Smart play, makes Te Pāti Māori exclusively Labour’s problem and makes it a lot easier for Luxon to frame the left, as he likes to dub it, as a coalition of chaos.
Because between the antics of the Māori Party, the infighting of the Green Party and the troublesome ministers of the Labour Party, it looks pretty chaotic.
But why’d it take this long?
My first reaction to the news that National was ruling the Māori Party out was to say: Well, obviously. Because the Māori Party was never going to work with them anyway, because they ruled it out on the 31st of May last year.
Despite that, do you know what happened last month? He was at a meeting with a crowd of Waikato dairy farmers when he was asked if he could win the election with the Māori Party, and he said no.
Afterwards, his spokesperson then watered that down, saying Luxon hadn’t meant to fully rule out the Māori Party, he just wanted to make it clear working with them was “highly unlikely”.
And last week, that's the line he kept using- “highly unlikely”- until he finally today went back to the original thing he said last month, which is no.
Do you know what that looks like? Like National is overthinking things.
Maybe they were worried last week that ruling out the Māori Party would open them up to accusations of racism, or maybe they were worried that it leaves them with pretty much only ACT and that would only make ACT more cocky. Or maybe that ACT could scare away the centre left voters they’re trying to nick from Labour
Tell you what will scare those voters away: a Party that keeps second guessing itself.
If they want to convince voters they know how to run the country, they’d better start with convincing us that they know how to do politics.
Today is a start. Took a while though.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
1 comment:
Spot on. National can now openly rubbish the maori party as a bunch of self interested tribalists concerned only with their own furtherance and not NZ. And as they obviously share the same approach, the Labour maori Caucus can be linked with them. The votes of most responsible citizens for National/Act/NZF should then be assured.
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