National announces terms of reference for its election campaign review

mickysavage
3 years ago
Categories: covid-19, election 2020, Judith Collins, national, same old national, Simon Bridges, todd muller

So National wants to work out what went wrong during the last election.

The National Party has announced its terms of reference for a review into its 2020 election campaign.

The review will be done by five panel members including former party president Judy Kirk and former National minister Kate Wilkinson.

It will look at preparations for the campaign, including candidate selection, the narrative, and the caucus’ performance.

“There is no doubt that 2020 was a difficult year for the National Party, and we would be foolish not to comprehensively review every aspect of our approach to the campaign and our work throughout the last term of Parliament. Our party membership rightly expects this, and we will deliver on it,” party president Peter Goodfellow said.

“We are committed to utilising the review results to help shape this next term, to carry out the work and changes required to position the party well into the future, and to ensure these improvements are implemented for the 2023 campaign itself.”

The review terms of reference will examine:

Preparations throughout the three-year term by all elements of the party, including candidate selection and Caucus performance

The election campaign including the political environment, strategy, narrative and execution

The strategic internal, social, and economic challenges and opportunities facing the National Party in the next term

Improvement recommendations for the next three years and the 2023 campaign

“The review panel are asked to focus on areas that the party has or could have control over and can effect positive change on. The panel has a wide mandate to seek inputs from individuals within, and external to, the party as they feel appropriate and are also asked to explore any areas they deem important …”

I am pretty confident they will not accept my advice but can I say their candidate selection was appalling. Instead of going for local candidates who were known and actually had a degree of cut through they chose a bunch of wide boys. Previous wide boy selections blew up. It was almost inevitable.

Instead of seeking diversity and trying to look like New Zealand of the 2020s they went for the 1960s country party look. They have really gone backward from the hey day of John Key where they had a significant number of token ethnic candidates.

Caucus performance was horrendous. I have written multiple posts about National’s loyalty problem in the last three years and the incidence of leaking and undermining of the leader, whoever it was, was a wonder to behold. Believe me I lived through Labour in 2014. National was similar but far more brutal and far more divided.

The political environment admittedly sucked. Going into competition with an administration that actually protected the country from the ravages of Covid and kept it out was always a tough call. Especially when the likes of Trump and Johnson were so goddam awful and this was reinforced by the daily infection rate and the daily death rate.

The big missing aspect of the review is any mention of the environment. Social and economic challenges get mentioned. But environmental challenges don’t get a look in. It is as if climate change does not exist.

If I was National I would invite them to publicly acknowledge the mess they have made of Aotearoa New Zealand, the damage they have caused to our environment through their farming friendly policies and their refusal to do something meaningful about climate change as well as their road fetish. They should acknowledge that their attacks on the trade union movement has made us all worse off and entrenched poverty in New Zealand. They should indicate that we are all equal, that diversity is great, and that we should not be measured by the size of our bank balances. They should admit that their refusal to do anything about the housing crisis has plunged Auckland in particular into chaos and there is a new generation of kiwi kids who will permanently suffer from the consequences.

And they should ask for forgiveness.

I hope they take this submission into account. Somehow I don’t think they will.