National’s short list of candidates for the Tauranga seat has been released. And it is clear that its gender and ethnic representation problems will be made worse after the selection process is completed.
From Kiri Gillespie at the Herald:
A city councillor turned real estate agent, a Tauranga Business Chamber boss, a council analyst and a financial crime investigator have all been shortlisted as potential National Party candidates for the Tauranga byelection.
Kelvin Clout, Matt Cowley, Tom Rutherford and Sam Uffindell are up for final selection. The successful candidate will fill the National Party Tauranga candidacy and contend the city’s upcoming byelection, prompted by the resignation of Simon Bridges.
National campaign chairman Todd McClay said all four men were strong contenders.
Clout, a Tauranga City councillor before the appointment of commissioners, is a real estate agent, Cowley has been chief executive of Tauranga Business Chamber for nearly three years, Rutherford is an analyst at Western Bay of Plenty District Council, and Uffindell heads the financial crime unit at Rabobank and is a local agribusiness owner.
My first impression was surely this is a wind up. Surely National has at least one viable candidate in the area that is not male and pakeha. Its short list is meant to contain up to five candidates, and there was a rumour that former MP Dan Bidois, who is Maori, was interested. If so why did he not even make the shortlist.
My second impression is that this is no longer John Key’s National. Under Key’s leadership National made a virtue of making its caucus appear diverse. As I wrote in 2017:
[National has] made an art form of getting away from the old perception that they are a bunch of bigoted anti diversity conservatives. The loss in 2005 when Don Brash talked about Mainstream New Zealanders and confirmed that this group did not include people who were not white or born overseas showed how important the strategy is.
Since then National has been very careful to cultivate ethnic candidates and have sent them out to spread the word. Candidates such as Melissa Lee, Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, Jian Yang, and Alfred Ngaro have done the job for National.
If you look at National’s list from [the 2014] election the strategy is clear. Slots 31 to 34 were reserved for ethnic candidates. Neo conservatives no longer care about race. The only battle they are worried about is the battle between the top 1% and the rest of us. Every other dividing line, gender, sexual preference or ethnic origin is irrelevant.
It is not as if Chris Luxon does not understand that National has a problem. As reported shortly after he took over as leader:
Asked … if he was looking to achieve some ethnic diversity with his front-bench of 12 MPs, Luxon noted the caucus itself lacked ethnic diversity.
“Well look, I mean, the reality is, when you look at our caucus today it’s not ethnically diverse, right, and that’s because we got a much poorer result in the last election than we had planned,” Luxon said.
National won 23 fewer seats in Parliament in 2020 than 2017 and was left with a far less ethnically diverse set of MPs.
Indeed, the party is now overwhelmingly Pākehā, with just three MPs of Māori descent and one MP of Asian descent.
…
The National MPs who survived the election were largely in safe seats, whose members have typically picked white candidates. Simon Bridges was the only successful non-white electorate MP, out of 23 National electorate MPs.
It looks like after this selection, and presuming National wins, all of its electorate MPs will be pakeha. And a startling opportunity to display a commitment to ethnic diversity has been lost.
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