GARY JUDD KC: More Misconduct by Stuart Nash
- Administrator
- Jul 23
- 2 min read
Realpolitik in operation: Nash ceases to be NZF candidate
My article of May 26, 2026, Stuart Nash, Cabinet Confidentiality, and Winston Peters’ Standards Has Misconduct Stopped Mattering: or is it another case of amnesia? ended this way:
The Herald article concluded with a quote from Peters:
“Potential coalition partners have to live [up] to a thing called political reality or what is known as realpolitik, [which is that Stuart Nash] is going to be a New Zealand First MP and Cabinet minister.”
Potential coalition partners ought to make it a bottom line in a coalition agreement with NZF that Nash is not a Cabinet minister as his previous conduct shows he is completed unfitted to occupy such an important position of trust. If Peters does not understand, he forfeits any entitlement to be in a position of influencing the decision.
Earlier in my article I had said,
… perhaps Winston feels so strongly that Nash’s selection may be politically advantageous to NZ First that he has completely forgotten that Nash got booted from Cabinet for inexcusable misbehaviour, behaviour that in the UK would likely have precipitated an investigation about possible misconduct in public office, and even in New Zealand may have warranted investigation concerning the linkage between the donations Nash had received and his opposition to the Cabinet decision.
Last night Winston Peters accepted Nash’s resignation as NZ First’s Napier candidate after Nash had sent an intemperate email to former National Party MP, Christopher Finlayson KC, about National’s Napier MP. That Finlayson publicized the email is completely unsurprising.
By his decision to accept Nash’s resignation, Peters was ‘living up’ to a ‘political reality’, but what was it? Was it belated recognition that he, Peters, had made a mistake and now realized Nash is unsuited to public office? Or was it the ‘political reality’
that he, Peters, had made a different mistake in thinking that embracing Nash would be politically advantageous?
Gary Judd KC writes at Thoughts from the North
Nash would have been an electoral distraction and negatively affected the NZF campaign
HOWEVER………the Napier MPs initial response to Nash was not hysterical or particularly negative. In the context of her political “colleagues” who benchmarked maternity leave recently, she has had a very long time off “work”. She also only returned to Parliment with the total support of her mother (she said). Compare that with Maggie Thatcher and her career with twins (fought a by election, successfully while pregnant) in tow. Also be aware that her gold plated “maternity leave” was at her full parliamentary salary of $3.4K a week rather than the standard $800 offered to the plebs. The virtue signalling rhetoric from the Nats is obscene, but predictable,…
NZF had added to their stupid ideas with $B to map gas fields many already know exist... so they had to get rid of one their earlier stupid ideas...
I wonder if MLaws is having buyer regret yet...
It was music to my ears to hear SN had resigned political parties do not need people like this in their midst.
Maybe he thought he could turn SN around to a better principled outlook but these things can be too ingrained in a person for them to alter which SN has shown. Feel sorry for his wife and family.
We seem to attract some patently inappropriate people into NZ politics, who manage to irritate and finally self-destruct, causing a certain amount of collateral damage as they go.
Nash is nothing new to this comedy show, and he won’t be the last.
Frankly I’d sooner watch Moe belt Larry or Curly; at least they were funny.
This quote from Groucho Marx sums it up nicely “ Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies”.