2020 election: Judith Collins and David Seymour fight for the right wing

ANALYSIS: Judith Collins was thinking of changing her policy on something: tattoos.

She had excitedly called Nik Given, the National supporter who had gotten himself a Bond girl tattoo. When the lengthy press conference at a small dental clinic in Whanganui came up with a question about the tattoo, her face lit up and she confessed that yes, this lady was in favor of changing and that she would be reconsidering her general policy against staining.

This kind of light news is exactly the kind of thing politicians want in campaigning: a chance to be on TV talking about something other than politics or politics. It’s also the kind of news that constantly orbits people like Jacinda Ardern and John Key, but not Collins.

But while Collins would consider a change in her tattoo policy, she was unwilling to change her stance on sugar.

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Surrounded in the dentist’s office by posters encouraging children to drink more water and less soft drinks, Collins said she did not see a role for the state in reducing sugar consumption by children, either with a tax. sugar or ‘water only’ policies. for schools that the last national government supported.

Collins may now be the leader of a great party, but that doesn’t mean she has softened on issues that concern the right wing of politics, such as taxes and personal liability.

Instead, Collins was announcing a national policy to spend an additional $ 30 million a year on a children’s dental program that would teach children about oral health and provide them with a free fluoride varnish.

Politics was very much the kind of thing that the last national government would have launched. It was dressed up in the social investment approach, marketed not just as a good public health measure, but as a way to save money in the long run. You could close your eyes and almost imagine Bill English speaking.

Collins’ next stop fit this theme: the Gonville Health Center, which was opened by Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia when she was associate health minister under John Key, along with one of National’s most liberal MPs at the time, Chester Burrows. Burrows snatched this seat from the Blue Column after years of Labor rule. It is likely, but not certain, that it will turn red again this year. If Collins wants to keep it blue, the centrism favored by English and Key will likely be part of it.

This was not exactly Collins’ environment, especially since his trusted health spokesman, “Doctor Shane” Reti, had gone to Wellington on urgent business. He sat in the clinic’s community room, asked about its ownership structure, and asked a nervous nurse how she had juggled her training and young children.

Collins is a deeply political creature, and he can make most people who care about politics laugh at a punch to the other side or a little self-loathing, but this wasn’t a room full of politicians, and the laughs were few and far between. Instead, there were a lot of polite smiles.

In fairness to Collins, many politicians don’t excel in a small meeting room. As he said in his press conference, he is missing the usual biggest public gatherings of the election campaign, which really doesn’t make sense with the 100-person limits below level 2.

Yet across town, ACT leader David Seymour was trying to do two things Collins failed to do: articulate a political vision for Covid-19 with a small government and hold a public meeting.

Just over 20 people turned up in the great room where Seymour was holding his meeting, which means he ended up sitting on the edge of the stage, his jacket buttoned and his shirt slightly unbuttoned, instead of the couch that had been prepared for him. .

Seymour was all smiles though, and with good reason: Recent polls show ACT has done better than it has in about ten years, with a UMR corporate survey obtained by Stuff putting them at a whopping 6.2 percent.

This placed Seymour much more firmly in the mainstream of political discourse, and means that he could ask for a lot more than a few National charter schools if the larger party manages to increase its vote enough to lean toward government.

Seymour was ready with a line that, in typical Seymour fashion, criticized both Labor and National: Labor wanted to feed his children, while National wanted to brush their teeth. This kind of ingenuity, usually published in a press release before anyone else’s reaction to a new policy, has been ACT’s bread and butter for years.

He was shy when asked by the media how he could use that new power in potential coalition negotiations, refusing to commit to any kind of public debt and instead said his goal would be to bring it closer to 20 percent of GDP by ten years. 30 percent promised and then not promised by National.

He didn’t even bite when asked about the fact that National has yet to release a full cost of all of its policies, but allowed himself to criticize the party’s ever-larger spending promises a bit.

ACT presents a real problem for the National Party in a way that it has not in years. While National needs friends, it doesn’t need them to have a large number of votes taken away, as ACT appears to be doing.

It’s a problem Labor has had for many years with the Greens: even if the combined vote of its two parties is high, people don’t take it seriously if the main party isn’t voting well above 30 percent.

However, going after the right-wing vote fuels the image Labor is trying to paint of National as right-wing and reckless, or “no longer part of Key and English,” as Labor MPs keep saying.

But ACT is not the only threat from the right today. A longtime ACT voter at the meeting, Jonathan Wilson, said that many Whanganui voters seemed interested in Advance NZ, the party co-led by Billy Te Kahika.

“A lot of my cousins ​​and friends could be swayed by that crazy level of thinking,” Wilson said.

I was very pleased to see Seymour reject the worldview of an audience member who had spent a few minutes asking why ACT was not doing more to enlighten the world about the “plandemic” and the shadowy influence that the United Nations had so much at the national level as in Labor.

Seymour, with a wide smile on his face, said that he disagreed with Ardern on how to fix the world, but that she was not at the forefront of the UN, and he really didn’t think anyone else in Parliament was either.

At Collins, Seymour was willing to be even kinder to the woman who might end up facing him at the cabinet table.

“All national leaders say they want to reform the Resource Management Law. I think he really means it. “