Williamson Maurice: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: General Debate[Sitting date: 24 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4718. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): I again thank the whips for giving me another slot for the drive-time audience of Auckland. In fact I almost feel I should be like Selena on breakfast TV and have my iPad out and take you through a traffic forecast for Auckland. But I am not going to do that.What I am going to do today is give a little lesson to the Labour Party members. It is a genuine lesson. It is not going to be rude. It is not going to be nasty. I want them to listen carefully. I am going to throw a bit of mathematics in it. For example I am going to talk about monotonic functions. Most people do not know—they think monotone is a dreary dull speaker—that a monotonic function is a graph that heads in one direction and keeps doing it. Here is my lesson. I have gone back and I have looked at the two main parties Labour and National right back into the 1930s and I have looked at general elections and what has happened when there has been a change of Government. We know there is a famous statement here that Oppositions do not win elections; Governments lose them. In fact all you need to do—and I suggest to people on the other side that they get their research people to do it—is to draw these graphs because it is just so factual it is not funny. Every time there has been a general election in the past that changed the Government from that point on the Government’s support has started to drop and the Opposition party started to grow in a monotonic fashion—that is a general increase.So we go back through history. Take 1975 when Rob Muldoon won. By 1978 National had dropped dramatically. By 1981 it just got there by about one seat from the Springbok tour. Three years after 1981 by 1984 there was a complete and absolute clean-out. Why am I telling the Labour Party members all this? I am telling them this because what has happened now is that history has somehow changed the political landscape.Hon Trevor Mallard: Tell us about 2002. Bill English—22 percent.Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: It is no good for Mr Mallard to keep yelling and screaming about this. He really should listen because he just needs to look at the graphs. This is not the National Party’s view. This is not whether the Labour Party thinks this is a great Government or not. This is what the public think of the performance of their politicians. Once the John Key - led Government had won the election in 2008 what should have happened after that—actually I hear Mr Mallard say: “Tell us about 2002.” Actually Labour dropped in 2002 from what it had got in 1999. Yes there was a huge aberration. For the first time in the history of the country an Opposition party—National—went down in 2002. It is the only time in the history of the graphs that that has happened.But let us come back to the last 3 years because this is where it gets interesting. This is where it gets frightening for the Labour Party. After the 2008 win by the John Key - led Government Labour should have expected its poor performance reflected in 2008 to start lifting and by 2011 be within sort of striking distance and certainly by 2014 to be right knocking on the door and if it does not make it well you know it is a little bit like the Brash-led party of 2005 when it did not quite make it but on the night you could not tell. But that is not what has happened—that is not what has happened. My lesson to the Labour Party today is that you should be very very afraid of what is going on because you are not making any traction in the polls. You can get up and blame this Government and say that we are useless and we are hopeless and so on. I do not mind you doing that. But why are the public not responding to the Labour Party as they normally would in Opposition? Labour members say: “We’re coming back; we’re coming back.”. They are not. They have got very limited time. Elections are not won in the last 6 months of the 3-year period. You cannot do it. The history of it is that unless you have got yourself well back in the polls you cannot do it.My lesson to Labour members is that they need to really scurry around fast and say—the polling is showing it. Our polling is showing it—I am sure they are doing the same sort of polling—and the general polls are showing it: Labour is actually lower in the polls now than it was 3 years ago or 6 years ago. The Labour leader is lower in the polls than previous other leaders before Cunliffe and so on. So they have got a limited time frame. Instead of carping on about what a useless Government we are or how the National Party is not building enough houses Labour members should go back to first principles and say: “What is it we need to do to turn these polls round?”. If they do not they are guaranteed a fourth term in Opposition and right now the way they are polling that is exactly where they are destined.