angry now, I'm going to be funny now, I'm going to be serious'. I don't know what or who the real David Cunliffe is but we haven't seen him yet. It's that inauthenticity that's the issue. He just is not pitching himself as a normal person."
Ralston, who helped train Key, said the Prime Minister and New Zealand First's Winston Peters were leaders who had "clearly identified characteristics and personalities - you can almost guess what they are going to say or do next whereas Cunliffe, there's something that just doesn't ring true".
Cunliffe, who at times proved he had the ability to connect, was a thoughtful man who was likely to be over-analysing problems, he said. "He shouldn't try to be anything else other than himself."
Media trainer Brian Edwards, who has worked with Cunliffe, said the Labour leader was coming across poorly "which is curious because in the past he's come across very well indeed. He doesn't look relaxed, he doesn't look spontaneous, he looks like he is reciting extended sound bites that he has been given by advisers."
This was likely down to poor ratings and a failure to gain traction with the public which affected an MP's confidence and tended to make people over-correct. It seemed this had forced Cunliffe to over-prepare and use scripted responses at a time when it was better to wing it. "You can have this problem of too many voices. You're given all this advice and you end up with scrambled brains."

Both Ralston and Edwards are right. With John Key, what you see is what you get, and you know what that's going to be. Key is as comfortable as a Prime Minister as he is as a husband or a father, and draws people in. Even those who oppose him acknowledge his ability to comment with New Zealanders from the board room to the workplace.

David Cunliffe on the other hand is an enigma. The David Cunliffe who delivered the Budget speech on Thursday was a far cry from the David Cunliffe at home with John Campbell on Monday night. Cunliffe confuses people with his different messages to different audiences.

Is authenticity a skilled that can be acquired? We don't know, but even if it is, we doubt that David Cunliffe can acquire it before the election campaign begins in earnest. We close as Tracy Watkins began; will the real David Cunliffe please stand up?

0 Budget Day - 15 May 2014

It's Budget Day, and it's an especially significant one for Bill English. After five years of having to balance competing expectations with not enough money to go round, he gets to deliver a budget surplus today. Little wonder that he's smiling in the time-honoured pre-Budget photograph at the printer!

In her preview piece in the Dom-Post, Tracy Watkins suggests this bodes well for the John Key-led Government; she opines:

New haircut, smart blue tie - Bill English was even cracking a big smile ahead of today's Budget. 
It has been a long time coming. After six years, a global recession and a devastating natural disaster, the finance minister will announce today that the books are forecast to be back in the black for the first time in seven years.
If the coming election is a referendum on National's economic stewardship, then today's Stuff.co.nz/Ipsos poll suggests voters give it much better than a pass mark, with 69 per cent rating it as doing a good job on the economy.
With the Budget expected to tip surging growth and falling unemployment, that will prove a potent recipe in National's favour at the ballot box, when it will urge voters not to put the gains of an economic recovery at risk by voting for a change of government. 

The opposition parties showed their hand yesterday. The new opposition buzz-word is "inequality", with claims that the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. Politicians will doubtless argue the figures until they are blue in the face, but it is inarguable that a healthy, growing economy provides the best platform to deliver benefits to every New Zealander. And a healthy, growing economy is what Bill English is going to forecast this afternoon.

Unsurprisingly, we have planned our day so that we will be watching from the couch when the Budget is delivered, and we'll be blogging accordingly. We don't think that there will be any major surprises this afternoon; Budget announcements these days are drip-fed in the weeks in advance of Budget Day. But we expect health and education to be the two major areas of focus.

John Key interestingly dangled the possibility of tax cuts to middle income earners yesterday as a longer-term option. That certainly contrasts with Labour's plan to create equality by taxing those who dare to earn a reasonable income, and could create a significant policy difference on the campaign trail in coming months.

But this is Bill English's day. Faced with an economy in rapid decline when he became Finance Minister in 2008, and with Treasury forecasting deficits for the next decade at least, his conservative stewardship has returned New Zealand to economic surplus in six years. He's entitled to a few smiles today.

0 A tale of two polls

The Left was cock-a-hoop at the end of last week when the notoriously variant Roy Morgan poll showed Labour/Green ahead of the National Party. But this morning, the bubbly can go back on ice.

Stuff has released the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll, and it makes grim reading; that's if your name is Cunliffe, Norman or Turei. And if your name is Peters, or any other NZ First MP, you'll be dusting off your CV ready for a return to the job market in October. Tracy Watkins has the grim details (for those mentioned above, and their supporters):

National has shrugged off weeks of scandal and is riding high in today's Stuff.co.nz/Ipsos Political Poll.
With Finance Minister Bill English poised to unveil tomorrow what he hopes will be an election-winning Budget, the poll suggests there is no need to pull any rabbits out of the hat.
It puts National on 47.6 per cent support, down 1.8 percentage points on our last poll, but still enough to govern alone if the results were mirrored on election night.
Labour has slipped to 29.50 per cent, taking it below the morale-busting 30 per cent threshold for the first time. 

The Fairfax-Ipsos poll has tended to flatter Labour. Whereas other polls have had David Cunliffe's team fluctuated above and below the 30% line since the 2011 General Election, Labour has held its ground in this particular poll. Until this morning, that is.

And Tracy Watkins predicts a new round of naval-gazing in the War Room:

Today's result is likely to cause soul searching within Labour, however, over leader David Cunliffe's failure to get traction against Key despite the succession of ministerial scandals.
The poll shows Cunliffe sliding in the preferred prime minister stakes to 13.4 per cent, down 3.9 points from our last poll in February and well behind Key, who is on 48.6 per cent. Labour also suffered a blow during the polling period with the news that former leadership hopeful Shane Jones is quitting Parliament. But Labour's biggest enemy may be the improving economy, with the poll showing 63.6 per cent of voters believe the country is on the right track. 

Indeed. Bill English is set to announce the economy is back in surplus for 2014-15 when he delivers tomorrow's Budget, more people in New Zealand are in work than at any time in the country's history, manufacturing and exporting is humming, and tourists continue to visit New Zealand in record numbers. Bill English and John Key have a strong platform from which to campaign for re-election.

Here's how the parties stack up:

Ms Watkins notes that the Greens seem to have picked up some "soft" Labour support, whilst NZ First is going nowhere. Winston Peters is going to need more than a luke-warm spud gun to gain any traction, as Labour threatens to trump him with anti-Chinese rhetoric.

John Key and Bill English will be feeling positive ahead of tomorrow's Budget, and they have every right to be. Bill English has steered the economy through the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the waters ahead are calm, especially compared to the heavy seas facing Australia. Why would any sensible voter put that at risk?

0 Quote of the Day - 7 May 2014

Tracy Watkins confirms what we all suspected; Trevor Mallard is a smear-merchant, who makes stuff up:

Clearly seeing which way things were headed, Labour MP Trevor Mallard fell back on the oldest trick in the book to spice the story up for the evening news and got chucked out of the House after lobbing an incendiary allegation in the Justice Minister's direction.
Mallard had interjected that Collins' family had benefited from Oravida to the tune of half a million dollars - a figure he later admitted was based on nothing more than totting up the average fees paid to company directors.
So Collins, whose husband Wong-Tung is a director of Oravida, was not too far off the mark when she accused Mallard of making it up. 

David Cunliffe yesterday promoted Mallard into his First XV. Will he have either the courage or the decency to relegate Mallard again to where he belongs; out of the side altogether, and back to the dirt-trackers, the ones who don't even make the reserves bench?

This is now a test of David Cunliffe's integrity, and of Trevor Mallard's basic decency. If Mallard does not make a personal statement to Parliament today in which he apologises to Judith Collins for his made-up smear against her, David Cunliffe should show some leadership and stand Mallard down.