Election 2020: As the ultimate political survivor, Judith Collins prepares for her ultimate test

OPINION: I met Judith Collins in a green media room somewhere in Auckland in mid-2015. She is famous for her ambition and stubborn determination. But meeting her in person, I found her attractive, funny, and very forthright.

She is also from my own home province, Waikato, which has a long history of producing influential women politicians (Dorothy Jelicich, Marilyn Waring, Margaret Wilson, Helen Clark, and Jacinda Ardern, to name just a few). When he found out I was teaching a freshman politics class, he immediately volunteered to come speak.

I accepted her in October of the same year and she proved to be an entertaining guest. She shared with her audience of over 300 her views on National as a party of pragmatism rather than ideology, and why any media attention is better than none. Asked about her leadership ambitions, she was diplomatically shy.

By then, Collins had been exonerated by a government investigation into the allegations, based on a leaked email from blogger Cameron Slater, that she had tried to undermine the director of the Serious Fraud Office.

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He returned to the cabinet, but it was a period in his political life that he refers to in his recent memoirs as “the worst of times.” After six years as a high-profile minister of police, corrections, veterans affairs, justice, ACC and ethnic affairs, while seeking an economic portfolio, Collins had been forced to resign from the front bench three weeks before the 2014 election.

Until that point, she had been touted as one of the people most likely to succeed John Key. While it would be six more years before Collins won the leadership of the National Party, he never gave up. The subtitle of his book sums it up: Memoirs of a political survivor.

Collins has submitted his name for leadership multiple times since Key’s resignation, but he was never able to win over enough caucus colleagues. This year was different. The unexpected resignation of Todd Muller as national leader just 53 days after his own coup against Simon Bridges presented Collins with a wide window of opportunity to finally take over.

National may have turned to her in desperation, but various experts have since argued that she should have been named a leader much earlier.

Divisive but decisive

Judith Collins was first elected to parliament in 2002, the year of National’s nadir – the party received just 21 percent of the vote, resulting in a net loss of 12 seats. Their support had fragmented: center-right voters had moved to ACT, New Zealand First, and United Future. With Helen Clark’s Labor Party 41 percent higher, Collins was one of five new national MPs to enter the 47th parliament.

Two of those five new MPs were Don Brash and John Key, who became leaders of the National Party before Collins. Unsurprisingly, both were influential in his career, albeit in opposite ways.

Collins recounts Brash’s political style and intellect with warmth and respect. Brash has a Ph.D. in economics from the Australian National University, has worked for the World Bank, and was governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand for 14 years starting in 1988, coinciding with the prevalence of neoliberalism in New Zealand.

As the leader of the National Party, it was clear that Brash supported Collins’s aspirations, giving him portfolios that matched his experience. He even invited her to a dinner with Milton Friedman, where he learned that the political leader, the most admired famous economist, was Margaret Thatcher.

Collins praised Brash’s speech at Orewa, in which he had condemned the “dangerous drift toward racial separatism” and the “entrenched Treaty claims industry.” In the eyes of many, Collins saw it as an example of the decisive leadership that ultimately led Brash to bring national voters “home” in 2005.

National did not win, but increased its presence in parliament by 21 MPs (48 compared to Labor’s 50), with ACT, NZ First and United Future losing 18 seats between them.

Surviving the key years

By contrast, the relationship between Collins and Key seems to have been less rewarding. She argues that Key had entered politics with a very clear agenda of being prime minister and nothing would stand in his way.

A political journalist had singled out Collins as most likely Key’s deputy before the 2008 election, but this did not happen. Nor was she promoted into Key’s first cabinet.

Describing the annus horribilis that was 2014 in her memoirs, it is clear that she was disappointed in Key’s lack of support for quelling the Oravida controversies and “dirty politics” that year.

More generally, Key’s political strategy was at odds with Collins’s political intuition. In 2008, he intended to bring the party further to the center, but Collins was skeptical of the argument that winning the election meant winning over the middle voters.

Citing Thatcher’s success, he believed that propping up the base and delivering to that base mattered more. For Collins, centrism is an excuse to do nothing and defend nothing.

Recovering the base

It was no surprise that Collins titled his memoir Pull without bumps. His style during the 2020 election campaign has reflected the pleasure he takes from flexing his parliamentary debate skills, which he says “requires quick wit. […] the ability to think quickly. “

She was rewarded with positive verdicts after the leaders’ first two televised debates, where her retorts and interjections were sometimes fierce, other times frivolous. She clearly enjoys being in charge and not being constrained by broader collective responsibility (a point she also made about her time as a newspaper columnist during her time at the back bench).

Her years of political training reveal that decision in a leader is a quality that she values, even if it offends. He’s probably further to the right than some at National might prefer, but in this he hasn’t wavered over time. Her keynote address and memoirs demonstrate a disdain for what she calls the “lazy gene” and a welfare system that “funded women to have multiple children.”

In a sense, his political ethic is a mix of old-school pragmatic national conservatism and a dose of ideological neoliberalism.

She has never had any qualms about her desire to be a good representative of the electorate, to make a difference, to be in power and to rise to the top of the political ladder. Polls suggest that Collins will manage to regain a portion of the base that began to abandon National with the onset of Covid-19. However, attracting voters from the center can be difficult.

That is unlikely to worry Collins. She is rebuilding support for National and is determined that her political career as a leader will not end on October 18, 2020. There are others, including future promoted leader Christopher Luxon, who might not agree; Ultimately, the decision will not be hers. But it may be too early to rule it out. When Collins calls herself a political survivor, she means it.

Jennifer Curtin is Professor of Politics and Politics at the University of Auckland.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.