Labour clearing out their old wood!!!
I fully subscribe to this scenario from the NBR. It's subscription only so will copy & paste for you.
The Labour MPs who didn't want David Cunliffe as leader also didn't want him as prime minister. They still don’t.These MPs are reverse campaigning. Their aim is to achieve a once-in-a-generation transformation of the Labour Party.
Their reverse campaigning is witnessed in their focus on the electorate vote, contradiction of party policy, plans to de-extinct moa and public criticism of Mr Cunliffe taking time to holiday.
None of this is accidental. These are professional politicians.
Here’s the logic. Labour this election picks up two Maori electorates plus Clayton Cosgrove wins Waimakariri and Stuart Nash wins Napier. Their success knocks out four Labour list candidates.
Labour polls in the low 20s. That means less than 30 MPs. The 27 constituencies that Labour wins largely fills Labour’s MP quota. The list MPs are cleaned out. Sue Moroney, Andrew Little, Maryan Street and Moana Mackey are gone.
The result is a different Labour Party. The constituency MPs are centrists. They have to be to win and retain their seats. The list MPs are to the left. The election cleanout changes Labour’s political dynamic. It’s ideological centre shifts rightward. The remnant Labour Party is more centre-right than National’s Cabinet.
Mr Cunliffe goes. He can’t survive such a catastrophic defeat.
Good Labour sources tell me this is exactly the plan. To go down in a blaze of glory, heads held high while smirking that Cunliffe’s supporters got their beans. Nash will win Napier, it is 50/50 in Waimakriri, and that shows the travesty of Labour this election, where against a two term government they can’t win seats except in Napier where National put up a fool, and have now officially given up to the onslaught by Stuart Nash.
The remaining MPs didn't like Mr Cunliffe to begin with. They like him even less now. Three ex-leaders in the caucus is one too many. He doesn't just depart the leadership. He departs Parliament.
There’s a by-election in New Lynn. And Labour rebuilds out of the rubble. The aim is to build a modern, centrist Labour Party, one than can win elections. The bigger the loss, the bigger the ideological change.
There is a lot more at stake this election than just who will be prime minister. The ideological future of the Labour Party is up in the air.
And consider the Greens. Russel Norman has pulled his head in. Metiria Turei has dressed like a corporate. It hurts like crazy but they have done everything they had to do to make government. And still they fall short.
They will celebrate their 20th birthday in Parliament never having made it around the table.
The purpose of politics is power. The Greens have never had it. They haven’t succeeded in the one thing that matters.
There’s a simple logic to Labour gaining power in 2017: work with the Greens. That means letting the Greens eat into Labour’s party vote. Labour should concentrate on winning electorates. That’s where their new politics position them.
I disagree with Rodney on this. The Greens are toxic, ironically. What Labour really needs to do is swallow some dead rats, move closer tot he centre, like John Key did, and then form a grand coalition with National and smash the Greens over coming years. Then politics can get back to sensible parties having at it without the distraction of the minnows.
They will likely only have two or so list MPs. A 10% shift in the party vote from Labour to the Greens would see Labour lose two MPs and the Greens gain 12. The exact number is open to conjecture but the MMP arithmetic is unassailable. But forget the math, it won’t happen.
He’s right it won’t happen.
Labour MPs will reason that they didn’t clean out their own list to replace it with Green whackos. And so the Greens will spend a generation in Parliament without power. John Key will achieve a historic fourth term.
The Greens make Labour unelectable. The heads can be pulled in; the outfits tarted up. But they are still Green. The nonsense they spout on global warming looks more deranged each passing year.
And that’s where the Labour MPs reverse campaigning falls to bits. They can clean up their own list with an election-night cleanout. But they remain stuck with the Greens.
Still, politics, like life, is often one step at a time. And cleaning out Labour’s list is a good first step.
Labour better get as used to swallowing dead rats as National did…it is the only way they can get onto the treasury benches again.