Mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.

I was a huge proponent of Andrew Little, seeing a bloke who not only has superb doctrine, but also a dry, wry sense of humour that might appeal to voters.

I was wrong.

What Little is, in fact, is a unionist, and that's the face he's shown to the NZ public. As opinion polls have shown, he hasn't won the party a vote, and Labour continues to languish a whole Cabinet behind National.

two major issues will define Little's leadership of Labour, and they were both complete fails:

TPP. When hard lefties but oldies like Shearer & Goff aren't prepared to damn it, it ought to have been blindingly obvious it was a bad move to oppose it, because the only organised groups against it were the morons from 1970s Soviet Marxism, Sure Bradford, John Minto, et al. The sensible move for Labour was to say what a good idea it was and point out the it all started with Helen Clark.

The Universal Benefit. It's actually a good idea, but it presupposes that voters have a brain, and they don't. What it did instead was give the ridiculous right of Whale Oil and Talkback Radio an infinite amount of sound-bite cannon fodder. Little now looks like a moving game of pint the tail on the donkey.

It is now abundantly clear that Key will walk to a fourth term as Prime Minister of NZ.

With one possible escape route.

The electorate is so bound up in personality politics that John Key is seen as a man of the people. The only reason for that is that there has never been a viable opponent. From the abysmal Cunliffe thinking he could drink Johnny under the table to Shearer and his misty-eyed wimp act, now to Little with his caricatured 1970s unionist outlook, Labour has shown nothing.

Key is actually an anathema to most Kiwis. He is a smarmy dick in a country that loathes smarmy elitist dicks, he can barely talk coherently, he is a city-slicker and above all, a poseur. Going on breakfast radio and talking about whether he bonks his wife is about as funny as taking a shit on someone's doorstep, yet people are so politician-deprived they're actually laughing along with him. For all of NZ's previous history, he would have been laughed at, or maybe you've all forgotten Catholic Bill English donning boxing gloves?

The starvation of populist politicians is emphasised further by the public attitude to Jackie Ardern. She does nothing, says nothing but has a noce smile and people love her.

Labour has a politician capable of creating the person the public wants, and like a top racehorse, he has the pedigree to go with it, and there may be a couple of examples in USA of pedigree helping political campaigns, or maybe you've never heard of Hillary Clinton & George W Bush.

Stuart Nash.

Stuart is great-grandson on Sir Walter Nash, architect of the Black Budget, but who also stood up to the Marxism of John A Lee and the other firebrands of his day. He wouldn't need a lot of those balls to have infinitely more than the little pussy leading National right now.

Labour will lose the election horribly and not acting will just increase the pain. The timing is right, too. A decade of Labour in the wilderness, a decade of the most boring man in NZ as PM, an economy that is very fragile on the fringes, a time when traditional National support among farmers is at historical lows. Yes, it has been a decade of booming property prices, but it's also been a decade of increasing inequality, wage erosion and a seriously ill education department.

One shot: change leader in the next three months or slide into political irrelevancy forever.

 

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