After the 2014 election, Peter Dunne got a phone call from Prime Minister John Key to say the National Party wouldn’t need the support of United Future to form a government.
The same call was made to the Act and Māori parties, which had also signed confidence and supply agreements after the 2011 election.
Key invited all three parties to stay in the tent, if they wanted, but said there wouldn’t be any policy concessions or negotiations. They took the deal.
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” Dunne said, in an interview for interest.co.nz's Of Interest podcast.
“About 10 days later, the specials came in and National had lost a couple of seats, and its outright majority, and suddenly realised they had a problem.”
Key and his team came back to the three parties and asked to renegotiate the newly-signed confidence and supply agreements into a more substantial and specific arrangement.
Dunne, and the others, refused: “I said, no, we've got a signed piece of paper here.”
“National, ended up in the worst of all worlds. It had supply partners they hadn't conceded anything to. All it was getting from us was confidence and supply. Everything else had to be negotiated case by case.”
“If they'd been a little less impatient, and waited till the specials they could have got better deals.”
This memory might be a factor in why National and New Zealand First have been holding out for the final vote count. The numbers might shift around in unpredictable ways.
Once the special votes are reported on Friday, November 3, Dunne thinks a government could form quite quickly.
He said it was partly due to Christopher Luxon’s leadership style. But also because Parliament has to sit by mid-December, and National won’t want that to happen under a caretaker government.
The National leader’s message, that he would not provide blow-by-blow commentary on the negotiations, was more directed at Winston Peters than at the media.
“I thought he was also sending a pretty clear warning to Act and New Zealand First: don't you either.”
“Because, if you look at New Zealand First's track record, they like to control negotiations, they like to be the ones that sort of indicate where things are at.”
It was an “unedifying spectacle” in 1996 and 2017 when Jim Bolger and Jacinda Ardern found out they would be Prime Minister, only when Peters announced it on live television.
“The bronze medal winner shouldn't tell the gold and silver medals who they are. I think Luxon is trying to guard against all that sort of thing happening again”.
Dunne, who was first elected MP for Ōhāriu in 1984 as the Labour Party's candidate, subsequently served as a Cabinet Minister in both Labour and National-led governments as leader of United Future. Listen to the rest of the interview with Dunne for more insight into negotiating a coalition.
*You can find all episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.
23 Comments
Believe that history explains why the situation today is as it is. As Jim Bolger clumsily intoned once - it ain’t over until the fat lady sings. Believe most reasonable New Zealanders appreciate that will be when all the votes have finally been tallied. Believe some unreasonable media identities have very little appreciation of that though.
I've got a lot of time for Mr Dunne. I once had an issue with a bug in the RealMe system while he was minister in charge, and they refused to acknowledge it was their issue. So I send him a overly strongly worded letter about it.
It was hilarious reading their response to him - they straight up lied to him about what had gone wrong - but I didn't care - he had it resolved the next day!
None of the useless responses I got from nearly every Labour/Green MP I've contacted over the years - straight up got it done.
Reportedly this is the heaviest defeat of an incumbent government since 1928. That in itself suggests that special votes may well follow the same trend. Luxon and National, have no reason not to and every reason to remain silent until all the specials have been recorded. The rather curious recent statements by Winston Peters suggests to, that the common ground there will need to have clear definition before consideration of a coalition.
Yes, and funded by a tsunami of money to National and Act from a handful of monied interests, which seems to have attracted little in the way of analysis. Wonder what they want in return for their "investment"?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/499176/property-industry-tops-political-donations
Overseas votes are about 80,000 of the ~570,000 special votes to be counted.
You say they have "stuffed it" with overseas voters, but in fact you can easily make the opposite argument - overseas voters lived through COVID in other countries and saw how badly it was all handled, vs how well NZ handled it.
Your view of the voting intentions of overseas voters with respect to COVID (imagining that overseas voters only care about this single issue for some reason) comes down to whether you think overseas voters are selfish and wanted to return to NZ but couldn't, or whether you think overseas voters are selfless and didn't mind that they couldn't return to NZ but were happy that their family was kept safe.
Most special votes are cast within NZ by residents outside of their electorate and the demographics of these voters skew younger - students in particular, anyone enrolling at the same time they voted, but also people simply travelling.
In the last 2 elections, National has lost 2 seats after specials were counted: in 2017 they went to Labour and Greens, in 2020 they went to Labour and TPM.
Covid wasn't "Handled well" in NZ, it was a total cluster f**k. The only thing Labour got right was the first lockdown and even then it was at least 2 weeks too late. Labour used Covid for its political gains, that's now pretty clear and hence they just got booted out. I think the special votes are going to swing to National and ACT this time around.
It could go either way, but I still think it will go left. Many people overseas still think Ardern was the best thing since sliced bread, they probably haven’t even heard of the current lot.
I reckon Winston is holding out to see if he is kingmaker, and he’d be stupid not to as the deal will be significantly different.
People have actually sat down and properly analysed which countries did the best during COVID. Here's one:
https://globalresponseindex.foreignpolicy.com/?_gl=1%2Amwwuri%2A_gcl_au….
And another: https://time.com/5851633/best-global-responses-covid-19/
And another: https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-countries-have-responded-best-to-cov…
I mean, its hard to argue that "it was a total cluster f**k" unless you have extreme myopia.
If there is one thing I've learned from Covid-19 and ex-President Donald Trump, it's that people don't want the facts or or to read properly researched articles. Instead, they want to complain about being inconvenienced by not being able to do what they want, regardless of others.
Okay, maybe that's two things.
The populace did what u-turn ardern demanded and were over 90 percent vaccinated. She/her was more interested in control of the people and we know how the lockdowns continued unabated. It wasn't until the uproar that the restrictions started dropping overnight.
Chippie was there in the background
Articles from Jan, Feb and Mar 2021. Omicron didn't even become a thing until later that year.
New Zealand's best ability to respond to the initial outbreak was being an isolated island nation with easy to close borders. Which barely happened in time. Everything else that followed was painful to watch.
Way too late to close the border, we could have done it a month earlier and could have avoided all the lockdowns except the first one while a decent quarantine was being sorted. From that point on it went the other way with a total overreaction. I can tell you that 90% of the population didn't get the vax, many quit their jobs rather than getting it and there is not a single person out there that doesn't know someone with an injury related to the vax.
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