NZ Country Party
New Zealand First had, as the pundits had predicted, been polling well below the 5% threshold since the first Hundred Days of the Ardern Government, when Winston Peters resigned from the party leadership and from Parliament in order to take up a new position as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom in early 2020. Twenty-seven years after the party's formation, it was to have its first contested leadership election between Winston's Diadochi.
That was the theory, anyway: the Deputy Leader, Fletcher Tabuteau, announced almost immediately that he was happy in his current role, while Shane Jones quickly fell in behind the respected Minister for Internal Affairs, Tracey Martin. The other touted challenger, Ron Mark, took a different path. Ever since his humiliating defeat as Deputy Leader by Tabuteau in early 2018, he had seen that he would not have the caucus votes to become Leader, and probably wouldn't be placed high enough on the List to get into Parliament again - even if the party did.
Mark split off. He had supporters: two of the NZ First MPs who had been the least impressed with the coalition with Labour and the fruits thereof. Mark Patterson was a former National member who had quixotically attempted to replace Bill English as Clutha-Southland candidate, and - after defecting to NZ First in 2015 - was subsequently linked to the leaks surrounding the behaviour of Todd Barclay. Clayton Mitchell was another, less recent, National convert, but had been disappointed by being snubbed for ministerial office and had weathered severe criticism from Labour and Green members over his failed private members' bill to make English an official language of New Zealand. The three of them viewed their personal loyalty to their party as null and void now that their captain had left them in the lurch.
There was a problem with splitting off, though. One of the coalition's first achievements was passing a Waka-jumping bill which would declare vacant the seat of any MP defecting from their party, designed for exactly this situation. As such, the Ron Mark clique were forced to engage in ignominious negotiations with Tracey Martin's party. The upshot was this: the dissident MPs would be allowed to officially retain the NZ First whip but could rebel at will, and would receive one third of the funding and speaking time allocated to NZ First as a whole - a similar arrangement to that enjoyed by Jim Anderton when he formed the Progressive Party in 2002. And like that situation, this split cost Labour their majority. Mark resigned as Defence Minister immediately, to be replaced by NZ First loyalist and former Army officer Darroch Ball - who had been in negotiations to leave with Ron Mark and his friend Mitchell until he realised that he was first in line to receive Mark's portfolio.
Not wishing to cause early elections and thereby lose substantial funding, Mark's group voted on a tiresome issue-by-issue basis for the last months of the parliamentary term. This slowed down the process of government, of course, but it allowed Mark to chalk up some policy wins such as keeping Agriculture out of the Emissions Trading Scheme and the purchase of two new planes for the RNZAF.
You see, Mark, Patterson and Mitchell were in the process of forming a new party, and needed some high-profile victories. Their chosen vehicle was to be a Nordic-style agrarian party - a concept that Mark had come across on Wikipedia - which would argue that both National and Labour had neglected regional communities and primary industries, that much greater powers should be devolved to local government, that farmers needed access to Reserve Bank funding and that the only good immigrant was a kiwifruit-picker who would return home in August. Most importantly, it would also claim to be centrist (agrarian parties in Scandinavia have governed with both right and left at various points) and therefore inherit Winston's favoured kingmaker role.
They also claimed to be environmentalist, but came under fire for their opposition to preventing farmers from dumping cow shit in rivers.
Country NZ, therefore, was launched in April, harking back to the Labour-aligned, well-respected Country Party of the 1930s, and definitely not the fascisty Country Party of the 1960s. Time will only tell whether they will be re-elected in September - while both NZ First and the Country Party are polling beneath the threshold, Labour have stood aside for the former party's Shane Jones in Whangarei and the latter's Leader Ron Mark in Wairarapa, in an attempt to prevent centre-left votes from being wasted in this very tight election.
When asked for comment on the new party, Sir Winston replied "I'm sorry, I misheard - I thought you said
Country".