{"id":31137,"date":"2021-04-20T11:03:59","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T02:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/commentisfree\/2021\/apr\/20\/national-mps-should-stop-their-intrigues-changing-the-leadership-wont-help-right-now"},"modified":"2021-04-20T11:03:59","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T02:03:59","slug":"national-mps-should-stop-their-intrigues-changing-the-leadership-wont-help-right-now-liam-hehir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=31137","title":{"rendered":"National MPs should stop their intrigues, changing the leadership won\u2019t help right now | Liam Hehir"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Judith Collins may trail badly in the polls, but MPs should only think about replacing her if a natural alternative leader emerges<\/p>\n<p>Followers of baseball in the US have a saying: winning fixes everything. A team can suffer player scandals and be beset by dysfunctional management. If they\u2019re hitting enough home runs, however, things don\u2019t tend to fall apart.<\/p>\n<p>The corollary of this would be that losing breaks everything. And while it\u2019s a bit trite to compare sports to politics, New Zealand\u2019s opposition National party resembles nothing if not a losing baseball team. Thumped in last year\u2019s general election, conceding a rare absolute parliamentary majority to Jacinda Ardern\u2019s Labour , nothing seems to have gone right for the party that was once called the natural party of government in New Zealand.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/commentisfree\/2021\/apr\/20\/national-mps-should-stop-their-intrigues-changing-the-leadership-wont-help-right-now\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Judith Collins may trail badly in the polls, but MPs should only think about replacing her if a natural alternative leader emergesFollowers of baseball in the US have a saying: winning fixes everything. A team can suffer player scandals and be beset by&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,56,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-new-zealand","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31142,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31137\/revisions\/31142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}