New Zealand National Party

The National Party was formed in May 1936, but its roots go considerably further back. The party came about as the result of a merger between the United Party (known as the Liberal Party until 1927, except for a short period between 1925 and 1927 when it used the name "National Party") and the Reform Party.[7] The United Party gained its main support from the cities, and drew upon businesses for money and upon middle class electors for votes,[13] while the Reform Party had a rural base and received substantial support from farmers,[14] who then formed a substantial proportion of the population.

Historically, the Liberal and Reform parties had competed against each other, but from 1931 until 1935 a United–Reform Coalition held power in New Zealand.[15] The coalition went into the 1935 election under the title of the "National Political Federation", a name adopted to indicate that the grouping intended to represent New Zealanders from all backgrounds (in contrast to the previous situation, where United served city-dwellers and Reform served farmers). However, because of the effects of the Great Depression and a perception that the existing coalition government had handled the situation poorly, the National Political Federation lost heavily in 1935 to the Labour Party, the rise of which had prompted the alliance. The two parties were cut down to 19 seats between them. Another factor was a third party, the Democrat Party formed by Albert Davy, a former organiser for the coalition who disapproved of the "socialist" measures that the coalition had introduced. The new party split the conservative vote and aided Labour's victory.[16]

Adam Hamilton was the first leader of the National Party.

In hopes of countering Labour's rise, United and Reform decided to turn their alliance into a single party.[17] This party, the New Zealand National Party, was formed at a meeting held in Wellington on 13 and 14 May 1936. Erstwhile members of the United and Reform parties made up the bulk of the new party.[17] The United Party's last leader, George Forbes, Prime Minister from 1930 until 1935, opened the conference; he served as Leader of the Opposition from May until November, when former Reform MP Adam Hamilton, who had been a minister in the coalition government was elected the merged party's first leader. He got the top job primarily because of a compromise between Forbes and Reform leader Gordon Coates, neither of whom wished to serve under the other. Hamilton led the party into its first election in 1938. He was unable to counter Labour's popular Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage effectively. Because of this, perceptions that he remained too much under the control of Coates and his lack of real support from his party colleagues, Hamilton failed to prevent Labour's re-election in 1938. In 1940, former Reform MP Sidney Holland replaced Hamilton. William Polson "acted effectively as Holland's deputy".[18] One former Reform MP Bert Kyle resigned in 1942 in protest at the "autocratic" behaviour of Holland and the new party organisation.[19]

In the 1943 election, National reduced Labour's majority from 12 seats to four. In the 1946 election, National made further gains, but Labour was able to cling to a one-seat majority. However, in the 1949 election, thirteen years after the party's foundation, National won power after taking eight seats off Labour, and Holland became prime minister.

Sir Sidney Holland was the first National Prime Minister, 1949–1957

Sidney Holland was finance minister as well as prime minister in the new government. In 1949 National had campaigned on "the private ownership of production, distribution and exchange". Once in power the new Holland Government proved decidedly administratively conservative, retaining, for instance, compulsory unionism and the welfare state set up by the previous Labour government.[20]

In 1951 the Waterfront Dispute broke out, lasting 151 days. The National government stepped into the conflict, acting in opposition to the maritime unions. Holland also used this opportunity to call the 1951 snap election. Campaigning on an anti-Communist platform and exploiting the Labour Opposition's apparent indecisiveness, National returned with an increased majority, gaining 54 parliamentary seats out of 80.

In the 1954 election, National was elected to a third term, though losing some of its seats. Towards the end of his third term, however, Holland became increasingly ill, and stepped down from the leadership shortly before the general election in 1957. Keith Holyoake, the party's long-standing deputy leader, took Holland's place. Holyoake, however, had insufficient time to establish himself in the public mind as Prime Minister, and lost in the election later that year to Labour, then led by Walter Nash.[21]

Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister, 1957 and 1960–1972

Nash's government became very unpopular as Labour acquired a reputation for poor economic management, and much of the public saw its 1958 Budget, known since as the "Black Budget", as miserly.[22] After only one term in office, Labour suffered defeat at the hands of Holyoake and the National Party in the elections of 1960.

Holyoake's government lasted twelve years, the party winning re-election three times (in 1963, 1966, and 1969). However, during this period Social Credit arose, which broke the National/Labour duopoly in parliament, winning former National seats from 1966. Holyoake retired from the premiership and from the party leadership at the beginning of 1972, and his deputy, Jack Marshall, replaced him.[19]

Marshall suffered the same fate as Holyoake. Having succeeded an experienced leader in an election-year, he failed to establish himself in time. Marshall had an added disadvantage; he had to compete against the much more popular and charismatic Labour leader Norman Kirk, and lost the ensuing election. Unpopular policies, including initiating clear felling of parts of the Warawara kauri forest, also needlessly alienated voters.[19]

Sir Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister, 1975–1984

Within two years the National Party removed Marshall as its parliamentary leader and replaced him with Robert Muldoon, who had previously served as Minister of Finance. An intense contest between Kirk and Muldoon followed. Kirk became ill and died in office (1974); his successor, Bill Rowling, proved no match for Muldoon, and in the 1975 election, National under Muldoon returned comfortably to power.

The Muldoon administration, which favoured interventionist economic policies, arouses mixed opinions amongst the free-market adherents of the modern National. Bill Birch's "Think Big" initiatives, designed to invest public money in energy self-sufficiency, stand in contrast to the party's contemporary views.[23] Muldoon's autocratic leadership style became increasingly unpopular with both the public and the party, and together with disgruntlement over economic policy led to an attempted leadership change in 1980. Led by ministers Derek Quigley, Jim McLay, and Jim Bolger, the challenge (dubbed the "colonels' coup") against Muldoon aimed to replace him with Brian Talboys, his deputy. However, the plan collapsed as the result of Talboys' unwillingness, and Muldoon kept his position.[24]

A former National Party logo, used during the Muldoon era

Under Muldoon, National won three consecutive general elections in 1975, 1978 and 1981. However, public dissatisfaction grew, and Muldoon's controlling and belligerent style of leadership became less and less appealing. In both the 1978 and 1981 elections, National gained fewer votes than the Labour opposition, but could command a small majority in Parliament because of the then-used First Past the Post electoral system.

Dissent within the National Party continued to grow, however, with rebel National MPs Marilyn Waring and Mike Minogue causing particular concern to the leadership, threatening National's thin majority in parliament. When, in 1984, Marilyn Waring refused to support Muldoon's policies on visits by nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships, Muldoon called a snap election. Muldoon made the television announcement of this election while visibly inebriated, and some believe[19] that he later regretted the decision to "go to the country". National lost the election to Labour under David Lange.

Jim Bolger, Prime Minister, 1990–1997

Shortly after this loss, the National Party removed Muldoon from the leadership. Jim McLay, who had replaced Duncan MacIntyre as deputy leader shortly before the election, became the new leader.[25] McLay, an urban liberal with right-wing views on economics, however, failed to restore the party's fortunes. In 1986 Jim Bolger took over the leadership with the support of centrists within the party.[26]

In the 1990 election National defeated Labour in an electoral landslide and formed a new government under Jim Bolger. However, the party lost some support from Muldoon era policy based conservatives when it continued the economic reforms which had ultimately led to the defeat of the previous Labour government—these policies, started by Labour Party Finance Minister Roger Douglas and popularly known as Rogernomics, centred on the privatisation of state assets and on the removal of tariffs and subsidies. These policies alienated traditional Labour supporters, who saw them as a betrayal of the party's social service based character, but did not appear to appease the membership base of the non-parliamentary party either, which still had a significant supporter base for the statist intervention style policies of the Muldoon Government.

Many more conservative and centrist National supporters preferred Muldoon's more authoritarian and interventionist policies over the free-market liberalism promoted by Douglas. However, the new National Party Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson, strongly supported Rogernomics, believing that Douglas had not gone far enough. Her policies—dubbed "Ruthanasia"— encouraged two MPs to leave the National Party and form the Liberal Party. Richardson's views also met with considerable opposition within the National Party Parliamentary Caucus and for a time caused damage to the party's membership base.[27]

At the 1993 election, National was narrowly able to retain government owing partly to a slight economic recovery and the opposition being split between three competing parties. National's unprecedented eighteen-seat majority had virtually disappeared and the country faced an election night hung parliament for the first time since 1931, with National one seat short of the required 50 seats to govern. Final special votes counted over the following days revealed National had won Waitaki, allowing it to form a government with the majority of one seat but required the election of a Speaker from the opposition benches (Peter Tapsell of the Labour Party) to hold a working majority in the House. At the same time as the election, however, a referendum took place which established the MMP electoral system for future use in New Zealand general elections as widespread dissatisfaction with the existing political system led to reform. This would have a significant impact on New Zealand politics. Some National Party MPs defected to a new grouping, United New Zealand in mid-1995 whilst other splinter parties emerged. And, as a result of the new electoral mechanics, the New Zealand First party, led by former National MP and former Cabinet minister Winston Peters, held the balance of power after the 1996 election. After a prolonged period of negotiation lasting nearly two months, in which New Zealand First played National and Labour off against each other (both parties negotiated complete coalition agreements), New Zealand First entered into a coalition with National despite the fact many expected Peters to form such a coalition with Labour.

Under the coalition agreement, Peters became Deputy Prime Minister and had the post of Treasurer especially created by the Crown for him. New Zealand First extracted a number of other concessions from National in exchange for its support. The influence of New Zealand First angered many National MPs, particularly Jenny Shipley.[28]

Dame Jenny Shipley, Prime Minister, 1997–1999

When, in 1997, Shipley toppled Bolger to become National's new leader, relations between National and its coalition partner quickly deteriorated. After Shipley sacked Peters from Cabinet in 1998, New Zealand First split into two groups and half the MPs followed Peters out of the coalition but the remainder broke away, establishing themselves as independents or as members of new parties of which none survived the 1999 election. From the latter group National gained enough support to continue in government with additional confidence support of Alamein Kopu a defect Alliance List MP.[29] The visibly damaged National Government managed to survive the parliamentary term, but lost the election to Labour's Helen Clark and the Alliance's Jim Anderton, who formed a coalition government leaving National in opposition for nine years.

Shipley continued to lead the National Party until 2001, when Bill English replaced her. English, however, proved unable to gain traction against Clark, and National suffered its worst-ever electoral defeat in the 2002 election, gaining only 27 of 120 seats.[30] Many hoped that English would succeed in rebuilding the party, given time, but a year later polling showed the party performing only slightly better than in the election. In October 2003 English gave way as leader to Don Brash, a former governor of the Reserve Bank who had joined the National Parliamentary caucus in the 2002 election.

Under Brash, the National Party's overall popularity with voters improved markedly. Mostly, however, the party achieved this by "reclaiming" support from electors who voted for other centre-right parties in 2002. National's campaigning on race relations, amid claims of preferential treatment of Māori, and amid their opposition to Labour Party policy during the foreshore-and-seabed controversy, generated considerable publicity and much controversy.[31] Strong campaigning on a tax-cuts theme in the lead-up to the 2005 election, together with a consolidation of centre-right support, may have contributed to the National Party's winning 48 out of 121 seats in Parliament. National, however, remained the second-largest party in Parliament (marginally behind Labour, which gained 50 seats), and had fewer options for forming a coalition government. With the formation of a new Labour-dominated Government, National remained the major Opposition party. Before the leadership of John Key, the National Party had made renewed efforts to attract social conservative voters, through adoption of anti-abortion and anti-same-sex marriage policies.

In the 2005 general election run up, it was revealed that the Exclusive Brethren had distributed attack pamphlets critical of the Labour party and praising of National to letterboxes throughout New Zealand.[32] Labour insisted that National had close ties to and prior knowledge of these attacks, which was repeatedly denied by National. It was later admitted by the leader Don Brash that he indeed did have knowledge of the plan, a statement that was contradicted by MP Gerry Brownlee who subsequently denied the National party had any foreknowledge.[33]

After the 2005 election defeat Don Brash's leadership of National came under scrutiny from the media, and political watchers speculated on the prospect of a leadership-challenge before the next general election due in 2008. Don Brash resigned on 23 November 2006, immediately before the release of Nicky Hager's book The Hollow Men, which contained damaging revelations obtained from private emails. John Key became the leader of the National caucus on 27 November 2006. Key fostered a more "centrist" image, discussing issues such as child poverty.

Sir John Key, Prime Minister, 2008–2016

On 8 November 2008 the National Party won 58 seats in the general election. The Labour Party, which had spent three terms in power, conceded the election and Prime Minister Helen Clark stepped down. National formed a minority government under John Key with confidence-and-supply support from the ACT Party (5 seats), the Māori Party (5 seats) and United Future (1 seat). On 19 November the Governor-General swore in the new National-led government.[34] In Key's first Cabinet he gave the ACT Party's Rodney Hide and Heather Roy ministerial portfolios outside Cabinet, and the Māori Party's Tāriana Turia and Pita Sharples the same. United Future leader Peter Dunne retained his ministerial post outside Cabinet which he had held within the immediately preceding Labour Government.

National came to power in the continuing wake of a financial crisis. In response to New Zealand's rising debt, Finance Minister Bill English made budget deficit-reduction his main priority for the first term. The government also cut taxes on all income; the top personal tax rate was lowered from 39% to 38% and then 33% in 2010.[35]

At the 26 November 2011 general election, National gained 47.31% of the party vote, the highest percentage gained by any political party since MMP was introduced, helped by a lower voter turnout and the misfortunes of its traditional support parties.[36] A reduced wasted vote enabled the party to gain 59 seats in Parliament, one more than in 2008. National re-entered confidence-and-supply agreements with ACT (one seat) and United Future (one seat) on 5 December 2011, enabling it to form a minority government with the support of 61 seats in the new 121-seat Parliament. National also re-entered a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Māori Party on 11 December 2011 for extra insurance, despite the parties differing on National's contentious plans to partially sell (or "extend the mixed ownership model to") four state-owned enterprises. This nearly led to a cancellation of the agreement in February 2012 over Treaty of Waitangi obligations for the mixed ownership companies, and again in July 2012 over water rights.

The government introduced the "mixed ownership model" plan, in which the Government planned to reduce its share in Genesis Energy, Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power and Solid Energy from 100% to 51% and Air New Zealand from 74% to 51%, and sell off the remainder. The plans to sell down Solid Energy were later axed due to the company's poor financial position. A citizens-initiated referendum on the sell-downs returned a 67.3% vote in opposition (on a turnout of 45.1%).[37]

The National Government won a third term at the 2014 general election. The National Party won 47.04% of the party vote, and increased its seats to 60. National resumed its confidence and supply agreements with ACT and United Future.[38] The National government extended free general practitioner visits to children under 13 as part of their 2014 election package, as well as extending paid parental leave by two weeks to 16 weeks.[6] The National parliamentary caucus was split on the issue of same-sex marriage in 2014.[39]

Throughout his second and third terms, Key campaigned heavily in favour of free-trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.[40]

After serving Prime Minister for eight years, Key announced his resignation as the party leader on 5 December 2016. He stepped down as Prime Minister on 12 December.[41] Key's deputy Bill English was acclaimed as the party's new leader on 12 December 2016 after Health Minister Jonathan Coleman and Minister of Police Judith Collins withdrew from the leadership election.[42][43]

In the 2017 general election, National's share of the party vote dropped to 44.4%. It lost four seats, dropping to 56, but remained the largest party in Parliament. Two of the National government's three support parties lost representation in parliament.[10] New Zealand First, led by Winston Peters, held the balance of power, and formed a coalition with Labour, who also gained Green Party support, marking an end to the 9-year National government. English announced his intention to stay on as party leader until the 2020 general election[44] but subsequently resigned.[45] On 27 February 2018, English was succeeded by Simon Bridges.[46]

Following the Christchurch Mosque shootings, the party removed content from their website which indicated opposition to the UN Migration Compact; a position also espoused by the terrorist in his manifesto.[47][48] On 2 July 2020, however, the party's new leader Todd Muller confirmed in response to a question from a journalist that the party was still opposed to the pact, although it was not an issue he was focused on.[49]

On 22 May 2020, following poor poll results for the party during the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand,[50] the National Party held an emergency caucus meeting and voted to oust both leader Simon Bridges and deputy leader Paula Bennett, replacing them with Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye, respectively.[51] Less than two months later, Muller resigned citing that his position had "become untenable from a health perspective".[52] This came after a series of gaffes and scandals surrounding Muller and the National caucus during his tenure, triggering the second leadership election in as many months. He was succeeded by Judith Collins.[53] Kaye, who served as interim leader during the hours between Muller's resignation and Collins's election, was succeeded by Gerry Brownlee. Collins led the party through the 2020 election, but was unable to recoup polling losses seen by the party throughout 2020 in time for the election, leading to the party losing 23 seats and suffering the second worst defeat in its history. Brownlee, who was the party campaign manager, lost his electorate seat, making it back as an MP via the party list and resigning as deputy leader two weeks later. He was replaced by Shane Reti, while Collins vowed to stay on as leader into the next election.

On 1 February 2021, Collins announced that the National Party would contest the Māori electorates at the next New Zealand general election.[54] Current National party leader Christopher Luxon confirmed they would still be contesting the seats under his leadership. [55]

On 24 November 2021, Collins announced that Bridges was being demoted and stripped of his portfolios, in what was seen by many inside and outside the caucus (including National MP and Bridges' brother in-law Simon O'Connor) as an act of political revenge.[56][57] O'Connor later announced that he was resigning his portfolios in protest, and demanded Collins' own resignation. Collins was removed as leader in an emergency caucus meeting the following morning, with Reti becoming interim leader.[58] Christopher Luxon was elected unopposed with Nicola Willis as his deputy after Simon Bridges bowed out.[59]

The National Party's core base has traditionally comprised European New Zealanders (Pākehā), social conservatives and rural voters,[69] although it targets other groups too. The party has exploited anxiety among conservative Pākehā voters that Labour privileges Māori at their expense – particularly during the foreshore-and-seabed controversy in the mid-2000s.[31] National has retained a reputation for showing more favour to farmers and to business than Labour; the party provides for its support through incentives for farmers.[70]

Key:
  National   Labour
PM: Prime Minister
LO: Leader of the Opposition

As of November 2021, there are nine living former party leaders, as seen below.

• 
  Sir Jim McLay
  served 1984–1986
  born 1945 (age 77)
• 
  Jim Bolger
  served 1986–1997
  born 1935 (age 87)
• 
  Dame Jenny Shipley
  served 1997–2001
  born 1952 (age 70)
• 
  Sir Bill English
  served 2001–03; 2016–18
  born 1961 (age 60)
• 
  Don Brash
  served 2003–2006
  born 1940 (age 82)
• 
  Sir John Key
  served 2006–2016
  born 1961 (age 61)
• 
  Simon Bridges
  served 2018–2020
  born 1976 (age 46)
• 
  Todd Muller
  served 2020
  born 1968 (age 53)
• 
  Judith Collins
  served 2020–2021
  born 1959 (age 63)

Short biographies of all presidents up to Sue Wood appear in Barry Gustafson's The First Fifty Years.