Standing up to China: The real reason National is tanking and Labour is up in the polls

Ok you primitive screwheads listen up!

So its political poll time again and holy hells bells look at those results, really look at them and tell me what you see.

Yes thats right Labour up, National Down, the Greens slipping and NZ First plunging into well below the 5% threshold in what looks suspiciously like what happened two months before the last general election when Jacinda Ardern blitzkreiged the opposition via the polls and then later on at the polling booth.

And lets put the mechanics of these movements aside for the moment and take a look at how this has been reported in the media or more importantly how this is being reacted to in the media.

Firstly we have Stuff which delivers the bad news via Henry Cooke in rather succinct and factual terms while noting the steaming pile of issues that Kiwibuild and the Karel Sroubek scandal were BUT without directly drawing the obvious conclusion that despite these two very damaging situations Labour has come out the other side with a jump in polling.

Then we have Tracy Watkins, also of Stuff, delivering a rather tepid opinion piece which tantalizingly hints at what may actually be going on behind the scenes but ends up with a lot of overly dramatic sentences or questions which state the obvious (such as "is it time for National to panic?") without really delivering any of the juicy analysis promised.

Meanwhile over at the NZ Herald "political commentator" Bryce Edwards does his usual plagiarist cut and paste job of other peoples work in his latest political roundup which is just sooooo lazy that I genuinely wonder why the Herald employs him and why he does not just make a list of links he wants us to read rather than desperately trying to add value to them by clumsily inserting his usual summary of things.

For Kiffloms sake Bryce, I have heard you speak on Radio NZ and its clear you have both a brain and opinions so why cant you just put these tedious lists to bed and tell us what you actually think, sheesh!

Then there is Audrey Young, also of the NZ Herald, doing just that by stating that its way too early for the knives to come out for Bridges. Well at least its her own opinion and not just a five minute list making exercise which makes its all the more a pity that shes completely and utterly wrong! Not only are the knives out they have been out for months but are held in "stasis" by a certain factor we will get into soon.

So lets check out the blogsphere shall we, perhaps there is more wisdom to be had there.

Over at National party supporting Kiwiblog, David Farrar, is, expectedly, talking things down and doing damage control by explaining this away as some sort of summer "bump" in polling because the PM was out at Davos and saying he will be "more interested in the next poll" but pausing just long enough to not the potential exit of both NZ First and the Greens in the next election based on the current polls.

Well at least its more analysis than the mainstream media but David is just being disingenuous by making it out that Kiwis cared about Jacinda headlining at Davos to be the real reason for the jump Labour has made (and the related decline of National) because this poll is also coming out in the period of the afore mentioned Sroubek and Kiwibuild muck-ups so you would think pressing issues more close to home would negate any temporary spin from mingling with the globalist elite for a few days.

Meanwhile no mention either way over at Norightturn but with the end of the Saudi Sheep Deal, climate change and NZ's open government being rated as marginal perhaps dear old Idiot Savant has other things to report on, maybe, maybe not, but its absence is noted. However as this is one of the better political blogs out there I am prepared to let it pass this time.

But aha, whats this I spy, its the Pundits Tim Watkin noting that the whole thing was "inevitable" and describing Judith Collins as the "complicating factor". Really Tim? Really? But Tim speaks some truth when he notes that its "a long way till the next election" but like all the other examples here there is almost no real analysis of whats gone on and playing the "its inevitable" card is the journalistic equivalent of Deus Ex Machina.

The sun coming up is inevitable, death and taxes are inevitable and given your half baked attempt at describing whats gone on as "inevitable" so is my opinion of your post as a "lazy hack job" inevitable, and you can quote me on that.

And finally over at The Daily Blog we get Martyn Bradburys usual take on things which given his political views, is that view is Bridges is a "dead man walking" which is not new and I could have told him that in October last year with my Dead Party Walking post.

But even Martyn, who can usually be relied upon to make schadenfreude entertaining rounds, out his post with the usual warnings about Judith Collins like she is the political boogeyman and how "right-wing pundits will pray this is rouge" with "rouge" being the polls result and not Collins going bezerek in a cabinet meeting.

Yet even in the Fifth Estate the takeaway on this poll result is way off and while mindful of my previous wisdom about political polls I think its time to set the record straight on why here and now after over 12 months of consistent polling, consistent rumblings of leadership challenges and things like Jamie-Lee Ross that only now is National getting hit in the one thing that has previously been unassailable and was its bedrock of both party discipline and future fortune: Nationals (some say magical) 46% party polling.

And just over a year ago I was pointing out that sooner or later that 46% was going to slip in my series of posts about rehabilitating the National Party but no one was listening then so just for once I am going to say "I told you so" because, unlike Tim Watkins saying saying its inevitable after the fact (easy thing to do Tim), I was saying it was inevitable 12 months ago when there was absolutely no indication that it would drop and in fact was defying all expectations in the post election enviroment.

But lets get to the real question about why it has dropped now.

Conventional wisdom is that its been that gosh-darned Jamie-Lee Ross and his damaging effect on National party polling and moral.

However that makes no sense because the previous Colmar Brunton poll showed absolutely no change to that magical 46% and that was taken right in the eye of the storm that was Ross saga and with the public having full view of the buildup of things in the months before so explaining this away due to Jamie-Lee Ross is just idiotic.

But there is a connection to Jamie-Lee Ross and National getting mugged in its polling and that is the revelation that National MP Sarah Dowie was the person telling Ross to kill himself via text which has not gone down well with the public despite a cabal of certain female National MPs, staffers and some in the media trying to paint her as the victim in the piece while Ross got characterized as the rapist in waiting.

As I have said in previous posts its takes two to tango but Dowie, in an age where that kind of behavior is absolutely not acceptable, went well beyond the fold.

With things like #meetoo and the review on bullying and harassment in parliament Dowie gets exposed as just as bad as any misogynistic male MP who thought that their position or name made them safe and as such its rather fitting that she not only get investigated by the Police but if found to be the sender of that text (and we all know it was her but let the system do its job) then she be cast out of parliament because if it had been Ross (or any other male MP doing such a thing) they would have been gone as of yesterday and the public views on the matter reflected that.

So some splinters of the Jamie-Lee Ross saga have done some damage here but it was always minor and in the end Bridges exercised some degree of damage control, even if only after the fact, by not talking about Ross any further but it was certain parties in the media who sought to paint this in a rather jaundiced light (as described above) that made the backlash there what it was. But still this was not what brought National down.

What about things like the Kiwibuild saga toppling over spectacularly in the early new year or the rancid stink from the Karel Sroubrek scandal that left Labour, Jacinda and Ian Lees-Galloway looking like a king sized hypocrites; shouldn't have those things had some effect in leveling out the poll result?

Well yes they should have and they probably did but when in the context of National selling citizenship to right-wing billionaire Peter Theil and its nurturing of the toxic and cancerous Housing Hernia one foreign drug dealer and a flawed but honest attempt to fix said hernia fall very rapidly into perspective as minor moments rather than deliberate and dishonest politics.

Thus we come to the real reason that National is down in the polls, or more correctly, Labour is up: Standing up to China.

Sure National scare-mongered it up as much as they could but in the end the current government saying no to Huawei for the 5G deal was the right thing to do and Simon Bridges going on TV to moan that New Zealands relationship to a country that is not free, democratic, jails it citizens for no reason, censors their internet, will risk war for its own stupid pride and will happily turn back an Air New Zealand flight due to accidentally mentioning Taiwan is not going to wash.

And that's it, that's the reason why after so long and so much Labour is finally up in the polls; because it made the most ethical decision so far of this government AND followed it through with action. If Labour could do this for things like tax, housing and all the rest Kraff knows where it and National would be polling but I cant imagine that National would be above the mid 20s.

National has been in China's pocket for so long (as Chinese spy Jin Yang is still a member of the party) that National probably don't even realize how distasteful being seen as a quisling is but Ross's recording of Bridges talking treason/sedition on behalf of China is one of the great scandals that the media just don't have the stones to investigate but the public no longer remain comfortable with China as our largest trading partner and using its size and leverage to undermine our democracy though it infiltration of politics both here and abroad.

Thus with National out of government China is no longer getting a free ride and that means that we may still trade with them but we wont be offering up our backsides for China's pleasure.

Something to note also here is that this was not some side effect of Jacindamania, the PM tried to stay well out of it and in the end it fell on Andrew Little, the GCSB and the Five Eyes relationship to see this through and for a public that had been desperately waiting for the government to fire on something and hit a six this was the first time it did since the first 90 days and look what happened.

Supporting this is the minimal movement in preferred PM polling (with Jacinda and Judith slightly up and Simon slightly down) showing that the movement in the party polling is not related to personality politics but rather it was solely an issue which drove this change.

Of course Judith Collins is now polling Higher than Simon Bridges and Bridges definitely has something to worry about but when has he not had to worry about his position as leader. As I have stated before its the toughest job in politics so unless he was harnessing personal mojo like Jacinda Ardern or John Key he was never going to be stroking it big all over the electorate in the preferred PM stakes.

All of this means that while Judith is polling higher she has not dethroned Bridges, yet, but she has out evolved him and that means no slick PR is going to take Simon any higher than he has been and his stock is now falling.

Also that "stasis" effect we have around who will be next leader of National in relation to jolly Judith Collins is due to the high degree of doubt around not only Bridges as being the man for the job but also Collins being the woman for the job (despite her repeated protestations that she does not want it: Your fooling nobody Judith!).

Bridges may not yet have the toxic cast that Bill English had roughly one year ago but as I mentioned late last last year the warranty on his time as leader "has expired" and that view came after I spent an evening speaking with moderate/centrist young Nats and listening to their views on who should be leader.

Short answer to the long question: They don't know who should lead but they sure as heck know it shouldn't be Bridges or Collins.

Nor should it be Paula Bennett, as her recent demotion to drugs "spokesperson" and subsequent beating by Chloe Swarbrick live on national TV showed that Bennett's limited intellect and long history of hypocrisy make her unsuitable to even be deputy leader let alone as some sort of vocal mouthpiece on an issue such as drug reform.

In fact if there is a moral to this story for National it was they should have taken my advice last year ago when I said that for Bridges to succeed as leader he needed to get rid of retched golems like Bennett, Brownlee, Smith and Collins (the remainders of the Gang of Five) and remake the upper party to his own design by letting some younger blood in.

And what a difference that would have made if only Jamie-Lee Ross would have been prevented from going bezerk by giving him the position promised to him by Bridges rather than to corpulent bully-boy Gerry Brownlee.

But its too late now and it does not matter if its Bridges or Collins at the helm of the ship as all Labour has to do is use their position as the government of the day to make a few more things real and you can watch that 41% slide into the 30s and down into the 20s to that place National was in before John Key seduced the party.

So thats the real reason why the poll results are what they are but there is no need to thank me. I do this because I care.


Vootie!