David Cormack
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The missing pillars of National
🕑 Added 2021-06-19 05:08:44 +0000 UTCYesterday Chris Bishop tweeted
I’m just imagining what people would be saying if @NZNationalParty was in government and we had the slowest vaccine roll-out in the developed world
It came after Bish has been hot on the attack over the delayed Covid vaccine roll-out. Day after day, Bish and some of the National surrogates on Twitter have been relentless in their criticism of the vaccine roll-out. The above tweet is a very clear sign of frustration that National just can't gain any traction with the issue.
National has struggled to gain traction with any issue. The party has seemed aimless and strategically bereft, firing off random shots at everything. Trying to make Māori separatism an issue. The electric vehicle rebate. They've even had a crack at the Trans community, influenced in no doubt by their anti-trans press sec in the National Leader's Office.
You may have noticed that for a while, Collins was focused heavily on the Māori separatist issue. Banging on and on about the He Puapua report. I'd wondered if this was an issue that was just dreamed up by National, or if they were privy to more information than me and people outside of Wellington really were worried about some kind of imagined racial separatist issue. But then we had a couple of polls come out that showed National had made next to no progress. And just like that, He Puapua has disappeared from National's attack lines.
It's interesting that it took some public polling before National moved. I would have thought that they'd be doing plenty of internal polling, not only on their own numbers, but on issues and focus group testing etc. But I've been recently told that National has found itself without three key external support groups that made the National of John Key such a slick machine.
National's pollster has historically been David Farrar's Curia, however rumour has it National hasn't been doing any internal polling at all so has had no idea what issues resonate with the public until public polling tells them.
They also haven't been using Crosby Textor who had been providing National with strategic assistance; even if only at the beginning of the year, someone would come and help National with the strategic direction of the party and develop communication strategies.
There's also no Topham Guerin to help with their social media (there is still a bloke who works for National who is very, very good at what he does, but he's constantly overlooked for promotion).
And the reason National has been missing these organisations is the root cause, which is the donations have dried up. The wealthy business folk that National has traditionally relied on have bailed. They see 2023 as a lost cause and so aren't spending their money. Without the money, and with a greatly reduced parliamentary presence, National has had to rely on itself, where once it could use experts.
This lack of money, I'm told, is why Peter Goodfellow was able to get re-elected as Party President, despite performing abysmally. Peter said that if he was re-elected as President, he'd underwrite National's 2023 election. With the bank accounts looking so grim this was a very attractive proposition.
This is why National has been barking at every car. Because they don't know what is working and what isn't. They also don't have the resource to properly communicate or strategise, and they can't afford the social media gurus. I knew National was in bad shape, but I didn't realise it was this bad.
At least with Labour, when they were in the darkest days of the Cunliffe era, they could rely on the Unions to chuck them some coin.
And so this is why Bish tweeted what he did. He knows National is dreadfully unpopular, that's why he conceded that people would be lashing out if the vaccine was being rolled out as poorly as it is, under a National Government. But until there's some kind of circuit breaker that jolts them into professionalism, we're going to see them flail and struggle. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving group.
Comments
m3me_fr0g
It's their job to hold the government to account and part of that is a bit of devil's advocacy. The point you're making about their lack of resources is interesting but I don't think it has much to do with that tweet to be honest. Frankly the pace of the vaccine rollout is appalling. He's not wrong. The saving grace for the government is that we don't have covid here so it doesn't matter. But Europe and America are slowly opening up and meanwhile we're frantically paying attention to single digit numbers in MIQ and relying entirely on it to stay covid-19 free, because the public will probably not accept another lockdown this year. And really most of the other issues National would bring up regardless of their resources. They'd just be better at choosing which ones to go hard on and which ones to not. But frankly what catches the attention of the public is mostly determined by what the media decides to make a big issue anyway. The media decided from day one that the He Puapua issue was not going to go well for National and so it didn't. Long gone are the days of politicians that were good at manipulating the media. These days the media decide for themselves how issues will play out. If they want the issue to play, they present it as if it already has. If they don't, they present a couple of tweets from nobodies getting offended as "a massive backlash" and then just start writing "news" articles that essentially use each other as sources. Outlet X said it was controversial, then outlet Y says "people are saying it's controversial", then outlet X goes hey look, see, it is controversial, Y says so too! It's not just He Puapua it's literally every political issue. So pretending that the Nats aren't capturing public attention is just kind of silly imo. Our media has decided that for now they aren't going to go anywhere in the media narrative. But in the real world if you actually talk to normal people they're concerned about everything they're talking about (and I mean Labour and Green voters too).
David Cormack
We political losers all talk to one another. I talk to folks both in and around the National Party.
Thunk
Out of curiosity (and sincerely), how do you know that donations have dried up, and that the reason is that the donors reckon 'lost cause'? Is that public information in some way?
