After 59 days after election day, parliament will finally sit again todaywith a new government. The process has mostly been notable for its incoherent dithering, inexperience, and general stupidity. It is a coalition based on chaos, a lack of usable policy and based on wrecking rather than work. The delay was directly due to the 25 days from final results to the swearing in of the executive council by the governor general due to wishful and muddy thinking by National.
The eventual results were obvious to anyone with a political brain on election night. The day after showed a underwhelming and inconclusive election night result. National + Act didn’t have a working majority.
That was mostly because National managed its worst largest party vote since 1996 when they won 33.84% and formed a chaotic coalition government with NZ First in the first MMP election. Sure there were overhangs and a by-election to come. But the special results were always going to give seats going to parties other than Act and National. Offhand I can’t think of an occasion when National or Act picked up a extra seat in the final count after special votes.
It was obvious that they would need another party to form a working parliamentary majority. It was also pretty obvious that the only viable alternative would be NZ First.
Yet for the three weeks mandated by parliament to audit a clear and final result, National dithered and self-indulged in quite obvious wishful thinking hoping for an improbable result that they would prefer. Instead, while sitting around doing nothing, they seem to have spent most of their time whining about the Electoral Commission, who were doing their job as mandated by parliament.
The final results dropped on the 3rd of November 20 days after the election. That involved the real work of counting and recounting 2.8+ million votes made locally and internationally for the election to get a clear and very very close to accurate result. Remember that this has to be to a very high judicial standard. When challenged and recounted for electorates the changes are a few tens of votes over tens of thousands of votes cast. That is a lot of work.
Clearly National would be incapable of doing that. They are good at being critics. But this current crop are clearly incompetent at doing any detailed work.
The process of coalition forming with NZ First under Winston Peters has had a pattern since 1996. They wait for the final results. They strongly favour legalistic and clearly written coalition agreements. They always try to become the dominant coalition partner of the dominant party in whatever arrangement is formed (ask the Greens 🙂 ). Any coalition formed is sped up if the main party forming the coalition did even a little bit of work prior to possible negotiations. Labour has done this process multiple times with NZ First.
Clearly National’s negotiating team were incompetent at anticipating any of this. How else can you explain the second longest government formation since MMP? National barely managed to actually get negotiators talking to each other during the first week. Primarily because it appeared that they were doing the dick tactic of not actually scheduling formal meetings on Winston Peters calendar and just assuming that he’d turn up in Wellington by osmosis as a supplicant.
We all know how that worked out. Waiting journalists staked out at Wellington airport were ecstatic as Luxon, Seymour and Bishop dragged their tails back up to Auckland to the grey kingmaker.
The coalition arrangements that eventually got signed 21 days after the final results were by comparison a work of incoherent mishmashes of policy. Mostly unfunded spending. Most was just a list of what the legislation and policies that were to be removed.
It was also notable for the massive holes of what would replace those bits of legislation and policies. National and Act have spent the decades damning things like the Resource Management Act, Three Waters (designed to stop people dying from bad water and councils going bankrupt fixing it), the battery backup for the electricity grid during dry years, freshwater policies, and a multitude of other thing things that a government is responsible to dealing with.
Yet coming into government, it is clear that they have no policy that they plan to implement in any of these matters. Instead they can only do what they are competent to do. An orgy of urgency removing legislation and planned work.
We finally have a new government in parliament. It is a government determined to prove that they are incompetent wreckers and useless at doing anything positive as a government.
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