0 The headline no leader wants to see

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.

0 Small on the Jones "cluster failure"

Vernon Small is one of the more senior members of Parliament's Press Gallery. He has seen more MP's come and more MP's go than most of us have had hot dinners. So he's not given to going overboard.

That makes his column in yesterday's Dominion-Post even more noteworthy. Under the heading Church collapsed? Buy a house Small opines:

Helen Clark would have lowered her voice and with a hint of authority - and a side order of menace - drawled "it's time to move on".
Labour leader David Cunliffe must be hoping he can move the party, and the political agenda, on after what is surely the heart of darkness of his political year.
If things could get any worse than the cluster failure around Shane Jones' sudden departure to work for a government he was supposed to want out of office, it is hard to see what they could be.

When Mr Small says "cluster failure", we're pretty sure that he means a variant of that phrase, which also starts with "cluster", followed by the letter "f". But the Dom-Post is a polite newspaper, and such a turn of phrase might be frowned upon by Small's editor. However, we all get the picture.

And it has been a shocker of a week for David Cunliffe and his party. Shane Jones quite literally lobbed the electoral equivalent of a hand grenade into Labour's War Room, and the party's handling of the issue is deserving of the "clusterf#ck" label.

Small continues:

The danger for Cunliffe, in the wake of Jones' departure, is that with some in the party wading knee deep in vitriol it will spill over into civil war, revisiting the divisions of the 2012 annual conference. (That's the one where according to some Cunliffites the media fabricated Cunliffe's challenge to David Shearer's leadership.)
Already the same divisions are surfacing. On one side there are the "good riddance to Jones" merchants who seem to believe the broad church party would have a wider appeal if its MPs came from a smaller chapel. It sometimes seems they would rather people - voters - changed their ways rather than the party appealed to a broader array of views.
On the other side are those who lament the loss of Jones' appeal to Maori, soft centrist or conservative National voters but use his supposed straight talking - too many "geldings" in the party etc - to attack identity politics.
At times it becomes indistinguishable from prejudice and downplays the strong strand of liberal egalitarianism and concern for human rights at the party's core. Both axes seem to think tolerance is essential, as long as you agree with me.
Cunliffe's task is to heal those wounds yet again - as Clark mostly did after her messy coup against Mike Moore in 1993 - and get the party back to its core messages. There are, after all, only 20 weeks till polling day.

If a week is a long time in politics, the 20 weeks until the election must seem like an eternity to David Cunliffe. His party is in disarray, his policy launches have been botched, his party's social media efforts (including his own) have been ridiculed, and now his best-performing MP can see that there is not going to be much chance of a seat at the Cabinet table after 20th September.

The wounds within Labour are deep, and mere Band Aids will not suffice. Helen Clark, Phil Goff and David Shearer all resisted major surgey, but now that may be the only option Mr Cunliffe has left.

0 Labour's own manufactured crisis

At last Labour has a crisis to be concerned about; even if it is its own crisis; Vernon Small from the Dom-Post reports:

Disarray. There is no other word to describe the mess the Labour Party plunged into last night. Not only did it have to come to terms with the loss of one of its strongest performers in Shane Jones, the party seemed to freeze like a possum in the headlights.
More than 90 minutes after the story broke there was no official confirmation, and leader David Cunliffe and his deputy David Parker neither returned media calls nor issued any statements.
Press secretaries were either unable to help, unhelpful or offline, and party president Moira Coatsworth and secretary Tim Barnett initially went to ground.
Former leader David Shearer was gracious enough to confirm he knew of the resignation, but other MPs said it was a "bolt from the blue" and "gutting" before a gagging order went around the caucus.
His replacement off the list Kelvin Davis - a mate of Jones - said he knew nothing.
It took Coatsworth until well into the evening to finally confirm Jones was quitting, just as Cunliffe and Jones went into a meeting together.
If anything was designed to scream "crisis" it was this. Jones will be a serious loss to the party.

Forget that manufactured manufacturing crisis that Labour was a party to in 2012-13. This is a genuine crisis for Labour, and it's happening right now.

And it's not just Vernon Small saying this. Over at the Herald, John Armstrong opines thus:

Shane Jones' shock decision to quit as a Labour MP will lead voters to draw one conclusion and one conclusion only: that he thinks Labour cannot win the September general election.
His departure is close to an unmitigated disaster for Labour. For starters, unlike the bulk of his colleagues, Jones could reach into segments of the vote - especially blue-collar males - who have switched off Labour. He was in the process of switching those traditional relationships back on.
He was a major weapon in helping Labour to win back more of the Maori seats.
Perhaps of most significance, Labour has lost the one man who would have acted as the essential go-between in securing Winston Peters' signature on a post-election coalition or co-operation agreement between Labour and New Zealand First which enabled Labour to govern.

Shane Jones has clearly blindsided the Labour Party's top brass. Pretty much the closest thing Labour had to Chris Trotter's mythical creature Waitakere Man, Jones appealed to the kind of voters that have deserted Labour as it forgot its working-class-and-proud-of-it roots, and set out to appeal the the urban elite in the likes of Grey Lynn and Wellington Central.

Armstrong also spells out the logistical implications of Jones' decision to bail out:

He might not have intended it, but his leaving is also a massive blow to Labour's morale at one of the worst possible times - just five months before election day when the party is endeavouring to motivate its membership to go door-knocking to get out the Labour vote.
The best that can be said is that Cunliffe will now not be overshadowed by anyone from his own side during the formal election campaign. That was always going to be a danger when Jones was around.

If Labour wasn't already in enough trouble, the departure of Jones is going to twist the knife. It's going to make it especially difficult for Labour to win back the Maori vote, although there is one upside; Jones' replacement Kelvin Davis will be able to campaign against Hone Harawira with the resources of Parliament behind him one he becomes an MP again.

However Labour spins this, it is a genuine setback, and from what we've seen and read this morning, Labour's top brass was in crisis mode last night. Shane Jones' biggest contribution to the New Zealand political scene might just be his exit from politics.