0.1. A Picture Says Five Thousand Words
1.1. Why I'm Calling Time on the Sixth Labour Government
Our government is under siege on all fronts. In the halls of Parliament, the raiders of the National Party have soared over the botched Three Waters entrenchment. In the streets, there is no sense of safety; they could not save Janak Patel the decades of life he was entitled to live in our country, their updated instructions to police around pursuit promptly got another person killed, and a series of stories perm. Even in friendly territory, there is no protection. Willie Jackson flubs an interview, about the government trying to help the media, with the media. (“Jack, was in fact, not tame.” -Peter Lang.) Looking ahead to next year’s battleground, the election will be fought after a smashing byelection loss in bellwether seat Hamilton West and the end of the fuel tax cut, the only real reprieve from the cost of living crisis. Labour is failing.
Perhaps the most damning sign of blood on the floor is recent Kantar and Taxpayers’ Union-Curia polling, which places the right bloc (National-ACT) 8-9% ahead of the left bloc (Labour-Greens). Add in NZFirst (who have ruled out working with Labour) and Te Pāti Māori (who have ruled out working with ACT) and the margin remains about the same. Even if NZFirst don’t make it in, National-ACT alone would bring 64 MPs. To be the government, you just need 61. The first poll this low could have been an outlier; the latest polls show their September recovery to be the real anomaly. Labour are losing. They are going to lose, barring conditions outside of their control, unless they transform from what they have become.
I do not want this. I wish New Zealanders were doing better, so I want the government to do better. I am pessimistic about the outcome of the next election; National have revealed few plans, and what they have has consistently flown in the face of sense. (Liz Truss tax cuts standing for so long on the heels of Labour getting irresponsible with debt, training would-be criminals in boot camps, and becoming the first iteration since Robert Muldoon to undermine Reserve Bank independence, to name a few.) Chris Luxon has not revealed himself to be as talented as most of our past prime ministers, and his “strong team” left over from the wreckage of 2020 still has months to work with in order to repel 5% of the vote and throw the election. Never mind ACT’s evolution’t from policy wonkery to constant demagoguery, as if we elected one centre-left government and all of a sudden became apartheid South Africa born again in reverse.
I also have to try not to be personally biased, and the facts of the situation reveal failure on so many fronts. What I have found over the course of my study of political science is that I am most interested in the history and the narratives of politics. Picking through 20/20 retrospectives, or working with scanty articles from the election runup (especially from the NZ news media), is interesting, but trying to grind any new facts out is often a painful process.
What I want to do here is preserve an omnibus document of the case against the Sixth Labour Government, as of the end of 2022. These factors will probably be key in next year’s election, and likely lose Labour the Beehive. Maybe not. Either way, and especially if Labour does get a third term, I hope to capture in time a snapshot of how the government has been doing. Without further ado:
2.1. Basket of Bads and Vices
Concerns about performance can be grouped into five boxes. The first is Labour’s handling of COVID-19. That may seem chronologically disruptive - and don’t worry, we’re going to be jumping all over the place - but the virus made the 2020 election an exception to the rules governing all of the others, including 2017 and 2023, and has established the landscape since.
The second is Labour’s lawmaking processes and priors. Everything Labour has done has been framed through how they approach the issues, the polls and the elections in Parliament and the Beehive.
The third is Labour’s implementation of their policies. Their Cabinet and MPs have often struggled to translate the vision that they have put out into policies in practice, let alone tangible improvements in people’s lives.
The fourth is Labour’s politicking and management of appearances. For a party very focused on these facets, they have often struggled to hold onto control of the narrative.
The fifth is the present cost of living crisis. This is the most egregious of the current circumstances outside of Labour’s control. However much you blame government spending or monetary policy, the crisis owes mainly to COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupting supply chains overseas, pushing up costs for businesses to offer goods and services when they need to buy foreign products to provide them. They pass costs on to the consumer by raising prices - inflation. Going by the principle of “it’s the economy, stupid”, that is going to be the key factor defining the political environment going into 2023.
2.2. Regarding The Ongoing Situation With COVID-19
The government has a popular record on COVID-19. The country did enormously well through a deadly global pandemic. They can also be faulted more than they have been.
They acted later than other countries as the crisis began, letting COVID enter the community and necessitating a full lockdown they then rightly took. Moves to lower alert levels frequently followed the path of what was popular rather than what was right. Innovative new measures like faster tests were not introduced until the crises that necessitated them actually arrived. There is no real plan still in place to protect those disabled people, elderly and others who remain highly vulnerable to COVID. I do not believe we have learnt enough to be ready to replicate our success in the event of a second pandemic.
These are just factual mistakes. They may have contributed to some deaths, but that is perhaps hyperbolic, especially against the backdrop of how well we did compared to other countries. These virus-abetting policies more definitely prolonged the necessary crisis measures and the myriad impacts that they had on people, from mental health to business closures. We were afraid of any measure of opening up, and we rejected Opposition critiques wholesale instead of taking the good and discarding the rest. Our fear was eminently understandable. The government, however, rather than admitting what worked and coopting those measures sooner, exploited our fear for political gain, and the response suffered as a result.
COVID-19 banked enormous goodwill for Labour, expended over the course of 2020 and 2021 through those lockdowns and other measures. However, Labour mostly chose to sit on these well wishes, rather than mobilising popular support behind new measures. Even the case for overhauling the health system due to COVID-19 has barely been made.
COVID-19 was a defence, for a while, that the government was preoccupied elsewhere, in a similar sort of sense to the NZ First handbrake. COVID-19 remains in the community, but the society-wide, near-apocalyptic crisis has passed. There are no more excuses for Labour, and no more electoral get-out-of-jail-free cards. Anybody who wanted to spend all of their time apologising for them is exhausted and has moved on by now. Labour must stand on its own merits or fall.
2.3. The Room Where It Happens
Whether the current leadership was trying to tilt towards the left or the centre, the Labour Party used to define themselves by their boldness. Bold ideas are not all that governing takes, not nearly, but they are an easy way to cut through to most voters, who don’t pay much attention to politics, what parties stand for and what legacy they will leave behind. During the John Key era, Labour repeatedly brought bold, big ideas to the table: a capital gains tax in 2011, Kiwibuild in 2012, and three years of fees-free university in 2016.
And they kept losing.
Whether that was the cause of their losses or not, Labour clearly internalised a lesson. Labour have gradually backpedalled, dropping the capital gains tax for a term in 2017 and for good in 2020, slimming the fees-free university down to one year in 2020, and effectively leaving Kiwibuild for dead. More recently, when teed up to take a swing at the supermarket duopoly (both a structural societal issue and an urgent driver of inflation, with groceries gouging a high weekly bill out of all households), they punted, passing the matter on to working groups. As they have done with so many issues.
As a consequence, Labour have struggled to find a centrepiece to build their overall narrative for government on. There is, of course, the big achievement on COVID, but that is not a lasting policy going forward into the future. Nothing else stands as a clear legacy, like Kiwibank or interest-free loans do for the Helen Clark government, which positioned itself as far more incremental and far less transformational than Labour in 2017. Labour have consequently had to rely on a hodgepodge of little changes. Admirable improvements, but not clearly life-changing for many, let alone most.
The next is not one they originated, but they have perpetuated the problem. Urgency is a Parliamentary process that essentially revolves around circumventing normal Parliamentary checks and balances that prolong debate and examination. The tradeoff here is that laws get passed faster and the Opposition is disempowered to stop the government benches. The measure is intended for emergencies like the Christchurch earthquakes. However, this approach is increasingly exploited by a Parliament that cannot possibly read and process every page of legislation in an increasingly complex world.
Both parties have been guilty of this since the 2010s, but the use of urgency has been especially egregious lately after the Queen’s death. As that necessitated many lost days late in the year, urgency has been used extensively right as Labour has come under scrutiny for a huge package of complicated and controversial reforms, just so that everybody can be done and home by Christmas. This both weakens democratic norms, and creates an overstressed, detail-light legislative forum.
The third problem has been their relationship with the one party that must usually stand by their side in Parliament. The Greens generally lean left for a host of reasons: most environmental advocates are critical of free market failings on issues like climate change and animal rights, there is strong overlap with other social movements like the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, and the Green voter base is mostly the young white university-educated class that votes left across the West. On paper, this means that the Greens cannot reasonably expect to govern alongside National, and must collaborate with Labour.
The problem is that both sides have reasons to be suspicious of one another. After their bad blood further back in history like the Alliance era, Helen Clark’s Labour saw the Greens as an influence which the public would reject as too radical, especially thanks to the Greens’ fervent anti-GMO attitudes at a time when Clark was hot under the collar about GMO accusations. They never entered a coalition together in nine years of centre-left government. In 2014, National slammed Labour as just one of several dysfunctional crewmates on a sinking ship alongside the likes of the Greens. All of that drove Labour to distance their image from that of the Greens, at the same time as Labour’s internal weaknesses and post-GFC, 21st century concerns drove many left-wing voters from Labour to the Greens.
In 2017, this led to a bizarre sort of warm war between the two. Metiria Turei revealed parts of her story around benefit fraud to build a compelling narrative of how we fail poor New Zealanders. The trend from Labour to the Greens went into overdrive, and, facing oblivion as a party, Andrew Little instead chose to immolate his own leadership. Ardern brought Labour out as a phoenix reborn, promptly cut the Greens off at the knees by vowing that Turei would never see a ministerial seat in her government, and drove her to retire from Parliament, and her colleagues almost out of the building. While Ardern’s warm, hopeful image softened the blows back and forth, the reality was that each party was competing for each other’s votes more than they should.
Since then, even though the Greens have finally made their way into government, they have been kept at arm’s length, especially after 2020. James Shaw has been a notable figure in the climate change space, but otherwise the party can note few wins clearly its own and not Labour’s, especially after the failure of the cannabis referendum (which may have ginned up discussion about incremental improvements but has clearly tabooed transformative change in the short term).
All of this points to an awkward relationship where the Greens, who have many radical members and a sense of a strong mission in these times of systemic failure, are not on the same page as Labour, who fear bold or distinctly left-wing moves that might set off the hive. All of this analysis applies even more so to Te Pāti Māori, founded in opposition to Labour. This leads to debacles like the entrenchment storm in a teacup, where Labour and the Greens cannot ensure they are on the same page.
Labour have struggled even more on the other side of the aisle. Any dreams of an agreement with that “arrogant prick” are lost to the mists of oblivion; any fantasies of a grand coalition with National are just that.
The more specific goal that Labour pursues, since the tumult of the 80s and National’s repeals in the 90s, is building a steady parliamentary consensus by allowing the Opposition considerable input into legislation through committees and discussion. In this way, though their centre-left laws may not be the first choice of National, they hope to mollify their opponents enough that, when National governments arrive, they largely accept what Labour passed and move on to new territory. This worked with John Key accepting the achievements of Helen Clark’s Cabinet.
Jacinda’s Cabinet has largely failed in this mission, between testiness on issues like COVID, and National’s vociferous and wholesale opposition since even Bill English and Simon Bridges to many moves since fees-free education. You can’t always fault Labour for National’s partisan intransigence, but the distinction is that you can fault them for making compromises and delaying where they were never going to get National’s assent. This was both especially obvious and particularly doable in their second term, with a militant ACT holding all the cards and without NZFirst as a handbrake either. They instead ought to have left a positive impact through real-world policy rather than what will be unwritten in Parliament next year. (This is particularly egregious because the entire thesis of this article is how Labour’s many decisions have doomed them to losing power, and therefore being unable to solidify their achievements, in the first place.)
Where Labour have exhibited a coherent and ambitious policy direction, it has been with the turn towards centralisation in their second term. This is riddled with flaws. In the abstract, there are plenty of arguments for and against unitary versus more localised governance. The particulars of our reality further confirm how unsettled the debate is: DHBs have struggled but also are clearly the established system nationwide, and their abolition is one of the sins of repeal I talked about above; local government is on the verge of nullification in even the major cities like Auckland and Christchurch, rioting against directives on water provision and housing intensification; Labour has struggled to deliver major wins in specific locations like Auckland light rail. That suggests Labour should either have taken a softer tack to win local government over, or seize the moment and compellingly make the case to the public for why centralisation delivers better services and is just. They have done neither.
This heavy-handed clumsiness has come to its crescendo with the recent debacle about entrenchment. In short, Green MP Eugenie Sage and Labour MP and Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta tried and failed to “entrench” a new ban on privatising water infrastructure, which would require 60% of Parliament rather than the usual 50% to repeal. As entrenchment is usually only used to keep the voting laws safe unless a 75% supermajority sees change as necessary.
The sanctity of entrenchment as a democracy-protecting process makes cynically blocking National from its alleged desire to privatise pipes what professional analysts call a “weirdo move”. The preemptive accusation feels extraordinarily out of touch coming almost a decade after the last battle over privatisation, when even at the height of National’s power, they lost that 2013 referendum almost two to one. The Greens’ voter base today is youthful and versed in TikTok and climate catastrophe, not fear of a return to Rogernomics.
No voter cared even at the time, let alone at election time; it’s more of a symbolic failing. Mahuta’s open defiance of Cabinet rules and proceedings was a sackable shambles all of its own, sending worrying messages about the drawn-out power of counterproductive actors since David Clark within Cabinet. Governments that intend to do their best by the people are both obliged in principle, and have been demonstrated in practice, to be most effective when they quickly remove ministers from positions (in this case Local Government) in which they have erred, failed to sell reforms, and become distractions. Labour increasingly fails to do so in a timely fashion.
What this affair really demonstrates, though, beyond feeding into feverish right-wing rumour mills, is an inability to avoid potholes at every point. If the Greens had been kept closer, maybe they would have given Labour more warning. If Labour were more aware of the nuance that, while most of the public may oppose privatisation, centrist voters tend to be uncomfortable with ruling economic policies out as beyond the scope of acceptable debate, then maybe even Mahuta and the Greens would have stayed on message. If they had done the right thing after winning power and clamped down on use of urgency, investigating alternative avenues to make Parliament run more smoothly, they surely would have had the time to notice this. Whichever way you slice it - from the right, the left, the centre, or apolitical good governance - Labour is running Parliament poorly. That creates an unproductive and flawed work environment, and is bound to filter down both to the laws they create and to how they engage with the real world outside.
2.4. Oh, The Delivery
The single charge that sticks best to this Labour government is, whatever their good intentions from the start, they simply cannot deliver in practice. So much of that owes to simple and plain individual incompetence at the top.
At the top, Cabinet has been stocked with an array of low-talent, unreliable individuals. Time and again we have seen everything from botched responses to scandals and harm (Clare Curran and, outside Parliament, Nigel Hayworth), to the inability of rising stars to rejuvenate the government (Kris Faafoi, Megan Woods), to a simple inability to meet or reasonably adjust goals (Phil Twyford, Poto Williams).
The inability to achieve goals is just damning. I don’t need to recite the whole litany (okay, fine, Auckland light rail, mental health, state house selloffs): the single, simple effective example is that Kiwibuild promised to deliver 100,000 homes by 2028, and is currently 1.38% of the way there. At least house prices are finally starting to disinflate, but try telling people still working towards their first home that the crisis has abated. Labour inherited many failing systems such as in healthcare from National, and they have not fixed them.
Some of these failings are particularly egregious when they arise not just from incompetence, but from the government picking an obviously bad direction and sticking to it. On personnel and on policy, Labour drags out their decisions until the last possible second when they must finally change them, too late.
My personal bugbear has been their insistence on lowering levels of immigration. The inherent long term harms of stunting our population and the inherent ethical arguments for free movement aside, there has been a clear, pressing demand for more labour to support our people in sectors like teaching and nursing, and the government has dragged on its response for no real reason. Sometimes, you get the feeling that they keep their policy settings fixed just because they had previously made a snap decision, and so what they say, goes. Opposition Spokesperson Erica Stanford clearly has the right of them on this one. That many of National’s top spokespeople (Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop) are both effective and moderate ensures that, when the government makes a bad decision, we usually hear about it quickly, and we know Labour will take too long to agree (let alone actually admit their critics have a point).
The most recent demonstration of Labour's inability to tackle day-to-day issues is the crime wave sweeping the country. This requires plenty of asterisks: there's no clear statistics showing crimes are soaring, media narratives about bad news thrive off of inflating crime, and ramraids are just the latest trend (for instance, the rash of shootings in Auckland earlier this year has mostly died down). Nevertheless, people of all backgrounds deserve to feel safe and know wraparound efforts to reduce crime in the long term are coupled with protection now. Children, the elderly and those disabled who cannot protect themselves; women getting home late at night; dairy workers just trying to make it through their shift. All are being failed right now.
Practically all of us are being failed by the government in one way or another. The country is their responsibility, and love them or hate them, they need to be held accountable for the state it is in. However noble their goals, if they simply lack the capability to deliver on hypothetically possible policies, then that is their failing.
2.5. Electioneering
The key accountability mechanism in our country is the next election, to readjust our Parliament according to opinions on each party. Labour’s positioning for elections has done them few favours as either a government or for 2023. It’s hard to even know what to assess them by with how frequently the goalposts shift. One minute Kiwibuild will solve the housing crisis; the next bright-line tests (a form of the capital gains test allegedly ruled out) are the real solution. We won’t shift our policies on immigration, COVID-19, or a host of other issues, until we will. It’s not a cost of living crisis, until only Labour can get you through this crisis. Governments must adapt, but the stubbornness is usually followed by an embarrassed silence rather than a deft pivot.
This is helped along by messing with the actual standards of measurement. Goalposts frequently move: for instance, what actually constitutes child poverty in this country is now assessed by measures unhelpful for actually understanding the depth of strain many households face. For what promised to be the most transparent government ever, it is well-known amongst journalists and NGOs that it’s notoriously difficult to get any kind of helpful cooperation from the government when it comes to disclosure, let alone the answers you’re looking for.
Next, we come to the gritty details of elections. As mentioned before, the relationship with the Greens has persistently unbalanced Labour - one minute staining them as too radical, the next poisoning them as a source of left versus centre infighting. In particular, since “wokeness” become the latest trendy buzzword to replace “PC gone mad”, the Greens end up conveying a perception amongst many that the left is “too woke”. It’s hardly their fault - I struggle to think of many ways in which the Greens have gotten attention for last years for stands on the biggest social issues of today; they’re just an easy caricature for morning radio and so on - but it makes them look distracted from the “real” issues like the cost of living crisis, despite how being disadvantaged often plays into perfectly real disadvantages.
Distinct from that are the contours of “racial backlash”, in this case mostly referring to white voters against Māori culture, interests and people. Bashing wokeness is more of a pastime for grousing about the latest news story you see as silly, with plenty of scope to happen across different cultures and venues. By contrast, white backlash is a more concentrated resentment, fear, and hostility to a government that has been more interested than most in creating Māori-specific problems to the many issues with which Māori people have disproportionately struggled since the blows of colonisation. Though National have largely learnt to avoid getting into petty wokeness debates since Judith Collins, there is still the allure of Māori bashing going back to Don Brash’s Orewa speech in 2004 in modern history, and while National may choose the high road this time around, ACT, NZ First and others are sure to make the most of mongering fear.
Labour is operating within a wider framework in which centre-left parties in the West have struggled. As a general rule, they have trended away from working-class roots, towards being run by and dependent on the votes of university-educated, well-paid, white-collar types. That leaves them increasingly open to charges of being out of touch and having their priorities in the wrong place.
In fairness, the trend is being bucked: UK Labour is well on track to win the next election in 2024, and the US Democrats have overall been thumping Republicans since Trump snuck in. They have done so in large part thanks to the extremeness and the failures of their opponents. National have moved past their bad years, and they are not extreme.
There is still a glimmer of hope. Just because voters think that Labour is a failure does not automatically mean that they will vote National. They might think that both parties are terrible and stay home or waste their vote on a minnow party. Plenty of voters are rational actors about their choices; they can be gravely disappointed in Labour and still pick them if they think the Opposition would do an even worse job.
The final thing to mention here is that Labour have not helped themselves with their relationship with the media. Plenty of international media fawns over Jacinda, which has helped at times but can make her seem more interested in foreign praise than domestic success. Here, forums like much of radio have been dead-set against Labour since the start, while more sympathetic media outlets have still been baffled by the tack the government has taken at times, most recently with Willie Jackson mock-threatening Jack Tame’s job. Finally, with past decisions and especially the confusing public media merger, they are open to charges of leaning on the media, diluting trust in those institutions to honestly carry a message and leaving it to voters to be suspicious of the government.
Simply put, so many of Labour’s governing decisions have been made with an eye towards the next election, to ensure that they stay in power for no doubt a host of motives both honest and cynical. Labour are on track to lose the next election. This shows the depths to which their approach has fallen in its failures.
2.6. The Cost of the Cost of Living is Losing
The cost of living crisis has been roiling on since last year, with disastrous impacts on people every day. Incomes, particularly low incomes, have risen slowly and unsteadily for the past few decades. Particularly after the 2008 GFC, most people don’t have large reserves ready in case of financial difficulties, and many lack insurance and other insulation to pick them back up after an unpredictable event like a serious illness, injury or disability. All of that means prices rapidly rising month after month threatens to push people from the danger zone over the threshold into serious unaffordability, towards poverty or further into that struggle.
Thankfully, we have a body tasked with curbing inflation! Unfortunately, it’s run by Adrian Orr, a lecturing bozo with the temerity to tell parents to spend less on Christmas presents after flushing billions into the economy. I oppose National’s calls to get rid of him on the principle of Reserve Bank independence, but there’s no doubt he’s been perfect for them - serving both as a boogeyman to contrast themselves against, and as an unintended ally by working to cause a recession, thereby dealing Labour a perhaps fatal wound.
As an aside, if anybody’s wondering, saying he’s trying to cause a recession isn’t just hyperbolic slander. It’s his stated intent, and this is the economics of the situation: people, businesses and the government spending grows the economy but tends to contribute to inflation, so shrinking the economy hopes to have the opposite effect. While the way he is going about it is insulting, he is intentionally trying to spread poor expectations for the coming economy in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A notable effect of raising interest rates to disincentivise borrowing to spend and make saving more attract is that mortgages will tend to go up. At a time when many home owners are already seeing the price of their investment in the soundest kind of asset - land and housing - slow down, or even fall in price, mortgages rising will put fear into the hearts of many. It is difficult to overestimate the kind of persistent financial anxiety that mortgages can create even at a time of low interest rates, let alone the apocalyptic reaction we will see amongst many as they rise by historic levels. Whether you can’t meet the bare essentials or you’re on the housing ladder, this crisis is biting.
3.1. Labour Failing
This is a government that has, in large part, been defined by the conditions the country has been put in, outside of their control. At the same time, Labour is failing in how they come up with and implement legislation and how they communicate to the public. They have only three strengths amidst perhaps over a dozen flaws. The first is their strong internal discipline - with the largest caucus ever under MMP, it’s impressive that there’s only been one blowup (Gaurav Sharma) and a couple cases of defiance (David Clark, Nanaia Mahuta.) These at least prevent an imitation in government of the disaster the last couple Oppositions have been.
Secondly, their top personnel are capable. Even if figures like Andrew Little have dug into unproductive battles, leaders like Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins have been engaged across the field and, at calmer times, gotten good reviews on competency. Tied into this is the third benefit, international relations; despite hiccups with Five Eyes, New Zealand has overall cultivated strong overseas relationships, and Jacinda can always rely on the glamour of appearing alongside world leaders as the most helpful advantage of incumbency.
Tied in to this is the fact that, whatever rumours were swirling, there is no more time to drop Jacinda before the election. The new leader would have no time to establish themselves and the optics would look terrible. Ardern remains their greatest asset, but by this point, it’s hard for her to back up her strong persuasive power with concrete facts. Labour have taken little wins for people here and there - I respect actions like their raising the minimum wage, providing lunch for kids in some schools, and doing more to support families after a child is born - but while I am happy for every person helped like these, they do not do enough to build a cohesive narrative of a society that is doing better rather than worse. We have every right to demand more from them, and demand that they do a better job - that is democracy. Even if their systemic reforms do deliver in the coming decades, Labour has run out of time for excuses or for patience.
4.1. A Brawl Is Surely Brewing
Labour go into the 2023 election ready to lose. Their hope lies not in themselves - though they may pull a rabbit out of the hat, as with student-targeted policies in 2005 or 2017 - but in factors outside of their control. Luxon’s leadership has demonstrated a series of flaws that both double down on concerns about National (ridiculously inexperienced in Parliament, unreliable on policy, and insensitive towards women) and build his own, uninspired brand (vague, inauthentic, and just plain unintelligent - by all means we need representatives of everyday people, not just an academic elite, but our Prime Minister must be the best we’ve got).
The wider National team have turned into an effective Opposition, but remain untested yet as a government in waiting; their bench looks as shallow as Labour’s right now. Labour have many sympathetic voices in the media who, presented with what would be a boring race if they accurately reported it, will try to make out the embattled government as exciting underdogs fighting their way back in, and National as a paper tiger ready to crumble under scrutiny. This will echo Labour’s own message that has served other leaders like John Key so well - don’t put it all at risk; better the devil you know than that you don’t.
This could be a very negative election with unimpressive performances from both major parties, not to mention the dark undercurrents of the fringe far-right (which factor shockingly little into my assessment of Labour's failures; Labour has gotten the response to them pretty much right, and they won't matter at the election, just to the social fabric). That invites voters to diffuse out to minor parties: lefties to the Greens and some to Te Pāti Māori, right-wingers to ACT, this incarnation of NZ First, the disenfranchised towards a hodgepodge of conspiracy theorist parties, and you know which kind of people to TOP.
All of this points to pressure on National to positively define their selves as individuals and as a party with a clear policy vision. In an election where Labour will be fighting for their lives, and without the colossally distracting focus on COVID-19, they cannot hope to just retread a 2020 small target strategy.
I hope for a vigorous contest of ideas where politicians must openly, honestly explain why what they want to do is actually better for New Zealanders. However, at the same time, I hope we avoid polarisation, between the major parties going negative and the rise of the fringe since the lockdowns. We hardly have to imagine things getting to the level of the US when we can just look across the ditch to see how detrimental relentless negative partisanship has been to Australia. Let us all hope that next year’s election sets a high standard, rather than plonking straight into a low bar. Until then, Merry Christmas, enjoy your holidays, and set your sights forward for a Happy New Year!
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