Hodgson Pete: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Hodgson Pete: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3447] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Energy) 
: 
 Immediately after the last election the  
Wairarapa Times-Age 
 advised its readers that the election result was a humiliating rout of historic proportions for National; that it was a massacre. The  
Dominion Post 
 stated that it was a disaster and dismal. The  
New Zealand Herald 
 reported that the National Party was woefully unprepared and gutless. Wayne Mapp said that it was a drubbing. The  
National Business Review 
 not particularly known as the vanguard of the revolution stated: “The question is not why the vote splintered and people refused to vote National. No the question is why 21 percent of the voters decided to vote National at all.”  
But what did the members of the National Party say about the election? Annabel Young said: ``With an environment that looks like something out of  
Ally McBeal 
 but without the good looks no wonder they came up with a crappy strategy. The whole committee”—and she is referring to the National Party strategy committee—“needs to be chopped in the wake of Saturday of course but Murray McCully has now lost three elections in a row. Surely he needs to find more important things to be concentrating on.”  
Belinda Vernon said in much more measured tones: “The result is a hangover from National’s last term in Parliament with New Zealand First as a coalition partner. Other factors include the time it’s taken to settle into Opposition a recent period of change with new leader Bill English and new president Michelle Boag and the campaign spotlighting Mr English instead of including his experienced caucus.’’ which by the way implies an inexperienced leader. So on it went. Wayne Mapp said: “I believe that the principal reason our vote collapsed was that we failed to have a coherent set of policies for middle New Zealand.” Maurice Williamson said that National had suffered a cataclysmic defeat. He said: “It’s not just a drop or a big drop it is a collapse and the person who is at the top of an organisation”—and here he was referring to Michelle Boag—“has to accept that responsibility.” Richard Worth said: “I don’t see it as a burden representing Epsom though it will definitely be a challenge to lift National’s popularity.’’ An unnamed senior National MP said: “We suffered from an acute relevance deficit.”  
That was the election of last July. What we now have in Parliament is a National Party that simply cannot run itself. Immediately after the election Bill English asked out loud whether the party should receive votes when it had not demonstrated an ability to run itself. He said: “When we can show we can run ourselves people are much more likely to believe we can run the country. At this last election they didn’t think we could run ourselves. I am the leader so I am responsible.”  
What has happened in the 6 months since that historic defeat? There has been no defeat like it in the history of the New Zealand political system involving a centre-right party. The party called the National Party still cannot run itself and the symptoms are both public and obvious and subtle and less obvious. The public ones are the public divisions—the Brownlee articles the Williamson utterances the demoting of Georgina te Heuheu and so on. The private ones are more interesting. The media statements have no coherence to them. There is clearly no checking mechanism before they go out. National Party members are riding freely over one another’s policies. Wayne Mapp has something to say about almost anything and certainly Mr Brownlee has but so have Don Brash and Maurice Williamson. They have more than one public position on any matter. They have many positions on most matters. Even on basic stuff like how we manage the treaty partnership we have the leader of the National Party doing a really serious flip-flop between— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: Every day! 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Yes every day but certainly if we take a look at it over the months we can see a leader who has moved from a position of basically saying: “I’ve studied the demography of our country. I’ve seen the future and it’s brown. We need to be there.” That is the position that the National Party leader has ordinarily taken. That is the position whereby he has stood up and been counted as someone who is looking forward.  
Over the summer we then had the extraordinary intellectual dishonesty of remarkable bits of research being done—some of it by Mr English himself no doubt but others by Simon Upton and so on. There has been some quite interesting research and studying of the nature of New Zealand in 1840 and how it changed through 1860 and so on. But we then have in the speeches coming out the intellectual dishonesty of just drawing a bunch of one-liners and drawing a bunch of conclusions that have no intellectual rigour to them at all. That is really worrying. The leader of the National Party is an important figure in New Zealand politics and for that to happen after all that research leads me to the view that so long as he has done the research he can convince himself that he does not really worry what he says. In other words the research has been done and the conclusions are known by the Leader of the Opposition to be junk but he will parade them anyway. That is really concerning. 
Even today the deputy leader of the National Party coming up with an amendment to the amendment to the amendment is an example yet again of a National Party that has nowhere to go.  
David Benson-Pope 
: Well most of them have gone somewhere. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Most of them have gone somewhere. The leader spends most weekends one imagines rifling through filing cabinets looking for a philosophy because there is not one. National members have taken a remarkable position over the summer. They have said the way back to being a popular large political party is to become an extreme right-wing party. That is a remarkable strategy. It is one that will not work they know it will not work but they have done it by mistake because they had to do something. They do not know how to run themselves. They have not worked out what their philosophy is. It is very serious for the National Party. It is very serious for Bill English. It is very serious back in his electorate.  
I know the electorate quite well; we campaigned hard in it. We went to Gore we went to the largest town Balclutha and we went to lots of little towns like Winton Clinton Hinton and so on. We went to Ohai and Nightcaps—and David Benson-Pope advises that he won the occasional pool game. But if members look at the results in the Leader of the Opposition’s electorate they would have expected Labour to win Ohai and the Kaitangata booths and to be cleaned up everywhere else. Not so. Labour won Milton Riverton and the largest town in the electorate Balclutha. Labour won it on the electorate vote! Lesley Soper beat Bill English. That is not all. After the election Bill English closed his electorate office in Balclutha. The Leader of the Opposition closed his electorate office in the main town of his electorate. I do not know why he did it but it is remarkable. Then this year in January the Leader of the Opposition started running advertisements in his own newspaper advertising for National Party members in that blue-ribbon seat.  
Here is the problem the National Party has. Its next election is not about running the country. Its next election is about coming home first amongst the Opposition parties. National needs to beat ACT and New Zealand First—and it needs to beat them well—otherwise it is finished. National Party members know that so they have the problem of pretending to speak to the country. Actually they are interested in getting more than their fair share—about 50 seats. That is about the sum of it. That is a desperate position to be in. The problem is they are not doing too well at it. In the latest poll Bill English is no longer the second-highest scoring preferred Prime Minister. Of course Helen Clark is first by a country mile. But Bill English is not second—Winston Peters is. So the slide continues. It seems to me that it is not yet clear where it will stop and it will not be resolved by a change of leadership. Simon Power is too young Don Brash is too old Roger Sowry is called Napoleon and nobody likes him and Gerry Brownlee is a bit like a large cattle beast amongst the crockery so there is not really any option for the National Party but to stick with Bill English at least in the meantime. That is a remarkable position to be in and I am glad I am not a member of that party.