Stupidity

No, not ACT President Catherine Judd's vicious attack on National, but would-be ACT leader John Banks' contention that National's recent change of direction is wrong because

a drift to the centre and the politics of ‘me too’ don’t attract additional votes.

Now, it may be true insofar as National hasn't managed to gain much by doing so, but that does not change the fact that under MMP, you win an election by capturing 50% of the vote. And as a simple matter of political sociology, this means that a party (or rather, the broader coalition of which it is a part) must gain the support of the political center ground. This means presenting policies which appeal. And the problem for ACT is that their policies don't (and are in fact regarded as pure poison by a large segment of center voters, who suffered under them during the Revolution). The fact that ACT does not understand this simply shows how deluded they are.

The broader problem for ACT is that the unpopularity of their policies may make it difficult to put together a governing coalition on the right. On current long-term polling trends, any such coalition will have to include a "centrist" party - and both the possible alternatives are likely to have significant problems with wholesale privatisations and cuts to health and education spending. This means that one or other party is going to have to swallow serious dead rats, to the extent that it may suffer a grassroots revolt from its constituency. Needless to say, this is not a recipe for stable or long-lasting government...