National no friends | The Jackal

23 Aug 2017

National no friends

The Prime Minister of New Zealand has recently been travelling the country trying to gain support for the National party at the upcoming election. It’s obviously hard going and English looks tired, perhaps because there's a marked lack of interest by the public in what National is once again proposing.

The photographs are portraying a very lonely Bill English who appears in interviews to be sick of faking the supposed positive aspects of National's policy announcements. It’s no surprise really, being that National now has a lack of coalition partners to chose from and the policy impetus is almost entirely with the Labour party.


It will be highly concerning to National that they may find themselves without any coalition options after the election, a fact that has clearly not been lost on the unelected PM. The United Future leader Peter Dunne unexpectedly quit and Act party leader David Seymour is looking very shaky in Epsom.

Combine those facts with NZ First leader Winston Peters once again going on the attack over the sale of state-owned land to a Chinese company and the Maori party saying they would rather work with Labour and the Greens, and it could be all over rover for the National party this September.


Clearly their leader is underperforming and failing to promote the right wings' business case properly, so National and their propagandists have gone very negative with attacks on the Labour party over their proposed taxes on water and capital gains, two policies that according to recent polls have a large majority of voter support.

Yesterday, Stuff reported:

National goes after Labour in new attack ads - but not Ardern

National have released a Facebook attack ad seeking to needle the Labour Party on tax, on the same day the party unveiled a new-look TV ad.

The National Party ad features Housing spokesman Phil Twyford talking about Labour's tax plans. It follows another recent attack ad on Grant Robertson.

Both are hashtagged "#LetsTaxThis", a play on Labour's actual slogan: "Let's Do This".

The spanner in the works as always for the left is a compliant media mixing Labour’s messages and providing a lopsided view on some very worthwhile policies, an advantage to National that will be their only help with traction this campaign cycle. Otherwise they're spinning old tires with some very worn out tread.

Even the Green party, despite a number of controversies, appears to have constructive cut through for their policy announcements, especially online.

There is clearly a stark difference between Ardern’s positive approach and National’s negative tactics while English re-hashes old policies most people are tired of hearing about. Combine those campaigning differences with the leader’s diametrically opposed personality traits and it’s clear that National isn’t just in trouble, they’re getting caned hard.