Electoral dysfunction (Patreon)

I get it. I really do. National would desperately want the election delayed for a number of reasons. All of which are self-serving. 

That's not what they'll tell us. 

Leader Judith Collins went on Q&A this morning and said it would be good for democracy and that National would help the Government delay the election until next year. 

I bet it would.

National Party pollster David Farrar is putting out rubbish tweets like this to try and stir up pro-delay fervour.

And look I do have some sympathy for their views. 

If the election isn't delayed and this outbreak continues to dominate the news then that will be Government (and specifically Labour) Ministers getting an abundance of air time and attention on a daily basis while nobody will care what any other MP has to say.

It will stop town hall meetings which might be of use to people when deciding their electorate vote, and it will stop junk mail pamphlets filling up letter boxes.

What a delay would do is allow some more of the economic shitness from Covid to bite so that people might start drifting away from Labour. It might allow people to forget that National has been an absolute shit-show of a party for the past however long and maybe people will reconsider them as a party of government.

However for that to happen, National would need to stop being a shit-show immediately and I just don't see that happening. 

Already we had Gerry Brownlee peddling conspiracy theories and being roundly condemned for it. He had to apologise for that. There was also the debacle in Auckland Central in naming a new candidate.

Also in her interview with Jack Tame on Q&A this morning, Collins said that the Government had "one job" and that they'd promised us we were Covid free now. 

First off, one job? What does Collins think the Government does? If that "one job" is make all governing decisions then yes, that is one job. However it's a lot more than just despatch some people to the border and tell them to stand guard. And also the PM and others have been very careful to consistently tell New Zealand that we could expect another community outbreak. It's why Brownlee was drumming up conspiracy theories, remember?

So I'm not even sure that a delay in the election will help National. And also delay until next year? That is nuts. It's only August now. Why would we delay the election several months? At best I imagine we'd delay it by a few weeks.

ACT and Labour will be keen to have the election as soon as possible. National and NZ First will want a delay. The Greens won't really know what they want, won't communicate it terribly well and will be high minded and polite about whatever it decides.

As to the performance of the Government over this latest outbreak, it's been remarkably good. The response was swift and hard and it seems like it has been able to draw a ring around this outbreak without letting it get too widespread. 

There have obviously been cock-ups. It is utterly appalling that those working on the borders were not being tested regularly, and even if what Health Minister Chris Hipkins says is true, and that the Government was under the impression this is what was going on, it is still not good enough. They need to know for a fact that it is what's going on.

And yes I'm aware that health checks were occuring but we have learned that people can be asymptomatic and still be shedding the virus, so testing should be happening frequently.

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Miscellanous political stuff that didn't fit into the above

Interesting that Roger Bridge has quit the National Party Board. Roger was the bloke who called up talkback pretending to be 'Merv' to badmouth Auckland Central wannabe candidate Nuwanthie Samarakone. I'm told by someone fairly senior on the party side of National that Roger was a strong chance to replace Peter Goodfellow as President of the Party. Not any more. The interesting thing about this story to me, is that not only was someone internal - Roger - sabotaging an individual from within their party, but that someone else went and told Tova that this was happening. So National is eating itself twice.

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There were two UMR polls that came out last week. There was the corporate poll that was reported on in the Herald, it had Labour on 52, National on 28, ACT on 5.9(!), the Greens on 5.4 and NZ First on 5.1. UMR is always bullish on NZ First for some strange reason, but still that will give them some heart.

The other UMR poll I got told about was Labour's internal tracking which happens more frequently but has a smaller sample size. I only got Labour and National but it was 52-32.

All of this was pre-Covid II so hard to know how that will have shifted it. Will Labour's strong response have helped their polling, or will the country feel like it has been let down and start drifting away?