Most MMP elections have been. Minnows hold the keys to the kingdom.
Be it Winston with his best result ever or Te Pati Māori with an overhang - 2026 won’t be a 2020 landslide.
The difference this time is how extreme some of the smaller parties, more to the point, some of their MPs, have become - think Takuta on Indians and Simon Court on Palestine.
It’s not just rhetoric, but policy, too.
A separate Māori parliament, re-nationalising power companies, you name it, they'll go there.
The temptation for the behemoths, the broad churches, is to emulate what’s getting traction. To dip your toe in the pool of radical ideas. To be establishment without looking or sounding like it.
Trump and the MAGA movement are the best example of this.
In the UK, parties that have been around since Moses was a linebacker are being absolutely whipped in the polls by newer upstarts with one thing on their pledge cards: radical change.
The Conservatives have been around almost 200 years. Reform UK? Six.
The big issues differ - our cost-of-living malaise is their immigration.
So the temptation must be to embrace a bit of that radical spirit. Labour might yet do that, we just don’t know what they’re cooking up.
My prediction? Establishment parties will do what established parties do.
Stick to the script, copy/paste their policies, hug the centre like a koala a tree, and hope their buddies grab enough from the fraying edges to get them across the line.
Their bet is that crises come and go but establishments don’t, even though the Brits and Americans show us they can and do.
Ryan Bridge is a New Zealand broadcaster who has worked on many current affairs television and radio shows. He currently hosts Newstalk ZB's Early Edition - where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
Truth be told, the leaders of our two main parties, Liquid Luxon and Chippie from the Hutt, are not very bright. Voters know it. Whatever their faults, the leaders of the minor parties in NZ are now not only smarter and shrewder, but also more charismatic than these two dim-wits who both favour inbred mates in terms of appointments. I'm expecting the two party duopoly to disappear because of it. MMP-induced instability is on its way.
NZ is beset by the same corrupt politics as the UK.
Farage and his big business backers perpetuated the myth that the UKs woes were caused by the European Union and immigrants. The UK public fell for the lie and fell into the lap of large UK businesses who wanted rid of they EU so they could pay workers less and distribute more wealth to themselves.
We have a similar story in NZ. Our quality of life is traveling south because successive governments support NZs price colluding supermarkets, gentailers, and banks; who use their huge resources to distract kiwis from the high cost of living and low productivity their business models create; by funding articles which abuse Luxon and blame Maoris.
Why? follow the money as this wonderfully insightful article explains.
https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/135246/geoff-bertram-looks-why-fixing-nz%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98broken%E2%80%99-electricity-market-such
Unlike Robert, I still hold out hope that Luxon who said ....
"our supermarket shop is too expensive and now Kiwis pay some of the highest prices on the planet for food. This is totally unacceptable. "
will honour his commitment to....
" tackling regulatory barriers and anything else getting in the way of lower prices for Kiwis."
and consequently romp in at the next election.
Taking a while to get up to speed?
Luxon said: "our supermarket shop is too expensive and now Kiwis pay some of the highest prices on the planet for food. This is totally unacceptable. "
YES !! Unfortunately he is correct.
I am in Spain, and food prices here are a lot lower than lovely NZ.
15.50EU for a lunch in a nice restaurant, Entree, Main, desert AND half a liter of very good Spanish wine.
Here we pay $22 + for a main meal and $9.00 for a glass of wine.
Funny that.
15.5 Euros = 31 NZ dollars by today's exchange rate (2.03:1).
Exactly the same as $22 + $9.
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