National Party Feuding Breaks Out

Negative polling around Key's credibility has added fuel to internal National-ACT party feuding.

The Palino, Slater, Lusk, Luigi, Cook scandal has reawakened the closet warring within the National-ACT Party and is, according to The Bellman, causing the ABCollins faction much angst.

The Bellman assures anyone who will listen that the ABC faction has been closely tied with the Slater-Lusk organisation in the campaign to recruit National-ACT MPs and aspiring MPs who have entered politics under their tutelege to be ready to take over the leadership of the Party from John "PinoKeyo" Key.

What the polls show... the support for Key's National-ACT party is slipping away.

For a while, the Bellman says, Camp Collins was buoyed up by the increasingly obvious voter swing towards Labour and the Greens being recorded in the different polls (in particular the highly regarded  Roy Morgan polls) and their own internal polling. The Bellman reckons that the internal polling as recorded a growing disenchantment with both the Party and the leadership of Key which has given greater credibility to their plan to catapult "Crusher" Collins into the leadership before the 2014 election.

The ABCers, concerned by the crude and increasingly sleazey attempt to unseat Len Brown from the Auckland mayoralty by the Slater, Cook, Luigi group, has been forced to do a rethink of their strategy and association with the group.

While Collins likes to be seen as being ruthless and Thatcherlike in her dealings with political opponents on both sides of the House she, according to the Bellman, has drawn the line at the underhand and distinctly distasteful tactics being advocated and practised by Slater & Cook.

Slater's declaration on The Nation that politics is a dirty game, using dirty tactics, played by dirty individuals has shaken the ABC camp's confidence as it threatens to destroy any semblance of trust between the public and the politicians and thus destroy any belief that legislation is drafted and passed from an informed and clearly articulated point of view by men and women who have not been blackmailed into a position by vindictive outside agencies such as that represented by those associated with the Slater group.

The Slater, Cook, Luigi campaign, says the Bellman, has played into the Joyce- Key camp as they attempt to shore up both internal party and cabinet forces in order to retain control over the caucus as they seek to continue the programme of selling state assets and trying to take National-ACT into a third term. However, according to Andrea Vance in the SST 27.10.13, the ABC camp is preparing to hunker down to play a long term strategy using Lusk and Slater groomed MPs to create the climate to unsettle the Key-Joyce camp and thus take over the leadership of what looks to be becoming a grossly disfunctional, faction ridden National-ACT party. (see Colin Espiner's Sin City Blues article in the SST 27.10.13 connecting the dots between the Slater described "dirty politics" brigade inside the National Party.)

Key, whose tendency to make up "facts" when put on the spot when playing at being PM at home which negatively affects his credibility rating, has increasingly spent more time out of New Zealand than inside the country as he has adopted a policy of attempting to grandstand on the international stage as he seeks that "bubble- reputation, even unto the cannon's mouth."

None-the-less, the unease within the National-ACT party has continued unabated as relentless bad polling and a distinct feeling that possible coalition partners are heading into extinction ( a point noted by Key's desperate musings that he could have a cuppa with the Craig financed Conservatives), along with a growing conviction among the membership that a Labour-Green coalition is inevitable, continues to show a defeat looming at the ballot box come 2014.