Former minister Peter Dunne says Judith Collins' personalised attacks and National's ineffectiveness over the Covid response make it hard to take the Opposition party seriously
Another week of Covid19 has gone by. And, with it, another week of the National Party and its leader continuing to make a complete mess of the role of Opposition.
The latest example was Judith Collins' ill-considered and graceless verbal assault on Dr Siouxsie Wiles, although it should have come as no surprise. For some time now the National leader's criticisms have been becoming increasingly personalised. Such attacks serve little credible purpose. Resorting to personal abuse at any level is the ultimate admission of having no credible argument to mount and therefore not being worth taking at all seriously. National is falling rapidly into that state.
However, Judith Collins' problem is not that there are no good arguments she could be mounting, but rather that she seems incapable of doing so in terms other than personalised attacks. In Wiles' case, for example, there were legitimate questions to be raised about the wisdom and nature of her behaviour and the apparent naivete of her response, given her current public profile and closeness to the Prime Minister, but those questions were quickly submerged once Collins' insulting epithet describing her became known.
Likewise, with her earlier comments about the Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield. There are big questions to be asked about his performance. They include whether he is now too diverted by Covid-19 to fulfil his primary role of leading a clearly struggling public health system. Or is it appropriate that he, unlike any other public servant before, other than the Cabinet Secretary, attends Cabinet meetings, as the Prime Minister admitted recently? That novelty raises significant questions of itself – Cabinet in Westminster type systems has always been the preserve of ministers to speak freely and frankly without officials present. Why is Dr Bloomfield different to every other public servant? There are other legitimate questions about his performance running the Ministry of Health as well, but for National they have all become subsumed by personal attacks on his impartiality.
National's continued woeful performance draws fresh attention to the role of Opposition in a parliamentary democracy like ours. While an Opposition has no direct power as such, it can play a vital role in our system, holding the government of the day to account for its policies, including their implementation and whether they will be good for the country. The Opposition can also delay or frustrate a government when it seeks to pass controversial legislation. At all times, the Opposition’s role is to challenge the government to demonstrate its policies best represent the public interest.
And the Opposition can also question ministers in Parliament about not only their own performance but also any aspect of the performance of, or specific actions taken by, the departments or agencies for which they have responsibility, however tangential at times that might be. Often, the public perception of the effectiveness of individual ministers is shaped by the way they are seen to respond to the Opposition in Parliament. For example, former Labour Party minister Clare Curran resigned a couple of years ago after a particularly bad performance during Question Time.
The Opposition’s role is also to present an alternative view of how the country could be governed, and the policies it would follow if in office. Its task is to campaign on those, alongside its criticisms of the government of the day, in the hope of persuading enough voters to support it at the next election so that it can take over the reins of power.
National is showing none of these traits at present. Since February last year it has struggled to work out how to respond to the Covid-19 outbreak. To be fair, its task has not been made easy by the continuing strong support for the Government’s actions, which has left National floundering. In many respects former National leader Simon Bridges was showing the right mix of aggressive constructive criticism and mild support where appropriate, until he went overboard with a negative social media comment that sparked a public outrage that led to the campaign which saw his colleagues topple him in May last year. Since then, National has been spooked into a far less aggressive stance.
However, by opting to play a mildly constructive role, supporting by and large the Government’s actions, it has made its political task much more difficult, a fact the 2020 election result alone should have driven home.
Our parliamentary system is predicated on contrast – between what the Government is doing and what the Opposition is proposing – that the public can ultimately use to decide the relative worth of at election time. When the Opposition broadly agrees with the government the matter of contrast becomes that much more difficult. This is not to say there are not times when an Opposition will agree with aspects of a government’s policies to neutralise their popular impact – as John Key did with Labour’s Working for Families and Kiwisaver policies when in Opposition. But those situations are possible when the Opposition is on track to the win the next election anyway and are more about removing specific irritants than the overall contrast between the parties.
That is not the case at present. The response to Covid-19 dominates every aspect of the government’s policy agenda, meaning that a muted “me too” approach from the Opposition provides no contrast to the Government and therefore, all other things being equal, no incentive for change.
In the past week alone National provided a classic example of this. In a publicly spirited way, its Covid-19 spokesperson Chris Bishop praised the recent upsurge in vaccination rates and urged those yet to be vaccinated to come forward for their jabs. He did a better job of supporting the Government’s case than some ministers. It may all be very nice but being a quiet government cheerleader is not the role for an Opposition MP seeking to see his party in government one day. The Government would have been delighted that this was his focus.
Why was the Opposition not instead keeping the focus resolutely on the Government for being among the last countries of our type to even order vaccines, let alone administer them? And why is it not hammering the Government on its seeming ambivalence and dithering about returning to more normal times?
To be fair to National, they are making such comments. A visit to the party’s website shows there have been many statements along these lines in recent weeks. The problem is they are not being reported, whereas the personal attacks and the apparent support for the Government’s line is what is making the news. And even then, other statements have been twisted to look like support for the Government’s position. On September 13, for example, National said the Government “had no choice but to extend the Auckland Level 4 Covid lockdown and ongoing restrictions elsewhere in the country because of its own ongoing failures”. TVNZ that night reported National just saying the Government had no option but to continue the lockdown, quite a different slant from the original statement.
Nevertheless, as the Auckland lockdown rolls on, there are fresh opportunities for the Opposition to spell out a positive alternative of how it would do things better. With more and more experts, the latest being prominent immunologist Professor Graham Le Gros, warning that the days of the Government’s elimination strategy may be numbered, especially as vaccination rates rise, while other commentators warn darkly that existing restrictions may not be removed before mid-2023 at the earliest, there is a golden opportunity for the Opposition to present its own clear blueprint for the future.
For example, why is National not advocating short, home-based quarantine for returning New Zealanders and other visitors who have been fully vaccinated and arrive from low-risk countries, freeing MIQ facilities for those who are higher risk? Why is National not promoting an electronic Covid-19 vaccination passport that can be used both locally and internationally? Why is it not pushing for specific timetables by which these milestones should be achieved? There may be other examples that could be considered, but these are the ones most commonly occurring in public discussion that in normal circumstances the Opposition could be expected to advocate.
It is simply extraordinary that after more than 18 months National seems yet to develop a credible alternative narrative on Covid-19 to break out of its current policy doldrums and initiate a public debate upon. This leaves Labour not only able to promote its response as the only viable and credible one – when clearly that it is not so, as there is never only one response to a situation -- but more importantly, to drive it home ruthlessly as the only way forward through the daily party-political addresses masquerading as press conferences.
To regain any relevance National needs to stop reacting to every move the Government takes and immediately start laying out a specific Covid-19 recovery programme of its own, with clear objectives and targets which the public can debate and consider. Otherwise, doing more of the same, in an era where elements of the state-owned media seem increasingly no more than the Government’s mouthpiece, will ensure National gets no traction before the next election.
To have any chance, National needs to rise above the petty personal attacks that are characterising and destroying Judith Collins’ leadership and focus instead on the issues that matter – and quickly.
