On her blog today Tracy Watkins comments on a speech by John Key in Wellington this morning.
Amongst other things she says
After ramping up his accusations of dirty tricks against Labour last night, Key wisely ignored the furore this morning in his speech to the Wellngton Chamber of Commerce, billed as one outlining his vision for New Zealand.
It was the sort of speech that would have had the National Party faithful stomping their feet in the aisles if he had delivered it on Sunday.
It was certainly one of the better ones I have seen him deliver. He did far better at communicating his vision for New Zealand than I have seen him do prevously with his usual set-piece, prepared delivery speeches.
Which is an interesting point about Key; he is much, much better speaking off the cuff than he is at speaking off prepared notes, where he often stumbles. His speech to the National Party conference on Sunday was from prepared notes and while it was an obvious improvement on previous efforts, it still wasn’t a patch on today’s to the Chamber of Commerce.
I think Key realises too that he is, in fact, a far more polished speaker when he tosses away the speech notes; it will be interesting to see how that translates to the campaign trail.
We made the same point about the speech notes on 6 July
We also disagree over scripting. We have seen Key read set piece speeches many times and heard him ad lib several times. There is no doubt that he is best without the script.
