National's Simeon Brown tells party members to vote National, not the coalition partners

Simeon Brown, a National Party minister, told party members in 2024 to give their party vote to National rather than to ACT or New Zealand First, the parties National governs with. RNZ reported the speech.

That message is blunt by the standards of how coalition partners normally talk about each other. Brown didn't frame ACT and New Zealand First as partners to work alongside; he treated them as a distraction. He even compared them to children. Language like that, if it had spread widely in 2023 when the coalition was being formed, would have made it harder for the three parties to negotiate and work together afterwards.

Brown also told members that government money should never go to gangs. That fits with what his government has actually done — it has passed laws restricting gang insignia and gang involvement. Brown championed that work as a minister.

The voting comments are the bigger political problem. Here's why: under New Zealand's voting system, when you vote, you get two votes. One vote is for your local electorate MP; the other is a "party vote" for the party you want in Parliament. The party vote determines how many MPs each party gets overall. Because of how the system works, a small party needs to get at least 5 percent of all party votes nationwide to stay in Parliament — unless it wins an electorate seat directly.

When a big party like National tells voters not to vote for its smaller coalition partners, there's a real risk. If ACT or New Zealand First falls short of 5 percent and doesn't win any electorate seats, all those votes simply disappear. They don't count. National benefits because those voters might vote for National instead. But if a coalition partner fails to make it into Parliament, National loses a governing partner. Brown didn't address that tension in his speech.

The comparison of coalition partners to children suggests Brown was being more candid than he would have been in public. It hints at something inside National that hasn't been fully settled: is the coalition a practical arrangement National needs to govern, or is it a real working partnership the party believes in? Senior ministers have usually sounded collegial when talking about their coalition partners. Brown's reported remarks suggest the conversation is quite different behind closed doors.

These sorts of unguarded comments tend to surface when politicians speak to their own members in private. For those of us reporting on Parliament, it's a familiar pattern: a speech to the faithful that reveals more about how the party actually thinks than what the communications team would want to say publicly. The substance of Brown's remarks — vote for us, not them; keep money from gangs; the partners are noise — reads as an honest picture of what some National members actually believe. Whether Brown expected the speech to become public is another matter. It has.