Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Chapter Four: A Match Made In Heaven
After the 1993 election, I’m afraid I spent rather less time on politics and rather more time establishing some sort of career and romantic life. In the May of 1995, for instance, I was simultaneously engaged in showing bored tourists around the Auckland Museum and figuring out ways of proposing to a girl I was seeing who, in the end, told me to fuck off. I was not involved at all in the King Country by-election, but since I’m getting quite into this thing, I’ll tell you about it.
Since the departure of Winston from the National Party, the dominant position within that caucus had been held by Ruth Richardson - even more so once the Class of 1990 was thinned out by the Labour resurgence in 1993. Almost all of the National MPs who had been approached to join the Liberals had lost their seats anyway, and most of the ones left in caucus had been mollified by positions in Cabinet or other perks. For the second time in less than ten years, a Prime Minister would be the only person capable of restraining an over-mighty ultra-right-wing Finance Minister. But Jim Bolger was no David Lange. He arrived at the caucus meeting in which he intended to announce the shuffling of Richardson to Education to find a confidence motion in himself already under way, and despite an impassioned speech or two, he was defeated 41-10. Richardson was immediately elected National Party Leader (and, therefore, PM) on 21 May 1994.
To his credit, Bolger stayed on in Parliament for several months, always plotting in the internal anti-Richardson opposition, but when the Government announced that the Ministry of Works was to be sold off to a company owned by the People’s Republic of China in February 1995, he resigned his seat in protest - although never a man for grand gestures, he acted out a symbolic dust-shaking from his feet on the steps of Parliament House and never visited again.
Despite the flak he got for egotism and a lack of dedication to seeing the fight through (none of which was really deserved), the gesture did produce something concrete: a by-election in King Country. King Country is probably the most rural, dispersed general electorate in the North Island, and had been a National stronghold since the year dot. The largest settlement is probably Te Kuiti, a town of around 5,000 souls and even fewer people. It is hard to campaign there.
That didn’t stop a few parties trying. There were the standard Natural Law and Christian Heritage candidates, the smallest of the minnows, whose members must have been singularly dedicated - I couldn’t understand why they bothered, and I’d been a member of two minor parties. There was also a curiously humourless McGillicuddy Serious Party candidate, whose candidature in many ways foretold the slow death of whatever fun was to be had in their one ‘joke’. NewLabour, who evidently had no organisation here (which was a change from when I had been a member: at that point, the standard boast was that the NLP had a branch in every electorate) had stood Kevin Campbell, who I had known when I lived in Christchurch. The Greens were evidently similarly weak, as their candidate was Rod Donald, another South Islander and, until a couple of years beforehand, the National Spokesman of the last remnants of the Electoral Reform Coalition. Since the failure of the 1990 referendum, they had shrunk down to a few dozen True Believers and Constitutional bores, and Donald had presumably felt the need to feel the Politics blowing through his hair.
Slightly more surprising was Labour’s decision to stand a Wellingtonian rugby player, Chris Laidlaw, who had entered Parliament in the 1992 by-election for Wellington Central and been defeated the next year on new boundaries. This by-election had been back when I was in NewLabour: our candidate got 6% in the by-election while the Greens got 15%, which was grimly predictable at that point. Anyway, Laidlaw tried to it all again in King Country, and did a decent job, despite himself: he was actually very close to winning the seat in the end, although this was not in any way down to his own qualities. As I understand it, he only won Wellington Central because New Zealanders always vote for a sportsman.
National presented for the approval of the electorate a dairy man by the name of Owen Jennings, who had until recently been President of Federated Farmers. He made no bones about being a supporter of Ruth Richardson, and this was not a welcome position in King Country, which had been loyal to Bolger ever since the 1970s.
This naturally played into our hands. Despite the rumours in 1994 of Bolger joining Winston Peters, nothing had come of it, and it was felt in the Liberal Party that after a rebrand, we could have a serious stab at presenting ourselves as the true heirs of the National Party. To do this, we made an attempt to simultaneously reduce the amount of centrist vote-splitting and also take in some competent campaigners: we merged with the Democrats.
The Democrats, a 1985 rebrand of the Social Credit Party, had been in a parlous state for the last few years. Their earlier right-populist image had been shed, perhaps unwisely, to attempt to take votes from the left of Labour - the rebrand had only served to split the party and abandon their protest-vote brand. And now they had no clear direction. Their last respectable performance had been a surprise second place in the Tamaki by-election, and they often polled in double figures or less.
They had attempted form an electoral alliance with NewLabour while I was a member, but had been rebuffed due to the fact that we had literally nothing in common with them apart from a certain lack of success. But in 1995, we Liberals were in a position of needing their entrenched organisation and they were in a position of needing the relative popularity and wealth of the Liberals - although we all viewed the Social Credit pyramid scheme with a mixture of suspicion and contempt, we found when we talked to them for five minutes that, well - so did they. It was a match made in heaven. Now we needed to take full advantage of the honeymoon period.
The candidate for King Country was John Wright, who despite being from Rangiora and not hugely overwhelming in person, insisted on standing. He had been the leader of the Democrats, and we thought that his reduction in status from Leader to Deputy Leader was payment enough for a Parliamentary candidacy. The Democrats had garnered around 10% of the vote in 1993, which made it one of their strongest electorates - we hoped that it would go forward as a strong electorate for the new-found ‘Liberal Democrats’. Despite some mockery in the media for the awkward name, it sounded decent, and we were confident that our 310 roadside signs across King Country would be sufficient to advertise the rebrand.
The Democrats who turned up to campaign were phenomenal - I went down to Otorohanga for election day, and these relatively elderly folk had done one pass already and got the kettle on by the time I arrived at 9 AM. Our orange signs, blazoned with the face of John Wright and the slogan ‘Working for King Country’, looked the business compared to the 1993 vintage ones, as I noticed on the way down.
As far as King Country can ever buzz, it was buzzing on that cold May day. Activists from three parties could be seen pounding the streets of provincial towns, and were engaging in largely harmless banter with one another when they came into contact. Some of the locals were even induced to leave their homes and get involved in this niche spectator sport - by, for instance, voting.
The result was not one which put any minds to rest on election night itself: from the perspective of the left, Labour actually lost votes, which was against the grain of the polls, but the worst thing from their perspective was that, if the Greens and NewLabour had not stood, they probably would have won despite their best efforts. The micro-parties themselves were spectacularly unsuccessful - barely worth mentioning.
The main story, though, was the winner. It was John Wright, of the Liberal Democrats, by a margin of eight votes. Somehow, we - and I use the word ‘we’ in the widest possible sense - had done it by opposing Ruthanasia, and proposing something better. In my mind, that was perhaps the high point of minor party success in the 1990s, at least - it was the first time in a long time that someone had won a seat without previously holding it as a member of a larger party, and the Liberal Democrats jumped to 37% in the polls in the immediate aftermath. The feeling in those heady days was one of energetic optimism: we were sure that Winston Peters would be Prime Minister next year, surer than we had been since the foundation of the Liberal Party. At that point, even a fundamental realignment of New Zealand politics was possible. The elation, even in my own Electorate Committee, when all the votes had been counted and verified, was palpable.
I think back to that day sometimes, and wonder if it would have felt different if electoral reform had passed in 1990. Of course, it might not have happened at all, but if it had, I feel that it would have been less of a victory. For one thing, Parliament would have been full of minor parties after the 1993 election, so it would have been less of a watershed, and for another, the main focus of political campaigning would be for the Proportional section, so the possession of each individual electorate would be irrelevant to the shape of Parliament. It would have been a meaningless victory in a changed game. The sport of politics would be different: much less bloody and much less exciting, and I don’t think it would be enjoyed by nearly as many people if the rules were fair. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your perspective, I suppose.
