Mike's Minute: The Labour Party need to do some soul searching in opposition

As the Labour party, still technically the Government of course, gather in Wellington to do that time-honoured thing of all losers, which is some soul searching, the trick is not to say you are doing it, but to actually do it.

The trouble, as we have discovered these past three years, is they don’t actually do anything except talk.

To search one's soul, one has to accept what has happened to you and take a level of blame. You have to see it's actually on you, it is your fault, and if you don’t want to repeat the exercise it needs to be different going forward.

I'm not sure they have the slightest idea how to do that.

Do you think, as Jacinda Ardern sits in Boston having wrecked the country and then scarpered for her own financial benefit, any of the carnage of Saturday night sits heavily with her?

Or do you think she could blabber out a couple of one-liners about there being no play book and we thought we are right and we tried our best?

As they gather in their offices this week and box up their three years worth of stuff, how many of them know in their heart of hearts they cocked it up in spectacular fashion?

Or how many of them still hold the broader contempt, so often on display, that we are basically not that bright, but fortunately they are, so if only we could be as good as them things would be different?

That is the fraud of soul searching. Very few people actually want to change and far less are actually capable of it.

The end of the Helen Clark era is no different to this one - they were arrogant and we got sick of it.

The last Labour Government that worked was David Lange's and even that only lasted one term before it blew up in their faces.

The reason it worked is because that was the Labour of old, the Mike Moore Labour, the Labour that reflected a hard-working country of working class New Zealanders, who aspired to graft and do well for themselves and all we wanted was opportunity.

The Clark/Ardern Labour Governments were about entitlement and race and laziness and crazed ideology. That view is shared by, comparatively, very few New Zealanders because it isn't who we are.

Labour will be back. Both major parties have won and lost and come back for more. But I don’t see this lot having the slightest intention of changing.

Worse for them, I don’t see enough talent left, once Grant Robertson and David Parker and whoever else quits, to even look like they know how to change.

It's two terms minimum in the wilderness.

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