Auckland City Deal

Heather, I'll come out and say it. Rachel Smalley has been tasked with polishing a turd. You're welcome, Stephen. Thank you. So, so, so blunt. Okay. So this is if you didn't catch the chat with Barry earlier about. About quarter to five, I said I'd get round to this. This is about the fact that Rachel Smalley has been hired to help National, particularly the Auckland-based MPs, including the Prime Minister, Chris Luxon, and she's sort of got to take an Auckland view on it. And my view on this is that no disrespect at all to Rachel Smalley, because Rachel is, I've met her, she's a decent human being and she's probably very good at what she's doing in comms and media because she has a deep. There's a deep understanding of how the business works, but she is not the right person for this job, because what has happened here is they've hired the same kind of people that they are. So the problem, and I think... A lot of the problems, and I've said this before on the show, a lot of the problems with the National Party at the moment is that the key people in the National Party could be key people in the Labour Party. And think Chris Luxon, if he was a Labour Party Prime Minister, it wouldn't be weird. And Nicola Willis, if she was a Labour Party Finance Minister, she takes very much the same approach as Orthodox Labour Party Finance Ministers. It would not be weird. Chris Bishop comes up with ideas that are very, very Labour, like housing density. It would not be weird, right? Right. So I think a lot of their problems actually sheet back to that in that there is a cohort of voters out there with the Nats who are going, give us some conservative stuff. And these guys are going, ah, but the kind of liberal Labour Party vibe is where I'm at. So what you need to do then is you don't hire another person who thinks like you because that is where Rachel sits on the spectrum too, right? She's a Grey Lynn lady. You want somebody who's going to tell you how normal people talk out there, go to a West Auckland lady. find a West Auckland PR person find a South Auckland PR person find somebody who's going to talk to a Cantabrian I think that is their problem and it's kind of the same as that internal comms stuff that came out that we discussed yesterday where the National Party is telling its MPs instead of saying meeting you should say hui no you shouldn't normal people don't talk like that that's Wellington people and I feel like Rachel Smallley would say hui so again no disrespect to Rachel and I bet you that there are happy clients clients out there who think Rachel is absolutely the bomb because she's great at her job. I just don't think the national party should be one of her clients. Quarter two.