We want our money back

It’s a shame the Consumer Guarantees Act doesn’t apply to politics. If it did, the country would be entitled to demand its money back. The governor-general could be petitioned to annul the election result and do it all again.

I say this because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the new government was formed under false pretences. We were sold faulty goods, not fit for purpose.

This is not the fault of the Labour Party, although it was over-eager to do a deal with Winston Peters. Labour was conned, as were National and indeed the entire country. No one knew Peters was planning to sue key National Party figures, including Bill English, which meant the theatrical negotiations leading to the formation of the new government were a sham.

We can also blame a flawed system that allowed Peters, whose party wasn’t wanted by 93 percent of voters, to take control of the government formation process. Our constitutional arrangements generally serve us pretty well, but they let us down badly by not setting sensible rules for post-election negotiations.

Of course there’s little prospect of a fresh election, in the immediate future anyway (hold all bets in the longer term), but it’s a tantalising thought. I wouldn’t mind if it resulted in a Labour-Greens coalition, just as long as the process was fair, open and transparent.

The crucial thing is that Winston Peters should never again be allowed within a mile of Parliament. No government can have any credibility as long as Peters is part of it, and this one is ineradicably tainted by association with him. Labour and the country will have to endure three years of shame and humiliation unless someone pulls the pin.

Were the coalition talks skewed by Peters' secret utu plan?

Let me see whether I’ve got this right.

We learned yesterday that on the day before the September 23 general election, Winston Peters kick-started legal action against National cabinet ministers and officials over the leaking of his superannuation overpayment. He took this action without disclosing it to either the National or Labour parties.

Then, post-election, Peters entered into – indeed orchestrated – what were held out to be “good faith” negotiations with both parties on possible coalition arrangements.

Both parties believed they were in with a chance – in fact an equal chance – and Peters seemed happy to encourage this belief. It suited him to do so because that way, both Labour and National would be keen to do business with him.

But realistically, what chance was there of Peters going into coalition with National when he was simultaneously – apparently unbeknown to anyone but his lawyers – taking legal action against senior National ministers and officials? What sort of hopelessly dysfunctional government would it have been if the deputy prime minister (let’s assume his appointment to that role would have been one of the conditions of any NZ First deal with National, as it was with Labour) was suing the prime minister?

No, it’s inconceivable.

The obvious conclusion, then, is that Peters kept quiet so he could play the parties along, spinning out the negotiations and extracting maximum concessions, when he must have known all along that he would go with Labour. To put it another way, the negotiations appear to have been an elaborate charade.

If this was the case, National weren’t the only ones being played for suckers. Labour were deceived too. Ask yourself: what concessions did the Labour team make that they wouldn’t have considered had they known Peters intended to go with them regardless?

I’m not alone in thinking this. Veteran political editor Barry Soper writes: “Like all good gamblers, Peters kept a stony face, letting them [National] believe they were still in the game whereas in reality they'd been dealt out when the court papers were filed against them."

They were playing blind, says Soper, and so was Labour. “If they’d known of the court papers they might not have been so generous”.

Now Jacinda Ardern is left with little option but to play it all down by insisting it was just a “personal” matter between Peters and the people he’s going after. She says Peters gave her a “heads up”, although not until last week. All sorted, then; nothing to see here.

Of course Ardern has to maintain the line that this doesn’t affect the unity or stability of the coalition. But seriously, how can Labour trust Peters after this? They appear to have been shafted before they even had their feet under the cabinet table. At the very least, they were misled by omission.

On Morning Report today, political law expert Graeme Edgeler put a benign interpretation on Peters’ behaviour by suggesting he may have decided to proceed with legal action only after deciding to support Labour.

In other words Peters may have negotiated with National in genuine good faith, intending to shelve his legal action if they reached agreement. But if that were the case, why did his lawyers file papers in the Auckland High Court the day before the election? He would surely have stayed his hand while he waited to see how the post-election talks panned out.

I suppose some people might admire Peters’ mastery of the political dark arts (Soper seems to), but to me it just looks dishonest and deceitful. On the face of things, he has treated Labour and National with contempt, he has treated the electorate with contempt and he has treated democracy with contempt. 

And what a cute coincidence that he should have left the country to attend the Apec conference in Vietnam before the bomb went off, so that he was spared having to answer awkward questions. (I won’t comment on the irony of a foreign affairs minister who’s deeply sceptical about free trade representing New Zealand at a meeting of an organisation formed to promote it, but hey - who's going to pass up an opportunity to hob-nob with the big boys?)

Let’s allow that the leaking of Peters’ superannuation details was a political dirty trick, albeit a transparently clumsy one, aimed at embarrassing him ahead of the election. But the secrecy of his plan to exact utu, and the possibility that the coalition talks were skewed by it, can only add to misgivings about the integrity of the process by which the new government was formed. Am I the only one who thinks this is a whole lot more important than the entertaining gamesmanship in Parliament yesterday?

The first 100 days: a better way

There has been a lot of talk about what the new government proposes to achieve in its first 100 days. It has set itself an extremely ambitious workload and a very limited time frame in which to accomplish it.

Political parties forced to chafe and fidget in opposition over a long period accumulate a big wish-list. They’re naturally impatient to correct everything the previous lot got wrong. When they finally get their hands on the levers of power it’s like a dam bursting.

There's a danger, then, that some of the Labour-led coalition’s priority objectives will be rushed through with insufficient preparatory groundwork or detailed consideration of the practicalities and possible consequences.

The risks are compounded because the vast majority of ministers have no previous experience in government and will be distracted by prosaic demands such as appointing staff and acclimatising in their new offices. Oh, and there’s the Christmas break coming up.

There’s also the tantalising possibility that neophyte ministers, giddy with excitement at their new-found power, will spin out at the first bend. Defence Minister Ron Mark certainly left some rubber on the tarmac this week when he appeared to rashly promise government funding for the RSA. To mix a metaphor, it looked like a case of political premature ejaculation.

Contrary to what Labour and its coalition partners are contemplating, I wonder whether it would be a good idea for power-starved incoming governments to resolve not to do anything for the first 100 days while they wait for the rush of blood to the head to subside.

A coalition of convenience

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 3.

“We won, you lost – eat that!”

Remember? That was the reported taunt to National MPs by deputy prime minister Michael Cullen in Parliament not long after National was banished to the opposition benches in 1999.

Actually, Cullen didn’t use the words in that sequence. Hansard quoted him as saying “Eat that! You lost, we won”, which conveys a subtly different nuance.

Although it’s commonly assumed that he was gloating over National’s election defeat, he was celebrating the fact that Labour had just consigned National’s Employment Contracts Act to the scrapheap.

But the triumphalist sentiment was unmistakeable, and since the paraphrased version has entered New Zealand political mythology, we’ll go with that.

Cullen’s comment is worth recalling because there has been a chorus of “We won, you lost – eat that!” since the formation of the new centre-Left government.

None of the crowing, I hasten to add, has come from Jacinda Ardern or her partners in government. They are wisely concentrating on the work ahead rather than wasting energy on nyah-nyah point-scoring. Rather, it’s the Left-leaning political commentariat that has been relishing its WWYLET moment.

Another crucial difference from 2000 is that this time, the taunt isn’t directed at the National Party. It’s aimed at Right-leaning commentators – including me, probably – who questioned the process by which the new government was formed.

Anyone who expresses any such misgivings is derided as a sore loser or caricatured as a dinosaur, still pining for the days of the first-past-the-post electoral system. The assumption is that they must be disgruntled National supporters.

The Left is keen to stifle any discussion about the questionable circumstances of the Labour-led government’s birth.  Get over it, they say; move on.

Well, just for the record, I don’t advocate a return to FPP and I don’t support the National Party. I didn’t vote for it and would have been happy to see it beaten fair and square.

Neither do I believe that National was automatically entitled to form a new government just because it won more votes than any other party.

I would argue, however, that it had a powerful moral claim to be first cab off the rank in coalition negotiations. But in the constitutional vacuum that followed the election, it was left to Winston Peters, Mr Seven Per Cent, to orchestrate the coalition-forming process. And it suited him to play the two major parties off against each other in order to secure maximum advantage for himself and New Zealand First.

Ultimately, Labour got Peters’ blessing because it was more willing to accede to his demands. To put it more bluntly, Labour was more desperate than National to win power.

Peters then added insult to injury by taking his media label of kingmaker rather too literally, magisterially announcing the formation of the new government as if delivering the speech from the throne, and not even having the courtesy to inform Ardern or Bill English beforehand. I suppose it was his unsubtle way of reminding everyone who was in charge.

You have to hand it to him. It was a breathtakingly audacious hijacking of the post-election process, and we let him get away with it.

The Left-leaning commentariat insist this was a glowing example of MMP working exactly as it’s supposed to.

They would say that, of course, because it delivered the result they hoped for. But can anyone deny that democracy is debased when a party with 7 per cent of the vote effectively dictates the rules of play?

We’re now expected to accept the fiction that Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First are soulmates, joined at the hip. But in reality, all that united them was a hunger for power. It’s a coalition of convenience. Peters couldn’t even bring himself to mention the Greens in his kingmaker speech.

The inherent tensions between those parties – socially conservative and populist on one hand, “progressive” and highly idealistic on the other – could easily cause this coalition to implode. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s just being realistic.

However it’s not the outcome of the election that grates so much as the process by which we got there.

Those who insist that the vote for change was bigger than that for the status quo have an arguable case. Many New Zealanders were tired of National’s laissez-faire approach to pressing issues, and even some on the Right accused the party of appearing arrogant and complacent. It will do National’s MPs no harm to suck it up on the opposition benches.

We now have a new government that’s fresh, ambitious and full of energy. It’s doing what Labour governments have traditionally done – coming in with a hiss and a roar after a long period under National and hitting the “reset” button.

But it’s unfortunate that our likeable new prime minister’s moment of glory is tarnished by doubt about the legitimacy of the process by which her government was formed. There has to be a better way.

Pardon me, but this is all arse-about-face

After 21 years and eight general elections, New Zealanders are finally starting to ask some hard questions about MMP.

The current political lacuna demonstrates all that’s worst about the electoral system we adopted in 1993 and put into effect in 1996. The problem is not that everything has come to a standstill while National, Labour and New Zealand First complete the negotiations which will determine who governs us. Other countries routinely experience long periods in political limbo without appearing to suffer great harm.

Neither should we be either surprised or even troubled by the fact that Winston Peters, having declared that everything would be sorted by tomorrow, has now reneged on that assurance. This is par for the course from Peters, who promotes himself as the only honest man in New Zealand politics but has never hesitated to shift his ground or even execute a U-turn when it was expedient to do so.

Peters is, however, central to the reasons why we should be having second thoughts about a political system that enables a man whose party got barely 7 per cent of the votes to determine who the next government will be. Under any circumstances this would be a travesty, but it’s made worse by Peters’ grotesque posturing.

Bizarrely, he behaves as if New Zealanders gave him a mandate on election day. We did no such thing, of course.  The power Peters is exercising at this moment (and so obviously relishing) has nothing to do with the popular will. It was placed in his hands through a quirk of a system that makes a mockery of democracy. A more humble party leader might acknowledge this by pulling his head in, but this is Peters we’re talking about.

In any half-rational political system, it would be the parties which between them won more than 81 percent of the vote, not Peters with his measly share, that determined the course of negotiations. A minor player such as New Zealand First, if it had genuine respect for democracy, would accept that its negotiating strength should be proportionate with its level of popular support. But again, this is Peters we’re talking about. And sadly he’s encouraged in his delusions by both the media, which can’t resist stroking his ego (for example, by calling him the kingmaker), and by the major parties, whose attempts to appease Peters come perilously close to grovelling.

Pardon the expression, but this is all arse-about-face. It’s demeaning to democracy. We’ve heard a lot over the years about the tail-wagging-the-dog scenario under MMP. Well, here it is writ large, and unfolding before our very eyes.

It’s a situation rich in irony. We voted for the introduction of MMP primarily to punish our politicians and bring them to heal. We were fed up with their broken promises. We wanted to make them more accountable.

Only now are New Zealanders realising that we achieved the exact reverse. Voters have no control whatsoever over whatever’s going on right now behind closed doors at Parliament. In effect, we have placed still more power in the hands of the political elites. This is the antithesis of what the promoters of MMP promised (and perhaps naively believed themselves).

It has also dawned on us that there’s a bit a constitutional vacuum around MMP, which means that the politicians are free to play by whatever rules suit them. For example, there’s no obligation on minor parties to negotiate first with whichever party won the biggest share of the vote.

And note the almost paranoiac emphasis on secrecy and confidentiality that surrounds the negotiations, even to the point of parliamentary security officials initially trying to prevent reporters seeing who was on the negotiating teams. So much for transparency. The last thing the politicians want is for the people who elected them to know what decisions are being made on their behalf. They couldn’t be more brazen about the fact that the public is locked out of the game. We’re not even impotent spectators. It’s particularly ironic that Peters, who has presented himself throughout his political career as a man of the people, a party leader who refuses to play by the rules of the self-serving political establishment, should be at the very centre of all this.

Nothing I say here should be interpreted as a call for a return to the first-past-the-post system. But it’s time to face up to the fact that we replaced one imperfect system with another that was equally flawed, and at the very least we should be having a national conversation about whether there may be a better way.

Mr 7.5 Percent makes the most of his intoxicating moment in the spotlight

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 6.)

As is well known, the MMP electoral system was created to ensure, as far as possible, that no party ended up wielding absolute power.

So far you’d have to say it has worked exactly as intended. In the eight elections since New Zealand adopted MMP, no one party has won an absolute majority. They have all had to compromise and negotiate with smaller coalition partners.

Now we find ourselves in the same position again. It should be familiar by now, yet something seems not quite right. What could it be?

Oh, that’s right – Winston Peters, the 7.5 Percent Man, is back in the mix, and making the most of his intoxicating moment in the spotlight.

He said he was out of phone range when Bill English called last Sunday. But what sort of party leader goes bush, leaving his phone unattended, when he’s in the hot seat and the country is waiting for a government to be formed?

Then there was his excuse that he was waiting for the 384,000 special votes to come in, as if these had the potential to skew the election night result by such an order of magnitude that any preliminary negotiations with other parties would be futile.

Peters wanted us to think he was delaying showing his hand out of respect for democracy, but I don’t think anyone was fooled. We’ve seen it all before.

If he truly respected democracy, he would acknowledge that his party pulled a measly 7.5 per cent of the vote and stop behaving like some sort of vainglorious potentate from Berzerkistan. Heck, he couldn’t even retain his own seat.

But this is Peters we’re talking about. The “h” word that comes between “humidify” and “hummingbird” in most dictionaries apparently doesn’t exist in the edition on Peters’ bookshelf.

Perhaps MMP works best when you have politicians who are prepared to be conciliatory, to compromise and to make concessions. The Germans seem to manage it.

Unfortunately, Peters is not one of those politicians. Bluster and demagoguery, rather than consensus, is his default setting.

Politically, he’s a living fossil: a relic of Muldoonism, with all its bullying, divisiveness and ad hoc state interventionism. From the time he first entered Parliament in 1978, his career has been marked by fractiousness and petulance. He is a settler of scores and a bearer of grudges.

Some of his policy ideas – reinstating the old Forest Service, introducing a police “flying squad”, legislating to ensure free-to-air coverage of major sporting events – appear designed to exploit the nostalgic yearning of his ageing supporters for New Zealand the way they remember it.

Peters is a political Doctor Who, inviting us to join him in the Tardis for a trip back to a simpler time when an all-powerful state pretended it could solve complex problems with the pull of a lever. Look where that got us.

I said at the start of this column that MMP is working exactly as intended. Does this mean it’s a good system? Not at all. It’s a dog that replaced a turkey.

We weren’t sure at the time that we wanted a dog. All we knew is that we desperately wanted to get rid of the turkey, and a highly motivated lobbying campaign convinced us – by a less than overwhelming majority, incidentally – that the dog would do the job better.

And so we ended up with a system in which a vain and egotistical politician whose party got 7.5 per cent of the vote determines who the next government will be; and where every solemn pledge made during the election campaign is now up for negotiation in a secret process that voters have no control over or input into.

We could, however, do a few things to make the best of a bad situation. For one thing, the media could stop stoking Peters’ already rampant ego by not giving him daily opportunities to grandstand. And let’s stop treating the post-election guessing game as some sort of diverting spectator sport or reality TV show. We’re talking about the future of the country, for heaven’s sake.

Oh, and here’s another suggestion that might negate the Peters problem altogether.

You’d think that if any party “got” MMP, it would be the Greens. But at the very suggestion of a deal with National, they clutch at their skirts like startled virgins.

Well, Labour has never invited them into bed. If promiscuity is the price for getting some runs on the board, perhaps they should forget about virtue and get their knickers off.

We were sold a crock in 1993

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, October 4).

Anyone having second thoughts about MMP?

I’ve argued for years that we swapped one set of flaws for another when we voted in 1993 to change the electoral system. The events of the past 10 days have done nothing to reverse that perception.

An obvious problem with the old first-past-the-post system was that a party could win power even without a majority of votes, since it was the number of parliamentary seats won, rather than total votes, that determined who governed.

Thus National got fewer votes than Labour in 1978 and 1981 yet remained in government – a situation analogous with last year’s presidential election in the United States, in which Hillary Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but was unsuccessful because Trump prevailed in a majority of states.

The other main reason for dissatisfaction with our version of FPP was that third parties never got a look in. Even with 21 per cent of the vote, the now-defunct Social Credit party won only two seats in the 92-seat Parliament in 1981. 

But it wasn’t so much dissatisfaction with the undemocratic nature of the FFP system that caused voters to rebel against it in the 1990s. After all, we’d been happy with it for 90 years. Besides, it’s still practised in Britain, Canada and the US.

No, what really enabled agitators for electoral reform to gain traction was the widespread perception that once in power, parties reneged on promises and generally couldn’t be trusted to do what voters had asked for.

The theory was that by denying absolute power to any one party – in effect, requiring parties to negotiate and compromise on key policies – the MMP system would force governments to become more accountable and consensus-driven.

A bonus was that by giving greater power to minor parties, MMP would deliver more diverse representation in Parliament.

At least that was the theory, and to some extent it has been proved right.

Under MMP, we have certainly had far more diverse parliaments.  The two-party duopoly has been broken, opening the way for a much wider range of ideological positions and agendas to be represented in Parliament, from the old-style populist Muldoonism of New Zealand First through to the environmentally driven Greens and the race-based sectional interests of the Maori Party.

But has MMP delivered greater accountability, as its idealistic (and mostly left-wing) promoters promised? Hmmm. That’s another matter entirely.

Here we encounter two problems. The first is that under MMP, 49 of the 121 MPs in Parliament are not directly accountable to voters. They are elected on the all-important party lists and have no constituents to answer to.

Rather, they owe their loyalty to the party organisation, on which they depend for their ranking on the lists and therefore for their career prospects. In other words, it’s system that prioritises loyalty to the party over any obligations to voters. Accountability? Pffft.

But arguably an even bigger flaw is the one that we again see in play following the recent election.

Not for the first time, New Zealand finds itself at the mercy of New Zealand First and its vain and fractious leader, Winston Peters. A man whose party won only 7.5 per cent of the vote on election day will determine who governs us for the next three years.

Whatever this is, it’s not democracy. It’s a travesty, and it’s made worse by Peters’ egotistical posturing.

The New Zealand First leader failed to respond to a phone call on Sunday night from National leader Bill English, whose party won six times more support than his own, Although Peters did return the call the following day, I believe he was letting English know who’s boss.

But even without a rogue politician like Peters in the mix, the system is deeply – perhaps fatally – flawed. Because regardless of the result on election day, all bets are off once the votes are in.

At that stage the public cedes total control to the politicians, who disappear behind closed doors to decide which of the policies they campaigned on can be jettisoned and which bottom lines no longer matter. We, the voters, have no power to influence what concessions will be made in coalition negotiations.

Whatever this is, it’s not democracy. Accountability? Pffft again.

The almost comical paradox is that the MMP system, which supposedly returned power to the people, is virtually guaranteed to produce a result where one or more minor parties end up wielding influence grossly disproportionate to their public support, and where politicians have carte blanche to wheel and deal without reference to the public.

Apologists for MMP (former prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer is one) continue to make excuses for its failings and to pretend that it’s fit for purpose.

The politicians have become thoroughly acclimatised to it too and either fail to see, or don’t want to see, its fatal flaws. But I reckon we were sold a crock in 1993, and I want my money back.

Post-election hiatus illustrates the perversity of MMP

(First published in The Spectator Australia, September 30).

The only thing that can be said with any certainty about the next New Zealand government is that it will look very different from the last one.

National party prime minister Bill English won an emphatic 13-seat majority over the opposition Labour party at the weekend in an election result that defied the pattern of history. But the vagaries of New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional electoral system mean it could be weeks before the shape of the new government is finalised, and no one can be sure what form it will take. Paradoxically, it may not include the National party.

Not for the first time, New Zealand finds itself at the mercy of the relatively small New Zealand First party (yes, it’s as nationalistic as the name implies) and its fractious leader, Winston Peters. That’s because despite winning 46 percent of the vote on election day, National doesn’t have the numbers to govern on its own. Three of the minnow parties that supported the government in its previous term crashed and burned, forcing English to look elsewhere for a deal that will give him a parliamentary majority.

That unavoidably leads him to Peters’ door, since the support of New Zealand First’s nine MPs would enable English to form a government. But the two parties of the centre-left, Labour and the Greens, are also courting Peters because his support would give them a one-seat majority – perhaps more, once 384,000 special votes are counted.

That puts Peters in the box seat, which is exactly where he likes to be. He will, in effect, determine the shape of the next government. No one knows what price he will demand in return for this, or what concessions the bigger parties will be prepared to make in order to humour him. Strangely, neither does anyone question the morality of a political system that allows a party leader to wield influence grossly disproportionate to his party’s share of the vote (7.5 percent).  But Peters can be expected to make the most of the situation. At 72, it may be his last shot at power.

It’s a situation that illustrates the perversity of the MMP system. Adopted in 1996 and modelled on the electoral system created in post-war Germany to ensure that no extremist party could again win total power as the Nazis did, MMP was promoted to Kiwi voters as a means of reasserting control over rogue politicians. In fact it turned out to be every bit as flawed as the first-past-the-post system it replaced.

Under MMP, voters are shut out of the game the moment the votes are in. Unless one party has an absolute majority, which hasn’t happened in any of the eight elections since MMP was introduced, the politicians then disappear behind closed doors to do whatever furtive horse-trading is necessary to cut a deal.

At that point, all bets are off. Every policy dangled in front of voters during the election campaign is effectively up for negotiation. What were solemnly declared on the campaign trail to be bottom lines become wondrously elastic or evaporate altogether. Voters have no influence over this process and can only await the outcome.

It doesn’t help that there are no clear constitutional conventions governing coalition arrangements. There’s a compelling moral argument that minor parties should first offer their support to whichever party has won the greatest number of votes. In this instance, that would clearly be National.

But politicians are free to interpret the rules in whichever way suits them. Labour and the Greens rationalise that because more people voted against National than voted for it, there’s a mandate for change – although it’s hard to imagine a potentially more fractured and dysfunctional coalition than one between Labour, the Greens and the socially conservative Peters party.

New Zealand has found itself in this predicament before, and it’s not a comfortable place to be. By instinct Peters is an attack politician, which helps explain why previous coalitions he has been part of – one with National, one with Labour – have ended acrimoniously.

He’s a true maverick: combative, polarising and capricious. He relies for support on a dwindling constituency of ageing voters who yearn for the reassuring certainties of the New Zealand they remember from the 1970s under authoritarian National prime minister Robert Muldoon, Peters’ role model. It was an era when New Zealand was comfortably monocultural and subject to suffocating state regulation.

So while English was nominally a clear winner on election night, he now has to curry favour with a politician whose support is smaller than National’s by a factor of six. He may even end up in opposition. It takes some of the shine off what was, in most respects, a signal victory.

English’s success was notable for two reasons. Conventional political wisdom decreed that the tide had gone out for National, since no New Zealand government had won a fourth term since 1969. A late resurgence by Labour, re-energised under its popular new leader Jacinda Ardern, reinforced a sense that New Zealand might be about to revert to the historical norm.

But English, the Catholic son of a South Island farming family, not only swam against the current of history. He also emerged from the shadow of former prime minister John Key, under whom he served as deputy and finance minister until Key’s surprise resignation last December.

In the Key government, English did the heavy lifting behind the scenes while the supposedly more charismatic Key took care of the public charm offensive. Although credited with guiding New Zealand safely through the global financial crisis, English wasn’t seen as either charismatic or populist. He partly reversed that perception during an election campaign in which he came across as genial and relaxed. But more important than that, he has erased the notion that National’s success in three elections was entirely due to Key’s personal popularity.

It would seem a cruelly ironic blow if, after accomplishing that, he ended up on the opposition benches putting questions to a 37-year-old Labour prime minister who has never held a cabinet post or even served in government. But under New Zealand’s topsy-turvy electoral system, and with a politician as contrary and unpredictable as Peters in the mix, it can’t be ruled out. 

Shakespeare would have loved it

Greens co-leader James Shaw on Q&A yesterday was saying he was shocked at the hatred for the poor that had been exposed since Metiria Turei went public about her benefit fraud. What bullshit. Turei is still being characterised by her admirers as courageous and virtuous. That’s bullshit too. She made a calculated and cynical political decision and it backfired spectacularly. While she was gazing down the track at a shimmering city of votes floating like a tantalising mirage in the distance, a 100-tonne locomotive was bearing down on her from behind.

Some people will consider Turei sainted no matter what she does, but I know Green voters who are repelled by her behaviour and likely to shift their support to Labour, especially now that it’s been re-energised by an appealing Jacinda Ardern.

If Turei has any humility, which I rather doubt, she will have learned a hard political lesson: that once you lift the lid on something from your past, you’re inviting the media to start digging into other things that you would prefer to remained buried. At that point you completely lose control of the agenda and just have to cop whatever comes at you. Shakespeare would have loved it.