On Monday, Todd Muller gave an important speech to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce,
He spoke firmly about his belief in the need for foreign investment, for the public sector to partner with the private sector rather than boss it around and, crucially, demanded the government deliver a clear strategy at the border in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Getting to the heart of the matter, he argued that staying closed until other countries had infection rates as low as ours or there was a vaccine was “untenable”. He challenged the government to deliver the criteria foreign visitors will have to meet before they are allowed in.
Unfortunately for Muller, New Zealanders who were paying attention to National at all were more likely to be watching Paula Bennett dancing around with comedian Tom Sainsbury as she announced her retirement from politics.
With Anne Tolley also announcing her retirement less than three months from election day, National is hogging the headlines in way they don’t want to this week.
National wants to be putting pressure on Labour and the cracks appearing in its handling of the pandemic. Muller wants to be playing the ‘competence’ card again as Labour, who through lockdown had dared to look competent under immense pressure, are toying with returning to their old, muddled ways.
If he can’t get that going and start sharing some new ideas, he at least needs his party to shut up and allow the news to keep reporting Labour’s confusions and run of calamities. And he wants to be warming up his attack lines. In the Chamber of Commerce speech we got a hint of where he could go on the campaign, pointing out that even before the lockdown economic growth had slowed significantly and the number of people on jobseeker benefits had leapt by around 20,000 in just the two and a bit years since National had left government.
But even while he was flexing that muscle, journalists were queuing up to interview Judith Collins about her new book. While Muller was trying to paint the picture of a new, improved National ‘under new management’, Collins was discussing at length the John Key and Bill English years, reminding people that National isn’t the party it was just a few years ago.
Sure, she was putting the boot into both, despite the fact Key stuck by her when he could have discarded her for popping into those Oravida offices in Shanghai “for a cup of tea on the way to the airport”. But reminding voters of the party’s most popular leader in a generation just as Muller is trying make his own mark, is hardly doing any favours for the guy she reckons is “one of the best”.
In the same news cycle that Muller was raising the idea of considering the ethnicity of his MPs when it comes to reshuffling his shadow cabinet in the light of the Bennett and Tolley resignations (just days after he had insisted he made his choices based on merit), Collins as musing on the decisiveness of Don Brash. She talked about his “skilled decision making even where those decisions were not universally liked”. Which sounded an awful lot to me like a reference to – and seemingly a defence of – Brash’s Orewa Speech.
At a time when the leader is musing about Maori representation on his own front bench and the world is gripped by the cry ‘Black Lives Matter’, reminding voters of its divisive history on matters of race relations from its recent past is perhaps not the most winning of strategies.
Whether the election year book release (due to have been earlier in the year had it not been for Covid) was always intended as a profile raiser in a quest for leadership or simply a chance to get her own back, few will know. But you don’t write a political memoir while your political career is alive and kicking without an agenda.
But the past few days have been a good reminder of why it’s so hard for parties to lose government and then win it back in just three years. There’s a lot of angsting and reconfiguring and frustrated ambition and dead wood-clearing to go through in a short period of time.
Voters this week will be left the impression of a party still getting its house in order and still looking back more than forwards.
As I wrote at the start of the month, the new leader has little time to bring out distinctive new policy that shows voters ‘It’s Muller-time’. And the days are a-wasting, while we continue to wait for any new policy of note. Tick tock. Or should that be tik tok?
Either way, it’s clear National is struggling to get its messages mixed up. They need to draw a line under the past and get busy with the future. But to do that Muller first needs to get his MPs in line and out of his way.