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Leader's message

16 May 2005

By the time you read this message, Helen Clark may well have panicked and called an election for the end of July – in which case, our annual conference will be an important part of the election campaign.

And it is easy to see why she might panic:

• her own reputation damaged by the evidence of her grossly inappropriate involvement in the Peter Doone affair, by her subsequent obfuscation in Parliament about that role, by her extraordinary arrogance in putting herself above the accepted norms of Cabinet behaviour, and by her limp-wristed response to John Tamihere’s behaviour;
• the ever-more-obvious shambles in the education sector, where hundreds of thousands of students have been abused by the NCEA mess and yet more hundreds of thousands have been let down by her failure to ensure value for the billions of dollars of money spent in the tertiary sector;
• the serious fall in public confidence in the police, best exemplified by the repeated breakdown of the emergency 111 system;
• the enormous blow-out in government spending on the health sector, with little or nothing to show for it in terms of any of the normal measures of improved health or shorter waiting lists; and
• the almost-universal expectation among commentators that, over the next few months, the New Zealand economy will slow sharply, further accelerating the huge exodus of New Zealanders to Australia and other more prosperous shores.

The National Party stands ready to restore the values which have been sadly absent over the last six years – values of independence, aspiration,  and compassion.

The values are fundamental.  But of course we also need the people and the policies which can reflect those values.

The people we have are of the highest quality.   Almost all our current Caucus are standing for re-election, and that means that we will have a strong nucleus of people experienced in Parliament to form a new government.  In addition, we have 42 other candidates of a quality rarely seen before by any political party – people from all walks of life, both women and men, and from all New Zealand’s major ethnic groups.

And we have developed policies which are not only popular with the electorate but which will lift the living standards of all our people, ensure that every child gets the best possible education, move people from dependency to independence, safeguard the lives and property of our families and communities, and guarantee that every citizen, regardless of race, is equal before the law.

Now the challenge before us, both candidates and other Party members, is to market those policies to the New Zealand people and to explain how they can improve the lot of all our citizens.

Having done that, we also need to remind people that a party vote for the National Party is the only way of contributing to a change of government: you can’t change the government by voting for the Greens, the Progressive Coalition, or the Maori Party, all of which are highly likely to support Labour in any coalition discussions; United Future and New Zealand First have both refused to say which major party they would support and could just as easily support Labour as National; and ACT, though more likely to be supportive of National than any of the other parties, may well not be represented in Parliament after the election.

The other point we must emphasise to people is that their party vote matters no matter where they live.  I still find people who say they may not bother to vote because they live in a safe Labour electorate, or a safe National electorate.  But under MMP, every single party vote matters (unless of course you are contemplating voting for one of the very small parties).

The coming election will almost certainly be more like an old-fashioned two-horse race than any we have seen since the first MMP election in 1996.  It is vitally important that all voters understand they have one basic choice: a government dominated by Labour or one led by National.

Finally, may I thank our President, Judy Kirk, and our General Manager, Steven Joyce, for the fantastic job they do for the party.  With their hard work and your support, we can look forward to a successful election!

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