Garth George: National's hurtling to self-destruction

Back in October of 03 I predicted that the election of Don Brash as leader of the National Opposition in Parliament "will ensure that the party will not achieve the Treasury benches in 2005, and probably not again in my lifetime".

Nothing I have seen since has caused me to resile from that prediction; in fact such has been the former Reserve Bank Governor's maladroitness that I am beginning to doubt that the National Party will even survive as a political entity.

I suspect that come election day later this year the party, decimated in 02, will be lucky to get as many MPs into Parliament as the mere handful it has now.

And I predict that not only will Dr Brash never be Prime Minister, he will never be part of a Government because he will not survive in politics much after the upcoming election and certainly not beyond the choosing of the list in 2008.

This ageing conservative (me), who grew up with National Party politics and politicians, was given a brief surge of hope with Orewa I last year when Dr Brash enunciated so clearly and simply all that was wrong with reverse discrimination as it applied to Maori.

And, indeed, there was a huge surge in National's polls as the electorate's knee-jerk reaction kicked in, but any advantage was quickly frittered away, first with the sacking of Georgina te Heuheu as spokeswoman on Maori Affairs and then by the inability of Dr Brash and his caucus to keep the ball rolling.

Instead they sat back and twiddled their thumbs while the masterfully politically astute Labour Administration backpedalled like mad and one by one trumped every racial ace that Dr Brash had played.

And, while all this was happening, Dr Brash shunned the debating chamber, I suppose because he lacks the mongrel instinct so vital to an Opposition politician and has no defence against the consummate scrappers who inhabit the Labour front benches.

So by the time Orewa II came round, National was back polling about the same as it had been before Orewa I.

As for Orewa II, there was nothing in what Dr Brash had to say that hadn't already been said by someone or other, including scores of writers of letters to the editor of this newspaper.

The only feature of his address that was worth a second glance was his suggestion that adoption should be seen as a valid choice for women giving birth to children they perhaps would rather not have had.

It is simply a commentary on our times that this suggestion - for that is all it was - should have been met with such a squawk of outrage.

I have known a number of adopted children in my time and a more well-adjusted group of people would be hard to find. It is significant, perhaps, that not one of them has ever expressed a desire to know who his or her birth parents were; their adoptive parents are their parents and that's that.

Orewa II has brought a slight jump in National's poll figures but that is nothing more than another (much smaller) knee-jerk reaction, mostly on the part of those who can't abide the thought of anyone getting anything for nothing - except themselves, of course.

In any case, any advantage that might have accrued from Dr Brash's welfare prognostications has already been cancelled out by his sacking of Katherine Rich as the party's welfare spokeswoman.

Both Mrs te Heuheu and Mrs Rich were dumped because they disagreed with their leader. Which is not really surprising because Dr Brash is not a politician, he is still by nature a bureaucrat, and bureaucrats, particularly boss bureaucrats, can't stand anyone disagreeing with them.

No doubt any dissent is a threat to him because surely he is intelligent and sensitive enough to know that he hasn't really got a handle on his job and if he doesn't act quickly to squash dissenters, his leadership might be on the line.

Which it will be, of course - if not this year, then next year or the year after.

The real shame of it is, though, that his sackings have so seriously damaged the party, not the least by alienating women in general.

Mrs te Heuheu, a woman of enormous mana among Maori, didn't say much, but when she did it was worth listening to, and her dismissal will have alienated a large section of Maoridom, probably to the advantage of the Maori Party.

Mrs Rich has been one of the National caucus' star turns, who is not only more than competent in her shadow welfare portfolio but one of the few able to stand up to the Labour artillery and give a good return fire.

Thus does the National Party continue, sadly, to self-destruct, and I fear for the future of what was once a political organisation par excellence, the natural party of government for nearly half a century.

My only hope is that when the political history of the first years of the 21st century is written, Dr Brash will not go down as the ultimate destroyer of the once-proud National Party, but as the politician who put paid to the pestiferous Act Party.

Come the election, Act will disappear off our political landscape with about as much disturbance (and even less regret) as a prebble dropped into a stagnant pond.