Kerre Woodham: The election was a rejection of Labour

The weekend. Discuss.  

No there's more than that isn’t there? What a weekend. I owe my texter Muz from Hawkes Bay a bottle of Pinot of his choice. He said that it would be a walkover, that it would be absolutely obvious that National would do well and that they would have partners to support them.  

I thought the election would be a bit closer, a bit tighter. But ultimately, although it wasn't a complete rejection of the left, it was an absolute decimation of Labour. Not as bad as 2014, but jolly close, and with ramifications for years to come.  

Those on the left who couldn't bring themselves to vote right went to the Greens. Some to TOP (TOP got the same amount of party vote as Te Pati Maori) but of course, they didn't get the electoral seat of Ilam, which they were hoping for. And Te Pati Maori did a fantastic job taking the Maori seats from Labour. The Greens did very well too, holding on to Auckland Central and winning Wellington Central, so it wasn't a complete rejection of the left.   

What it was was a rejection of Labour. Labour wasn't Labour enough for those on the left. And they were utterly hopeless for those in the middle. National did better than expected. ACT and NZ First were about what everyone was predicting in the final week of the election. I flicked around the media a bit before settling on Newstalk ZB’s coverage for the night. And I found it really entertaining. Thank you, team. I don't think I'm biased, (probably biased) but I thought it was jolly good.  

Chris Hipkins's speech was odd and sort of sums up why Labour lost, in my opinion. He talked about the many, many amazing things that Labour had done and how impressive they'd been in the face of so many odds. Oh, how magnificent they were, proving yet again that by spending so much time in Wellington he is completely out of touch with what people have been feeling for at least two years.  

The best moment of the speech came with the mic drop of hey, I'd like to thank my new partner Toni. Everyone said “Toni? With an I? With a Y? Who's Toni? Where's Toni?” It was that bit that got my attention.  

He doesn't seem to understand how Labour lost so badly. So, my recommendation, if he's remotely interested, for him to come to a come to Jesus moment and understand what happened, would be to sit himself quietly in a corner, away from sycophants and people who just think he's the bee's knees, open up the New Zealand Herald and read Simon Wilson's column. Because Simon Wilson, who is a left-leaning columnist, has had a road to Damascus moment in his column where he talks about Labour's ability to win the war. They were fit to win the war, but not for peace. A bit like Churchill's World War II Government.  

Simon Wilson writes, it isn't Labour's fault that the fallout from the pandemic has been difficult to understand. People isolated from loved ones and hardship and grief, children traumatised, businesses collapsed and still collapsing. Anger and intolerance on the rise, the health system almost broken - the social trauma has been far deeper and more widespread than expected and it will roll on for a long time to come, he writes.  

Yes, we know! Is this not what we've been talking about for the past couple of years? If Simon or Chris Hipkins or whoever had turned off Nat Rad, or Concert Radio for 10 minutes and tuned into ZB, they would have known this long before Saturday night. Simon Wilson goes on: Co-governance was always going to be opposed by racists, but Labour allowed a lot of other good-hearted people to feel estranged by it too. Yes, the messaging was so poor, their delivery of it was so poor, that as Simon Wilson says, people who would normally be quite moderate and quite tolerant were like, “What the Dickens?” And Simon's, like, wow, who knew?  

We did. We knew. Simon Wilson goes on: build a light rail, okay, but make sure the existing bus networks are highly functional on existing roads. Reform education, of course, but get kids back into classrooms and do not wreck the universities or the technical institutes. And yes, reform the health system, but the priority has to be the front line.  

Yes, Simon. We know. We've been saying this all along. Where were you? Where were you in the lead up to the election saying this? This is why people turned against Labour, because they could see all of this ineptitude. Not because they're racist, or anti trans, or venal money grubbing capitalists who want to squeeze more out of the oppressed working men or women.  

Basically, it's because Labour were completely and utterly hopeless at delivering all the myriad promises they made to New Zealanders. And when it came down to it, they simply could not deliver what New Zealanders needed and wanted. 

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