Where to from here for National?

If John Key wants to have a stab at a fourth term as Prime Minister, there’ll be no one in the party to stop him. He’s weathered the Dirty Politics and Moment of Truth storms, and come out the other side with an increased majority.

Now it’s time for a clean up. Jason Ede has already resigned, which is perfect timing for National. An announcement prior to the election would have looked like an admission of guilt, just prior to people walking into the polling booth. This way, it’s lost in the honeymoon maze, and when the House returns to sit, the opposition will have lost another line of attack.

You’d hope that National’s leadership has learned its lesson from the Dirty Politics saga, and will keep people like Cameron Slater at bay. National may have romped home, but Brand Key has lost a touch more of its shine in the process. National’s result wasn’t necessarily as much an endorsement of John Key’s charms as a rejection of the state of the Left.

And hopefully, National MPs (and prospective MPs) lower down the food chain learn from the reaction within National to the Dirty Politics claims regarding Slater and Lusk’s involvement in the Rodney electorate selection process. If anyone finds out you’ve contracted Slater or Lusk to run interference for you, you’ll hopefully be toast.

Of course, the big issue for National, as they seek re-election in 2017, is the same one that kept them awake at night over the last three years – coalition partners. The election results for ACT and United Future were risible. National will give them roles in this new Government though, partly as a reward for six years of loyalty, partly in the vain hope that they might against all odds surge again in popularity and offer National more assistance at getting over the line in three years time.

Likewise, the Maori Party will be offered a role again too. Te Ururoa Flavell has been very clear that the Maori Party cold work with both National or Labour. National will be keen to keep Flavell onside.

But what if that’s not enough? What if ACT and United Future remain unappetising minnows, and Team Key needs a few more seats next time? Does National build up the Conservatives in the hope that they’ll supplant NZ First?

Once the honeymoon fades, Steven Joyce and the rest of the strategy team will undoubtedly be pondering what needs to be done to ensure a victory in three years time.

Student leader ‘revolted’ by politics – that’s what dirty politics does.

Sam Johnson is a fellow about whom it’s rather difficult to find any bad press – founder of Christchurch’s Student Volunteer Army; 2012 Young New Zealander of the Year; ranked number 22 on the Readers Digest top 100 trusted people list; endorsed by John Key when he successfully stood for the Ricccarton-Wigram Community Board in 2010; approached by Lianne Dalziel to be her running mate in the last Christchurch mayoralty race; founding Trustee of the Ministry of Awesome…

And he features on Stuff this morning in an article that begins:

Student Volunteer Army kingpin Sam Johnson says the underhand tricks exposed by Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics have left him revolted by politics.

Johnson is quoted as saying:

The whole thing is revolting. There’s obviously dirty tricks and games played on every side but I just think we’re coming up to an election and we are promoting all these campaigns to get young people to vote… the whole thing needs to get itself cleaned up.

That’s on all sides. This is not restricted to Whale Oil or Simon Lusk. It’s everywhere. It’s quite disheartening. I think we need values-driven politics.

Even before this book, I’ve been put off all sorts of politics. The council debacle was enough to put me off. I’ve seen friends go in and spat out the other side.

You can see why someone like Johnson would receive a brief taste of politics, even only at local body level, and recoil in disgust. And that’s a great pity. Politics, whether it’s local body or at a national level, is supposed to be about public service (“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, if we’re going to really descend into the cliches…). Surely people like Sam Johnson are exactly the type of people we eventually want to attract into politics?

Yet who in their right mind would want to be a politician in this day and age, knowing that everything you say and do, and everything you’ve said and done, will be picked over with a fine-tooothed comb and used to try and destroy you?

Sam Johnson featured briefly in Dirty Politics. Simon Lusk saw him as a client, and was unimpressed by a Green Party MP making favourable comments about the Student Army. Lusk asked Slater:

“Cam, can you bash this c… [the Green MP]. I’ll write it… Sam is a client. He will pay off long term.”

Johnson describes Lusk as just one of his ten to 20 mentors during his Community Board campaign. I’m sure Johnson threw up in his mouth a little to discover that Lusk thought him a long-term cash machine, existing purely to further Lusk and Slater’s ambitions.

Lusk has written:

There are a few basic propositions with negative campaigning that are worth knowing about. It lowers turn out, and drives away the independents. Voting then becomes more partisan.

Add to that, it also drives away people like Sam Johnson.

 

Too many errors – why ‘Dirty Politics’ won’t convince swing voters

Rodney Hide has very publicly rubbished Nicky Hager’s claims that Hide was blackmailed into resigning as ACT Party leader. Here’s an extract from his Herald on Sunday column this morning:

It seems a character called Jordan Williams told another character, Simon Lusk, that I had sent inappropriate texts. Lusk and blogger Cameron Slater then apparently message each other about threatening me with the release of the texts unless I resign.

And then I resign.

Oh, and Don Brash in replacing me was – according to Hager – Lusk’s client. Ta da!

What hasn’t been reported is Hager writing: “The documents do not contain the texts and we do not know they exist. There is also no evidence that a direct threat was made to Hide.”

So he quietly admits his “explosive claim” could be a fizzer. Even with the admission our so-called investigative journalist never bothered confirming his story. Hager never rang to ask: “Hey, I have just come across the damnedest stuff and just have to ask, were you ever blackmailed?”

To which I would reply: “No, definitely not. I would never give in to blackmail. I would go straight to the police. It’s a crime. I have no doubt the police and the courts would take a dim view of any attempt to blackmail a political leader and Government minister. It never happened.”

But then if Hager had fact-checked, “one of the most explosive claims in the book” would evaporate. Far better to publish, run the story, make everyone scramble.

That’s the thing – the blackmail allegation seems a case of Hager playing join the dots with too few dots. A few political operatives emailing each other and saying, “We should blackmail Hide!” doesn’t mean that Hide was actually blackmailed.

The blackmail allegation was one of the big allegations that featured prominently in the media’s initial coverage of Dirty Politics, along with the allegation that Judith Collins had arranged for a prisoner to be moved at Cameron Slater’s behest. The media are now backtracking on the Collins allegation, with Nicky Hager clarifying yesterday that he’s in fact alleging that a prison officer arranged for the prisoner transfer, not Collins. It’s a misreading of the book by journalists, rather than a mistake by Hager, but it substantially reduces the culpability of Team Key.

The more allegations that are either proven to be false, or can be credibly argued to be an exaggeration, the less likely it is that the public (who haven’t read the book and are relying on media coverage for their information) will believe the credible allegations.

Just look at last night’s One News Colmar Brunton’s snap poll. Question two of the poll asks:

[Nicky Hager’s] book suggests smear campaigns and leaks were organised at the highest levels of the National Party, including the Prime Minister’s office. Do you believe these suggestions?

The results? Just 28% of respondents said yes, they believe these suggestions. 43% said no, while 29% didn’t know.

And question three?

Have these allegations positively or negatively influenced your view of the National Party, or have they not made much difference?

5% didn’t know, while 82% said “Not made much difference”. Just 9% said they’d been negatively influenced. (And I don’t even want to know what’s going on in the minds of the 4% who said their view of the National Party had been positively influenced by the allegations…)

Now one could argue that if those 9% of voters who have been negatively influenced were leaning National and were now leaning left, that that’s a huge impact. A 9% shift in the polls would likely hand the election to Labour and the Greens. However, we don’t where those 9% of voters sat, in terms of allegiance. It’s entirely possible that a good chunk of them are left-wingers who didn’t like National, and now like National even less. Or that some are National voters who may like National less, but not enough to vote for a different party.

It’s a pity that Colmar Brunton didn’t dig deeper with their questions, but I guess we’ll see impact of Dirty Politics with the upcoming polling cycle. But I’ll be surprised if the impact is substantial.

UPDATE:

For those interested in a complete summation of the Rodney Hide blackmail dots that can be connected, Danyl Mclauchlan at The Dim-Post has a useful timeline.

Also worth noting is Andrew Geddis’s comment on Danyl’s post:

The question isn’t so much “did Hide actually step down because he was frightened into it by threats of stuff being released?” It’s, “did these people conspire to bring about this result?” Because you can plot to do something and be criminally liable for doing so without actually bringing the plan to full fruition.