Golriz Ghahraman faces two charges and will appear in court, National starts political year on a high and why King Charles will be booked into hospital next week in the latest NZ Herald headlines.
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Ministers are already back at work, with Cabinet committees starting up this week, ahead of thefirst Cabinet meeting next Tuesday.
Incidentally, National actually calls its retreat a “two-day caucus” (just one of a number of things known by different names depending on whether you’re in the press gallery or an MP, some others being the “bridge run/tile run”, for the daily pre-Question Time press stand-ups, and “3.2/Pickwicks” for the Beehive bar; you can tell how much an MP spends fraternising with the media by how easily they’re able to switch between Parliamentary dialects).
The retreat is “back to school” for the party’s significant crop of backbenchers (though most will have been doing some constituency work over the break).
And this retreat is mostly about the backbenchers, making it somewhat different from National’s retreat last year, which was about leader Christopher Luxon amping the caucus for the 2023 election. He announced a minor reshuffle and gassed about returning the local electorate, Napier, back to National control.
You probably don’t remember it, because a couple of hours later and 10 minutes down the road at Labour’s caucus retreat (the proximate locations were a happy accident), then-leader Jacinda Ardern announced she was calling it quits.
He’ll want to be careful with his words. Labour’s 2019 caucus retreat saw Ardern dub that year the year of “delivery”, which became something of a meme as the year went on. Luxon may want to set some expectations for the year, drawing a line under a rocky December for the Government.
MPs are buoyed by an oddly good poll from January that showed National in the 40s for the first time since Simon Bridges’ leadership, while Luxon opened up a large gap with Chris Hipkins as preferred prime minister. The other important indicator, the right track/wrong track poll, showed a huge leap in the number of people who think the country is, to quote National’s election slogan back at them, “back on track”.
It’s nice reading, but no one is putting too much stock into it given summer polling tends to be rosier for the incumbents, whose fortunes tend to rise with the tide of positive holiday sentiment. It’s hard to feel too grumpy about anything at the beach when even a very ominous “marine heatwave” sounds actually quite nice, frankly. Voters’ sentiments return to earth when they’re back at home, timing their showers thanks to water restrictions.
That said, a good poll, even if it’s a bit too good to be true, is always better than a bad poll - and National has seen its fair share of them as recently as this time in the last election cycle, when a rather sad and dejected crop of National MPs gathered at Wellington’s Basin Reserve for the 2021 retreat (you may remember that one better, thanks to a rather unflattering photograph of Luxon, resembling a toppled bowling pin, which became a well-used file photo).
Christopher Luxon takes a tumble while playing cricket at a National Party caucus retreat in 2021. Photo / Mark Mitchell
This year there are no announcements planned, unlike last year. This being a non-election year and a year in which National finds itself in government, the focus is easing the party’s crop of new MPs into their jobs and what is politely termed “expectation-setting”.
This is essential. The party has 22 “new” MPs (though two of these, Dan Bidois and Paulo Garciaare resurrectees from the 2020 wipeout). At 49 MPs, it’s a big caucus, which has a crop of very experienced members sinecured to Luxon’s ministry or occupying the whip’s office and a similarly large crop of backbenchers with somewhat less to do.
There are two risks here: the first is that a large backbench can breed instability if kept idle (see 2017-2020), though this is less of a risk when in government. The second is that without a crop of experienced MPs on the backbench, the class of 2023 won’t have anyone to show them the ropes.
The main lesson is, of course, “do what you’re told”, but the second and more important is to avoid doing dumb things that could get you in trouble.
Luxon’s oft-parodied corporate background comes in handy here. He’s said to be quite good with the human resources part of leadership - something that other leaders have lacked, having come through a more Parliamentary background, which can veer between bizarre and psychopathic when it comes to employment relations.
It can be a bit beige and by the book, but this week delivering another MP’s self-immolation underscored the fact you can never be too careful when it comes to ensuring your caucus is on the straight and narrow. One MP’s strife almost always blows back on the party at large.
The collateral political damage caused by errant MPs is something with which many in National also have some experience - experience they will be in no hurry to repeat.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
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