Sam Uffindell's political career is probably over. Photo / Mark Mitchell
OPINION:
National leader Christopher Luxon wanted to spend Monday talking about idle and delinquent youth - and in a way he did.
On Sunday, Luxon announced a social investment policy that would help young people at risk of long-term unemployment into work. The policy would give career coaching to under 25s who had been unemployed for three months or more, and $1000 for staying off a benefit for a year to people who had been on a benefit for a year or more.
But by Monday afternoon, the National Party was talking about a wholly different delinquent youth, one of its own MPs, Sam Uffindell, who admitted in a Stuff story he had beaten a younger student whilst a boarder at King's College. There are now other allegations that he terrorised flatmates whilst a student at Otago University. Uffindell admits drinking and using cannabis at Otago, but disputes significant parts of the flatmates' account.
The scandal is playing out on two fronts. The first is what Uffindell did, and what it represents. The second is how the party and its new leader responds to them.
Uffindell's political career is toast - barring divine intervention and more serious contrition. As things stand, he represents a toxic cocktail of things that are wrong about New Zealand and the National Party. Worse still, he's a caricature of everything the Labour and the Greens want National to be and undermines several arguments National is trying to make about what Labour is doing wrong.
His continued existence in caucus ties National's hands.
National has alleged Labour is "soft on crime" and "out of touch with reality and the mood of our country when it comes to serious violent crime, just how out of touch they are when they attempt to cut all the consequences of really bad behaviour out of the criminals" (the words of Paul Goldsmith speaking on three strikes repeal).
Luxon told National's annual conference at the weekend that unemployed young people who were getting a "free ride" under Labour would stop.
Yet Uffindell's life story would argue National has one rule for ordinary people committing crimes, and another for those who seek to become National MPs. If delinquent youth are getting a free ride under Labour, they appear to be getting a free ride into National. Uffindell, after all, admits to having hit or tackled so many people at school that he doesn't remember the precise number of offences.
There's of course nothing wrong with contrition and remorse leading to rehabilitation and getting on in life. But the argument the current National Party is making is that the Government's "soft" approach is a scourge.
Labour is the party defending the principle of redemption and the dangerous consequence or writing people off because they fail to quickly reform.
National does have a story to tell about reforming troubled youth.
It believes in charter schools, which it argues offer better, more individualised education that young people in Uffindell's situation might need. No doubt there's a future social investment policy that would target a response to help violent young people - "thugs", to use Uffindell's terminology. Indeed, National itself has defended and extended laws that give young people a softer ride through the justice system than adults.
But Uffindell's own story undermines the argument National is trying to make about the way its policies give people a leg up. The story National tells about itself is that it's the party of people who seize opportunity to make something of themselves and their country.
Introducing himself to party members at National's conference this weekend, Luxon said he succeeded because he "work[ed] hard" and was "aspirational".
Uffindell's problem is that he appears to have spurned rather than seized the significant opportunities he was given as a child. He appears to have succeeded despite his lack of effort, rather than because of it.
An education at King's College (2022 boarding fees $40,000 a year) would be a golden ticket for most young people, but Uffindell appears not to have thought so. For many, expulsion from that school would have been a significant setback, but not Uffindell, who was given another shot at yet another elite school, St. Pauls (2022 boarding fees $39,000 a year). Instead of getting his act together there, he appears to have spurned this chance too, getting suspended for leaving school grounds without permission (he eventually finished his schooling there).
Uffindell disputes allegations about his violence at university, but if he finally became a dedicated student there, he did it, by his own admission, in between bouts of drinking and cannabis use (National was opposed to the decriminalisation of cannabis when it was put to a referendum in 2020).
It was only later that Uffindell managed to pull himself together, enter the world of banking, and become a family man, eventually convincing a National selection panel into putting him forward to become the party's Tauranga candidate.
Uffindell has broken laws the party wants to defend and strengthen, he has spurned the opportunities the party exhorts people to maximise, and is a living refutation of the doctrine of personal responsibility the party purports to exist for. Worse still, Uffindell is the embodiment of the Labour-Green caricature of National as a silver spoon caucus of mendacious patricians whose idea of "consequences" in public life depends on the accused's clubbability, rather than universal principles.
Uffindell's only conceivable future in Parliament is either to never talk about law and order again, or to discuss and be honest about the way in which his experience has informed his attitude to justice.
Neither of these paths appears open to him. A Tauranga MP can hardly keep silent on law and order, and National's current policy platform gives little opportunity for Uffindell to expound on justice without looking like a hypocrite.
When National wants to talk about how some career coaching and a $1000 employment bonus can turn people's lives around, it doesn't help having an MP who turned his back on an education that, in today's dollars, was worth about $40,000 a year. It plays into Labour's allegation that social investment is nothing but welfare for misers.
The only positive for National is Luxon's mostly competent handling of the catastrophe. Luxon's been lampooned for his awkward, executive-eese argot, but he quickly responded to both sets of allegations demonstrating a calm, fair way of handling the crisis.
First, by looking at the way "red flags" were raised and dealt with during Uffindell's pre-selection, then by acknowledging that he needed to be told about Uffindell's past much earlier, and finally by fronting up about the fact his office knew about the allegations.
It shows a quick ability to grasp what went wrong and how to fix it. Luxon moved fast on Wednesday to step back from his full-throated support of Uffindell, making it contingent on the outcome of a review into the latest allegations.
It would seem that if these are substantiated, Uffindell will be forced to go.
After a tango of missteps, back-steps, and false steps, National can see its current leader can at least weather a crisis - something all leaders must do.
As MPs put themselves forward for reselection, they will have to go through the party's new process for weeding out any other miscreants. Luxon will hope that most MPs survive such a process, but a significant test for him, in coming months, will be how he deals with any past deeds of current MPs who might be affected by the parties' new processes.
During the Jami-Lee Ross saga, when the National Party looked like it would sink beneath a rising tide of sleaze and scandal, one MP reminded me that in dark times like that, it helped to remember National had survived for more than 80 years.
It's true. National will weather this scandal like it, and other parties, have weathered so many others. Deputy leader Nicola Willis used the words of National's first leader to remind party delegates in Christchurch this weekend that the party stood for "a reduction of taxation so that enterprise may be encouraged, industries established and living costs reduced".
It's a simple ethos and it's one that is popular with a plurality of voters according to the most recent poll.
New Party President Sylvia Wood has promised to once again review the party's selection process. Luxon has also said he'll look at why problems weren't raised quickly enough with him.
The immediate problem for Luxon is dealing with the Uffindell problem quickly and ensuring the party continues its work attracting a better crop of candidates for 2023.
Outreach programmes have already started, and people in the party are confident National is reaching beyond the usual suspects and attracting new, more down-to-earth candidates.
National will need that to be true.
The party has enjoyed a remarkable turnaround under Luxon, but he's also been lucky to have an economic tailwind. Every quarter he has been in charge of National, inflation data has been worse than the quarter previous. Now, a Reserve Bank survey suggests inflation expectations are anchoring. It's likely that by the time the election rolls around, inflation will be on the way to being tamed - a good story for the Government.
That will be the real test for Luxon. Taking the fight to Labour with the economic wind at his back is one thing, as previous National leaders have discovered, fighting Labour during a more benign economic environment is something else entirely, and if there's one thing you can say about Wellington, it's that the wind can change very quickly.
This is no longer the concern of Uffindell, who, one suspects, will be spending a lot more time in balmy Tauranga.
For more from Thomas Coughlan, listen to On the Tiles, the Herald's politics podcast
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