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RDo you remember January 2020? We were young, carefree and full of hope. The political year in New Zealand started out like any other, but then the wheels came off spectacularly and in a way that none of us could have predicted.
Covid, coups, conspiracies, scandals, leaks, lies, leadership, lockdowns, misinformation, ministerial gaffes, a deputy sexting. It was huge, and that was before the campaign started.
Even setting aside Covid, which we all wish we could, we’ve had one of the most tumultuous years in New Zealand politics.
In the midst of a global pandemic while our country was locked up, our health minister violated his own lockdown rules.
We spoke to families who were unable to be with their dying loved ones, who were unable to meet and support each other at funerals and tangihanga. Women gave birth or aborted alone. People recognized that these were the sacrifices we had to make for Covid even though our health minister risked everything for a bike ride and a trip to the beach.
He finally resigned.
Another minister, responsible for labor relations, was fired for having an affair with a former employee who worked in his department.
Just this week, the speaker of our House of Representatives was forced to apologize to the entire country for wrongly suggesting that there was a rapist in parliament. Taxpayers’ cash in the amount of $ 333,000 was disbursed to settle a defamation action.
It’s crazy. It started out crazy. It ended up crazy. Surprisingly, the election campaign was something of an oasis. Since the year had been full of noise, there was a dire expectation that the campaign would continue at high speed. It was a terrifying prospect.
And so it began. One of my first stories from the campaign was about a high-ranking National Party figure making midnight radio talkback calls and posing as a guy called “Merv” to undermine a young candidate for his own party.
Then: handbrake. A press conference was called at 9 pm at the Beehive, where the offices of the government ministers are located. It can only mean one thing. Covid was back. The campaign ended. Back to the largest city lock, Auckland. The election was delayed.
Then something extraordinary happened. Restart. The second round of the campaign started and, miraculously, there was clean air.
We finally had a policy to discuss: a new holiday, drug harm reduction, business loans, taxes, energy, electric vehicles, borders. That was only in the first week of the main matches.
But despite the unexpected volume and breadth of the policy, this was, as our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern often said, the Covid campaign.
It was Covid who helped determine the outcome. Covid that cemented Ardern’s leadership in a crisis, something we already knew could happen after the Christchurch terror attack and the Whakaari White Island volcanic eruption the previous year.
If you had asked Ardern in the pre-election campaign about her leadership and the hellish trifecta of crises besetting us, she would give the team credit as a whole, she never wanted to talk about it.
Coming the campaign was a different story.
Labor knew that Ardern’s leadership was its bazooka of political power. Politics is very often about nuance, but during an election campaign the subtlety is lost.
At party rallies, Ardern unusually trumpeted his leadership in a crisis. Labor’s political advertising, meticulously crafted and grouped by focus, was carefully crafted to conjure up the leadership of Covid and Ardern at all times.
Crowds of adoring supporters flocked to the prime minister’s campaign events, some crying as they thanked her for “saving us.”
Journalists were crushed in the stampede. Parents threw their children into the media scrum. “Take a picture with Aunt Jacinda!” they demanded of their young. A priceless selfie was worth a little mutilation.
But it is a struggle to see how the rival National Party could have won the election even if Covid had not happened. What a litany of failures. Own goals, friendly fire and false passes.
The annus horribilis of the National Party was a notable exercise in political mismanagement. It was like an episode of The Thick of It had a baby out of wedlock in a church with an episode of House of Cards and somehow an episode of The Office. it was the substitute. National couldn’t take a breath and, barring Covid, the party was only to blame.
The party entered the campaign with a severed leg (the first hit), an arm severed (the second change of leadership) and two amputated fingers (Andrew Falloon, the sexting MP, and Hamish Walker, the MP who leaked the details of a Covid patient).
He had several bruised toes (including the misstatement that Pākehā MP Paul Goldsmith was Maori as he was trying to defend the lack of diversity in the party). He was always going to have a hard time crossing the finish line.
Surprisingly, he kept shooting himself in the remaining foot. Finance spokesman Paul Goldsmith’s fiscal hole undermined the National’s only advantage of responsible economic management and shattered its only chance at a vote-cracking, election-winning bribe: tax cuts.
And it was a deputy that most New Zealanders would have had a hard time fitting, Denise Lee, who almost knocked down the head of the party again.
He emailed the entire group with a grocery list of heavily worded leadership complaints – an attack that was leaked to Newshub.
As bad as it was for National, and despite Covid’s vote windfall for Labor, the 2020 election defied the odds to become a traditional campaign.
Our MMP voting system still works. Yes, we lost a minor game (NZ First) but we won another (The Maori Party). Yes, we ended up with a one-party majority for the first time under the system, but we also saw the resurgence and sustainability of two other minor parties, Act and the Green Party.
Ultimately, despite how horrible 2020 was on so many levels, how ugly our politics and global politics have been, New Zealand has landed in a relatively good place.
America no longer has a terrifying narcissist at the helm. Vaccines are being released. Being young, carefree and hopeful again in January 2021 will be an overstatement, but there are strong reasons for optimism.
