Mate, I'd also coda that Worths 'flaws' were on a whole different level from disloyalty to a weak leader. And that Key's initial reaction was piss weak; only following that initial failure did the the threat of it all becoming public forced him to cull him, for reasons he had to refuse to state.
Fair. But ultimately he did it, which is what matters for the purpose of the example. As distinct from English and Barclay, or Luxo and Uffindell, for two of many examples
I know a bloke whose car was actually hit by a smallish rockfall in the Cromwell Gorge there. It was a Maserati and cost a fortune to fix (insurance was not having a bar of it it until NZTA confirmed the rockfall)
Comic of the beetle from the cover of Massive Attack's "Mezzanine" meeting the crab from the cover of The Prodigy's "Fat of the Land".
Hi this joke is for me
Coda: Chris Carter went through an extraordinary purgatory as UNDP programme manager first in Afghanistan, then in Myanmar, doing real, hard, honourable work in service of humankind, and returned to NZ where he now is by all accounts an effective and well-regarded local board chair. A fine outcome.
Not to mention his own caucus, although they have buried their disagreements for now.
But excuses are for losers, and bitching about the media coverage was bullshit when the last govt did it, and it's still bullshit now.
Fix your own party or fuck off. Simple as that.
Again, in opposition, the stakes are lower. But history provides two potential paths for Luxo to convince the 84% of us who don't prefer him as PM, the 70% of us who don't vote for his party, or the ~50% of us who think NZ is headed in the wrong direction that he has the goods.
And Helen Clark showed us how that could be done in an earlier Labour opposition: in 1996 she stared down a coup attempt from her own front bench, and used the opportunity to win over her dissenters, most notably Cullen & Goff, and they went on to run the country for nine long years.
And so it is with Luxo. If he has rats in his ranks, no amount of whinging about how it's not fair for the meanies in the gallery to publish articles about it will help him look like a leader.
What might help is actual leadership: winning dissenters over, or cutting them loose.
Goff and Andrew Little's failure to do so to Carter might not have been their fault exactly -- and in oppn the stakes were lower. But the negative consequences of failing to do it were theirs to wear all the same, and the electoral results speak for themselves.
At the time, I argued that a serious party should have internal mechanisms of discipline to excise such failings from the party before it got that bad.
Key had already shown this by defenestrating Richard Worth (for different flaws). That became emblematic of his effective leadership.
In the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Ten, a senior but quite ineffectual backbench Labour MP called Chris Carter started briefing against then-Oppn Leader Phil Goff. It was a shitshow, characterised by an expenses scandal and a fake "anonymous" letter www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
Luxo supporters also point to how he gets criticised for his Christianity, not taken seriously because of corporate duckspeak, how he is held responsible for the actions of his uncontrollable coalition partners, how he started billions in debt due to Labour's profligacy &c &c. So fuckin what.
These factors are real, but are not especially relevant to the basic dynamics of the system, since each govt has their own strengths and weaknesses which are asymmetric. Govts are obliged to make the best of those strengths & weaknesses in whatever circumstances occur, and excuses are for losers.
But Luxo's BAU sucks too. And as we now learn, so does their crisis response, at least so far. And the mini-crises they fabricated to create drama (pay equity, TPB, Treaty clauses, urgency & select committee fuckery, second COVID RC) kinda flopped too. But some Nats are just figuring that out now.
So Luxo took over on a "we're gonna fix these crises the previous govt created" mode, and it didn't magically turn into poll support, so a certain faction of Luxo supporters turned into crisis cargo-cultists just waiting for the right crisis to come along which would magically fix them
Or really pre 15 March. Because one the the characteristic features of the Ardern era before that was of a lot of aspiration and not very much delivery, and both the reporting and the polling reflected exceptional crisis responses & underwhelming BAU. Hence the idea that crises are free poll support
I think it had started to play out this way, and I think that was justified, because the Ardern-Hipkins govt kinda sucked at most things that weren't the COVID response, and fumbled a shitload of bags. Her personal popularity and credibility remained, but polling had reverted to pre-COVID patterns
This is a fine example, and yes, there are many more that he has been able to coast through just on the basis of what he would say to us
So maybe that changes now. Or maybe not. Or maybe the pressure rattles him and he gets shouty. Or who knows. But at least now we know the caucus are all in on it
Yeah. And the substantive question "who should lead the govt through the polycrisis" is really important to the matter of climate, fuel supply, econ recovery, and much else.
Not to mention the essential constitutional legitimacy question "does this guy actually have the support he claims to have?"
And it might still pay off, because we don't know what the plausible alternatives looked like (we only have partisan caricatures). That's highly motivating for partisans, but you can't expect a press gallery to make it their whole personality without concrete details, which are not yet forthcoming
My mental model of the boats is: the status quo was bad and poorly-provisioned, and instead of making do the gift bet that the political advantages of blowing it all up and blaming the previous govt for the losses would perform the financial & operational costs & attendant politics. And it kinda did
I personally agree about the ferries. But this is not a universally-held view, it's a political decision for the govt to use it as a wedge against the previous govt & supporters. It is a bad hook to hang accountability on because the merits are complex & illegible
Whereas govt MPs leaking is easy
Who knows? It is famously hard to know how anyone will perform in this job until they are in it. In this sense a leadership spull always expresses something like "well they can't possibly be as bad as the current lot" which is very far from a sure bet. But it rarely happens without that push
Blood in the water is only the proximate cause. The substantive causes are failing to execute well on strategy, or to pursuade the polity that the failures were justified or were better than plausible alternatives or whatever
This is a common and fair criticism. But it is the succession of substantive failures, and not just mean journalists writing mean things because they're big meanies who live for drama, that give rise to bad polling and internal dissatisfaction that produces defection within the caucus.
The way to avoid this is simple to conceive and hard to achieve: don't suck
And to the extent that we get better leadership from Luxo now he recognises that you can't just ignore this sort of thing and hope it goes away, the event may create a kind of accountability even though the spull failed
It is about accountability. To the extent that the govt sucks because Luxo sucks, the members of that govt are the only people in the whole country who can do anything about that. So when they start leaking spull plans to journalists, that makes accountability for sucking possible (not certain)
Currently in my mentions the people who think this are a weird coalition of ultra-leftist "real news" hawks and the usual claque of Very Serious Tory Harrumphers who don't like it when people are mean to their guy
The year is 2085. The A-10 Warthog pleads for sweet release. Congress appropriates 800 bitcoin to extend the plane for strafing missions on Mars.