Election 2020: David Cormack - With NZ First polling so low it's scary gap that fringe-right can fill

Winston Peters and Shane Jones at the Whangarei Town Basin during the 2020 election campaign. Photo / Tania Whyte

COMMENT:

You've got to look past the majors. We're in MMP now.

While the headlines of the most recent 1 News / Colmar Brunton poll were Labour able to govern alone, National struggling to go anywhere, and the Greens and Act both doing okay it was the other numbers that interested me.

NZ First had dropped down to 2 per cent, looking very likely this is the end of Winston Peters' career and in many ways that brings in some risk.

I'm not a fan of NZ First.

Sometimes their policies, particularly around economics, are headed in my direction, but for the most part the party has been a blight on progress in New Zealand. Winston has even made that a feature of NZ First's campaign, calling them a handbrake on his presumed socialist utopia that a Labour/Greens government would bring in. I think he's misread the room here — people don't want a handbrake, they want certainty and progress. And Labour definitely isn't socialist.

But if you take NZ First's vote share of 2 per cent, the New Conservatives at 2 per cent, Advance New Zealand at 1 per cent and Act at 7 per cent, that's 12 per cent — or just about one eighth of voters — who are at the far right end of the country culturally.

One of the benefits of Winston is that he'd say horrible bigoted things during an election campaign, quite often racist, but then once given the levers of power would never enact bigoted or racist policies. This meant that he'd soak up a lot of the bigoted vote which would then be rendered benign.

With NZ First all but certain to be gone, there is scope for a charismatic leader to sop up that vote, and actually try to do something with it. This is a scary proposition.

New Zealand often talks about itself as being small-c conservative when it comes to our Overton window. We don't fall victim to the populism that has seen the rise of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and various other strongman parody politicians around the world, but that's only because we've had Winston to attract them.

He is the nightlight to the moths of the fringe-right. The racists, the anti-1080 crowd, the fervent pro-gun folk, the anti-5G people, they have more political heft than we like to think. They're just fractured.

Whichever party ends up leading the Government after the election, it needs to make sure that these people aren't ignored or left behind. It's often the strugglers who end up subscribing to these fringe beliefs.

Whoever leads New Zealand needs to remember they lead all of us, not just their supporters.

• David Cormack is the co-founder of a PR firm. He has worked for Labour and the Greens.