Sunday, May 02, 2021

Damien Grant: "Here's your problem, National: You need to take your leader seriously"

"Around 400,000 formerly blue voters abandoned National at the last election. If recent opinion polling can be trusted, they have not come back.

National’s review of why this happened is out, and a sanitised version has been released to the public. The report wants the party to focus on diversity and recruitment. Both recommendations fail to address the party's malaise.

National does not have a diversity problem, and even if it does, it does not matter.

I do not care about the racial make-up of any political party. Neither, I suspect, do most Māori, given that the Māori Party only collected 33,000 party votes.

Indeed, the last time National was polling in the forties it was buoyed by widespread Pākehā support, despite being led by two individuals with Māori heritage. If National believes that dragging Shane Reti around to every photo shoot is going to boost its support among those who identify as Māori, it has a shockingly low opinion of the Māori electorate.

National can embrace the Treaty if it will make it feel better, but diversity isn’t its problem."

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4 comments:

Rick said...

Looks like the future National 6.0 has already taken this on board before it was even published.

Apparently Mrs Collins has run the numbers and found that it's safe to attack Labour 6.0's plan for health separatism.

I think sooner or later the discourse is going to come down to are 'I'm harder than you are' match between Collins and Stuart Nash. Not sure how many elections away that is yet.

--
Ref. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300290100/judith-collins-issues-race-relations-warning-says-labour-planning-two-systems-by-stealth

oneblokesview said...

I think the point of difference will be separatism verses one nation together.

Desperado said...

I think Damians's second point is actually more on the money than the first. National have a large portion of ambitious buffoons (no offence intended). They possess no depth and upon entering politics quickly become political tools and lose any touch with the rest of the population.

Brendan McNeill said...

National is suffering from the same kind of identity crisis that afflicts Labour. Remember when Labour represented the 'working class'?

Who is leading National's campaign in support of Free Speech?

Who is leading National's campaign in support of parental choice in Education?

Who is leading National's campaign to get beneficiaries back to work?

Why in nine years did they do NOTHING about ERA reform?

Why in nine years did they do NOTHING about the lack of diverse opinion in State owned media channels?

Collins may be on a winner when it comes to exposing Labour's attempt to introduce by stealth a massive constitutional change around the introduction of Maori Sovereignty. In theory if handled correctly this should destroy Labour and Adern who promised the 'most open government ever'. It's such a gift.

However, we will have to wait and see.