In the back rooms, some public servants say, Steven Joyce can be a bully. This past week bully Joyce has been roaming in the open.
He even infected the usually (though not quite always) courteous Bill English. National turned into the nasty party.
Result: National looks discombobulated. Result: some voters sense National thinks it might lose. They look around.
There is one certainty in this election of upsets, diversions and sudden career endings: Parliament will be younger. The under-40s will swell in number. So will the lower-40s.
Already there are 11 under-40 MPs: four in Labour, including its leader, four in National, two Greens and one in ACT.
On parties’ recent polling averages up to late August that would double to at least 21 — more than one-sixth of Parliament.
A question hung over Bill English on stage on Sunday at his campaign launch: will he be in Parliament three years from now? He has been there 27years already.
If Jacinda Ardern is Prime Minister, he will surely not want to stew in opposition. Note in that light a TV1 poll published Sunday showing a massive party vote swing in Whangarei from 50%-18% National-Labour in 2014 to just 41%-37%.
The good news for Labour at its campaign launch on Sunday was Jacinda Ardern: sure-footed, traditional-and-modern and an overflow crowd ranging from fired-up to goggle-eyed.
For that crowd Ardern personified the change they want and sense but thought till three weeks ago was beyond the horizon.
She asserted Labour tradition, invoking Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser, Norman Kirk, David Lange and Helen Clark (in the audience supporting her former staffer).
Economies don’t work quite the way they used to. Will Labour convincingly address that at its official campaign launch on Sunday?
A clue to this change is in differing messages from Steven Joyce, Finance Minister and National campaign chair, and Graeme Wheeler, soon-to-depart Reserve Bank governor.
In November 2012 at a Fabian Society conference on Norman Kirk I called him a political pivot between two eras, old Labour and post-1980s new New Zealand. At the end I asked if Y-generation MPs would be such a pivot from the post-1980s paradigm to the 2020s or if that would need to await millennials’ coming-of-political-age.
This is “democracy week”, Victoria University has declared. So how are we doing?
According to young people, not well in parliamentary politics, so it seems. At June 30 only 64% of estimated eligible 18-24-year-olds had bothered to enrol to vote, the Electoral Commission says.
For 25-29-year-olds the figure was 73%. Even for 30-34-year-olds it was 83%.
The chief guardian of freedom in the “land of the free” will give a speech tomorrow evening. But it will not be free. Welcome to today’s wobbly “western” world.
Decent, upstanding, even erudite and pillar-of-society non-terrorists will be subjected to the indignity of a security bag check and X-ray on their way in to an address by the august John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Tomorrow, with the weekend’s mid-ranked parties’ conferences over, Labour will have another go at getting traction.
Grant Robertson will unveil Labour’s “alternative budget”. Will he map a path to the 2020s?
This is potentially an existential question for Labour which has not done the root-and-branch rebuild three defeats suggest was needed.
The third- and fourth-ranked parties will hold their pre-election conferences this weekend in Auckland. One will be confidently contemplating a time in or around the government, with influence. And the other?
New Zealand First averaged 10.7% in the most recent four opinion polls in June — more than twice its June 2014 average.