Watkins on Parliament’s 1st day

Tracy Watkins writes:

So far so shambolic. If this is a taste of things to come in the new Parliament, get ready for a wild ride.

Labour has run hard up against the reality of dealing with the biggest single Opposition party ever, and the panicked scenes as it tried to bargain its way out of an embarrassing vote to elect the new Speaker are a memory it will want to bury quick smart.

While Labour was still scrambling to recover from that debacle, Foreign Minister Winston Peters dropped a bombshell, serving legal papers taking broad aim at a bunch of Opposition MPs, political staffers, a government department chief executive, and journalists, before heading overseas.

It’s a fair bet that this is not what Labour’s strategists and senior ministers wanted day one of the rest of the next three years to look like.

Winston will be the gift that keeps on giving. He’ll push his personal agendas at the expense of the Government’s.

Ardern insists Labour knew it always had the numbers, but wanted the Speaker elected by consensus, rather than by a vote.

That may be so.

It’s bullshit. There is no way they would have agreed to the select committee changes unless they were crapping their pants that they did not have the numbers.

Their claim that they did it because the Speaker should not face a contested election is farcical as it was Chris Hipkins himself who nominated Mallard vs Carter in 2013. Ardern and Hipkins are lying rather than admitting they stuffed up.

There has been a lot of posturing about the select committee issue in recent days but Hipkins’ refusal to even return National’s calls seems to be what got the Opposition particularly incensed.

That’s a lot of arrogance in their first week on the job.

But Labour should take it as a lesson to live by for the next three years. National is a new phenomenon in our Parliament – a large, well-resourced, and popular Opposition that has a hard-earned reputation as a formidable and well-oiled machine.

A lot of that reputation was earned through its exploitation of the huge resources that go with a Beehive office. The loss of those resources will be telling over time. But if Labour expected National to come back weakened and demoralised from the election loss, it has been given a big wake-up call.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how motivated many National MPs are.