Heather du Plessis-Allan: Parties playing nice for the sake of coalition

Meka Whaitiri.

Opinion

One of the more remarkable aspects of Meka Whaitiri’s defection from Labour was how nice everyone was to each other afterwards.

No one in Labour really took a crack at her. They had every reason to. They must’ve been furious.

Whaitiri hadn’t had the decency to give any of them a heads up. Not even Willie Jackson, the man she had co-chaired Labour’s Māori caucus alongside. And then not afterwards either. She wouldn’t take any calls. Not even from the Prime Minister.

If they felt angry, they hid it. Jackson said he was disappointed. They “were mates”. Kelvin Davis was understanding: “obviously she had her reasons”. Kiri Allan joked about being sent to to talk to Whaitiri, being unable to talk her around, instead being invited to do the same and defect.

Lols. Apparently a minister quitting five months out from an election was just No Big Deal.

The Māori Party returned the courtesy. No one said anything unkind about Labour. Not co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer on the day after the defection, in an interview when she was handed chance after chance to smash Labour for going soft on Māori reforms.

Not even Whaitiri, the woman who was unhappy enough in Labour to do the remarkable thing of defecting, who was upset enough to not take phone calls. Not even she said anything critical of the government she had just left. That is why no one actually knows why she defected. Because telling us would be criticising Labour. And clearly, that’s not in the strategy.

Neither side pulled the legal trigger to kick Whaitiri out of Parliament. Instead, they seemed to go out of their way to work around the law to avoid that.

Everyone was playing nice. Because the election depends on it.

It is very likely Labour will need both the Greens and - importantly here - the Māori Party to form a government after October. The polls have been telling us that for a year.

That’s already a tall ask for swinging voters. New Zealand has never elected Labour, the Greens and this radical version of the Māori Party into government before.

Those parties’ strategists must know they’re already at a disadvantage. They must be calculating that if centre voters are faced with the choice of Labour, the Greens and the Māori Party; or National and Act, voters would probably choose the latter. It’s a choice of what you’ve never had before versus what you’ve had. Voters have never had this threesome but they’ve had National and Act in the John Key years.

It’s also how much radical you can handle. On the right there’s only one party: Act. On the left, there’s two. And the Māori Party are so way out that it turns off 97 per cent of voters.

Then there’s tax. Voters get nervous on taxes. The left are gambling with tax at this election. Labour might propose one. The Greens and the Māori Party are both calling for one on the rich. That’s high-risk at election time.

The last thing to repel voters further from the left would be infighting.

Had Labour and the Māori Party launched war on each other this week, the Opposition would have made hay with it, running out the line that if the parties can’t get on with each other now, they won’t get on with each other in five months.

Instead, they sorted things out amicably. Which is what you’d expect coalition partners in a government to do. Which tells you, that’s what they’re expecting they might be.

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.