On National’s Fraught Journey Back To The Centre
Monday, 16 January 2023.Article by : Gordon Campbell in Scoop https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2301/S00012/on-nationals-fraught-journey-back-to-the-centre.htm (My editing-- ACW)
Ever since Christopher Luxon became leader, National has adopted a “small target” strategy. This consists of offering nothing to distract the media from its focus on the government’s shortcomings and the public’s discontent with its performance.
In particular, the strategy involves releasing no policy alternatives whose own failings might then be picked apart, and become the story. It assumes the media will largely shrug and accept the stonewalling on policy and move on. Here’s how the comms experts define how the strategy should be used by corporates facing unwelcome media scrutiny:
… There's barely a story that doesn't pass. They all do. So I think it's really important- if you're able - to implement ‘small target’ to put off the press, so they go and chase another element of the story, they go and chase another organisation or the regulator or whatever it is. [If] you can satisfy [the media] that that's all you're going to say and it's going to be minimal, they will probably report that. That's boring, so they're gonna go chase a different aspect of [the story].
Works like a charm. So here we are in election year, over 12 months after National changed leaders and we still have no idea what – for example- Luxon’s alternative (if any) to Three Waters would look like, or even what is the ballpark size of his promised tax cut package. Nor do we have any inkling of how National would pay for said tax package, what infrastructure spending he would prioritise, what debt levels he would accept, and what services Luxon would cut to make it all affordable etc.etc. In a similar vein, the impact of what Luxon has said on superannuation lies decades in the future. His key social policy – “social investment” – is a holdover from the Bill English era, with no clues as to how Luxon would address the failings detected in it at the time.
