New Zealand Listener – August 10, 2019

16 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019

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It scarcely needs saying that the beloved wasn’t

National Party leader Simon Bridges. The party’s

annual conference had taken the considerable

risk of inviting the former leader, Sir John Key.

Suddenly, everyone else was chopped liver.

Political exes are tricky guests. They either waft

about like Banquo’s ghost, tacitly reminding

people where all the bodies are buried, or, as in

this case, serve as rather unhelpful nostalgia. Every

piece of beaming encouragement Key gave to the

still-struggling Bridges could not help but sound

patronising, however well meant.

With leadership rival Judith Collins patently on

manoeuvres around the delegates – sporting an

eye-catching blue baseball cap, à la Shane Jones, in

case anyone didn’t quite twig what she was up to –

Bridges had to dig deep to find any glamour in his

unremitting underdog status.

But by the conference’s end, and with a reassuring

opinion poll published on Monday, the underdog’s

collar had a few sparkly rhinestones in it. Bridges

has bought himself more time in the wobbly leader’s

chair – albeit partly assisted by the

Greens’ meanly funny ad mocking his

“ixent” the previous week. Shove a

chap too many times when he’s down

and New Zealanders hit the “Not fair!”

button and start sticking up for him.

Bridges rousingly owned his battling,

Westie-vowelled long-shot status in

a crowd-pleasing conference speech.

He further steadied the wobbly chair

by – belatedly – promoting another

potential rival, Todd Muller, to pri-

mary industries spokesman and on to

the second bench.

These conferences are always metic-

ulously stage-managed affairs, where

the ra-ra might look convincing even

were the leader to appear in concrete

boots and strobing his/her dismal poll

rating from a neon tiara.

But this conference was bristling

with new policy ideas and the sort of

vigour that can’t be faked. It wasn’t

the result of a “we wuz robbed!” sense

of grievance about the election and

it didn’t centre entirely on outrage

about the doings of the Government.

This was a party for whom a period

of unaccustomed lack of power,

popularity and relevance seemed to

have proven remarkably liberating.

A few years ago, no delegate, let

alone a farmer, would have got

spontaneous applause in a Nats’ remit

committee for an impassioned speech

about the urgent need to spend

more money on helping gangs – and

certainly not for using phrases such as

“social investment”.

There would certainly not have

been a spirited technical discussion

on the distinctions between gene-

editing and genomics on the full

conference floor.

And although Muller faced a volley

of irascibly unconvinced cockies in

the environmental policy session,

only a couple attempted to re-litigate

whether climate change was “man-

made”, and even they weren’t deniers.

CONFRONTING COMPLACENCY

In National’s later years in office,

some in the caucus – Bridges among

them – worried that policy innova-

tion was atrophying because the

Government’s towering poll lead

gave little incentive for improvement.

There was much Beehive talk of

innovation, but mostly in the sense

of how fantastic it was that businesses

could/would/might do more of it if

the Government kept out of the way

• such as conference guest speaker
  Rocket Lab chief Peter Beck – rather
  than that the state itself needing a
  refresh/reset/boot up the bum.
  The now-chronic housing and
  infrastructure deficits remain the
  most obvious illustration of this com-
  placency. National’s broad “reform”
  recipe became to leave well enough
  alone, and avoid the disruption and
  controversy of delving into problems
  holistically. Where things were a bit
  too sticky to gloss over, the response

A

nyone would have thought one

of the royals was at Christchurch

Town Hall in the last weekend of

July. The foyer was jam-packed

with dotingly smiling people

pivoting as one to follow the progress of a

deified presence among them.

POLITICS

A liberated National Party is full of fresh ideas at its annual conference.

Simon sez slog on

JANE

CLIFTON

Simon Bridges

owned his battling,

Westie-vowelled

long-shot status in a

crowd-pleasing party

conference speech.

Simon Bridges:

underdog’s collar

had a few sparkly

rhinestones.