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National leader Judith Collins has suggested that the party’s defeat in rural areas can be attributed to voters supporting the Labor Party to keep the Green Party out of power.
The game’s loss on Saturday included big drops in rural areas that traditionally back National.
Much of this vote went to ACT, but much of it also went to Labor. Parts of rural Canterbury saw a 35-45 percent shift toward the Labor Party, as it won the party’s vote in all South Island voters. National won just 36.8 percent of the party’s votes in Southland generally Royal Blue, compared with 38.5 percent for Labor, with ACT getting 12 percent and the Greens 4.9 percent.
In the same seat in the last election, National won 59 percent of the party’s votes compared to 24.1 percent for Labor.
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Judith Collins speaks after her first post-election caucus meeting.
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Labor has won 64 seats, enough to rule without help from the Greens, though leader Jacinda Ardern is still negotiating with the party to see if any cooperation is possible.
Collins, speaking to the media after his first post-election caucus meeting, in which 22 MPs were fired, said he believed some national voters had backed Labor to prevent the Green Party from being necessary in government.
“We have certainly heard from some outlets who have asked, and from some parts of the farming communities, that they voted for Labor because they wanted to stop the Greens,” Collins said.
There have been suggestions from the presidents of Federados de Agricultores across the country that this happened, but there is as yet no hard evidence that this is the case.
For it to account for the broader swing, it would have to be one of the largest cases of strategic voting in history, and one that happened against the explicit wishes of the National Party.
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Collins supports his much smaller post-election caucus.
Collins said these kinds of things would become more obvious in the party’s internal review of what went wrong in the election, National’s second-worst result in history.
When asked if his attack on the Green Party’s wealth tax policy in the final weeks of the campaign could have contributed to conservative voters turning to Labor to keep the Greens out of power, Collins said that “It’s certainly something the review can consider.”
“I think the main thing is that nobody wanted the Greens in government,” he said.
The Green Party increased its share of the votes between 2017 and 2020 and won the Auckland Central seat of National.
The outgoing MPs were frank when asked about the defeat on their way to Parliament.
Dan Bidois, who lost at Northcote, said the entire caucus should bear the loss, including the leader.
Lawrence Yule, who lost at Tukituki, said there were factors outside the party’s control that contributed, but also factors within its control, such as the hole in its fiscal plan.
Many were furious at the leak of an email written by Denise Lee in the middle of the campaign that complained of a terrible culture within the party.
Lee herself told reporters that she supported Collins at the press conference.
When asked about the Green Party theory on Tuesday, Ardern said: “There are a number of reasons why people would have chosen to vote for Labor in this election.”
“A lot of people voted for us to make sure we implement that plan on the Covid-19 recovery and we will be very clear about it.”
Green Party co-leader James Shaw simply replied “there is certainly a lot of speculation” when asked about the theory.
The exact reason why so many rural areas back the Labor Party will likely not be fully explained until the post-election New Zealand Election Study, a massive poll of voters that explores their intentions when voting, is completed.
Labor agriculture minister Damien O’Connor said the Labor vote in the areas was an endorsement of the party itself.
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Collins returns to his caucus room after the post-election meeting.
“It’s amazing, I think we saw it in 1993 and since then we haven’t had as many of those provincial seats. It’s an indication that underlying there is always a good understanding and appreciation of what Labor can do, ”O’Connor said.
He also said that the apparent campaigns against water and climate policy in rural New Zealand had been clearly exaggerated.
“Look, they were hit for political reasons and that’s a bit unfortunate because rural New Zealand feels a bit hit and the reality is that everyone wants the same thing, farmers will say that, it’s just a question of how far and how far. Quick . “
