Right now, National is letting others tell the story of this government, and when you leave a vacuum, the void will always be filled.
– Ani O’Brien, who has gained quite a reputation in NZ political circles as a women’s rights advocate and commentator since working previously for the Leader of the Opposition (National) and is a council member of the Free Speech Union.

In a nice, but blunt and somewhat exasperated piece, Ani O’Brien, National has a storytelling problem, in which she puts much of its poor recent polling results down to poor communication, as the quote above says.

I think there’s more to it than that when I look at the wooden-headed continuance of things like the Net Zero policy – which will kill us with the same massive cost increases for energy that are hitting other Net Zero fanatics like California, New Jersey, Australia, Germany and Britain – plus the awfully slow reforms of our Education system, Resource Management Act and so forth (which if too slow could be killed by a Labour-led government after 2026, plus spending higher than Labour’s and a still massively swollen bureaucracy.

Yes, they have trashed Labour’s new, awful ideas like Three Waters, but it’s no longer enough to play the John Key/Bill English game of 2008-2017 – slow, steady, incremental improvements, both fiscal and regulatory, that can simply be trashed in turn by Labour and company after 2029 and almost certainly after 2032.

Labour is not the party of Clark and Cullen; the next lot have made it quite clear that they will raise taxes, introduce new ones and still explode the debt with increased spending, especially with the Greens and Te Pati Maori in coalition. The economy is slowly stagnating in its fundamentals, like energy costs and the loss to Australia of the very sorts of people we need, ones who are young, with get-up-and-go. That’s why it’s not recovering the way it did under Key and English, even as we now face more benign foreign circumstances than the GFC left behind.

Anyhoo, to Ms O’Brien’s article, the following points stuck out:

It’s no secret that Luxon has had high turnover in his office. Experienced hands who might have been able to lock down a strategy and run interference with the media have walked out the door. Their replacements, often younger and less politically battle-hardened, are dealing with a Prime Minister who, according to Beehive gossip, doesn’t always take advice easily.

That’s news to me and it’s bad. In the nation I focus on, America, the tell of a poor politician is someone with high staff turnover, with Kamala Harris merely being the latest example as it followed her through lower government positions all the way to the Vice Presidency. Aside from anything else its a mark of managerial incompetence, which is not what I expected from a man with Luxon’s business reputation. Does it extend into other advisory groups and Cabinet? It would explain some of the unexpected ministerial shuffles.

O’Brian contrasts this with Labour’s Ardern machine:

She was backed by an experienced, disciplined, and media-savvy team including Chief Press Secretary Andrew Campbell. They were masters at anticipating the next day’s headlines, feeding media just enough to frame stories favourably, and pivoting hard when things went wrong. Ardern herself was disciplined enough to stick to the agreed script and that consistency made her comms strategy almost bulletproof for years.
…
Her communications strategy wasn’t complicated, but it was ruthlessly effective. Every message was framed around emotion, empathy, and a clear moral position….The result was that Ardern often looked like she was leading the conversation even when she was simply front-running public sentiment.

I think O’Brien here is forgetting one crucial difference, which is that all this is much easier when you’re dealing with an MSM that’s not only in love with you and your policies, but willing to carry your water for you. To say that Luxon and his comms team have not had that luxury is an understatement.

Still, the following four flubs are all on them, as O’Brien explains:

  • Nicola Willis is actually spending more than Labour did in its last term. The public service is larger, not smaller. And yet the media, the commentariat, and half the country are convinced we’re living through a slash-and-burn austerity programme. It’s a masterclass in losing the narrative.
  • [On NCEA changes] Labour tried to claim [Standford] hadn’t consulted and she came back swinging with evidence of extensive engagement and reframed the whole debate around raising the bar for our kids. That was a textbook example of seizing the narrative. But … it was left to fade after one news cycle.
  • The government brought ram raids to a screeching halt almost immediately. They scrapped Labour’s failed prisoner reduction target, toughened sentencing for repeat violent offenders, and gave police greater powers to tackle gang activity. These are concrete actions that speak to voters’ concerns about safety. Yet the communication has been fragmented and reactive, allowing the media to focus on isolated incidents or opposition scare lines rather than the bigger picture of restoring law and order.
  • After years of delay and ballooning costs under Labour, the City Rail Link is finally on track for completion, with National overseeing the final delivery stage. This should be framed as a symbol of competence, cleaning up after Labour’s mismanagement and getting critical infrastructure over the line. Instead, the milestone barely made a ripple, drowned out by unrelated headlines because no one in government was driving the message…They should have made an event of it. They could have staged a reunion. Christopher Luxon, Chris Bishop, Simeon Brown, and their coalition partners (though they would be wise to elbow them out of the frame as much as possible), could have invited Sir John Key, Sir Bill English, and Simon Bridges on the first ride.

Aside from the policy failures that I see, is it any wonder that National are merely polling neck-and-neck with Labour when they can’t even push their actual successes. It’s even worse when one considers the still incompetent, moronic primary opposition that is the Labour Party, still wounded by it’s 2023 election loss.

To paraphrase the classic comment: “We’re tied with THOSE GUYS?”