Polls keep proving that the election will be close. Every vote counts. The stakes are especially high this year: this is the one chance to repeal many of Labour’s policies before they bed in; debt is soaring, and facing a cost of living crisis, every fiscal decision is critical. Each of our major parties will take the country in distinctly different directions.
Both are botching it.
Labour faces a tougher task. The cost of living crisis removes a key advantage of incumbency. Usually governments, left or right, get to spend their way to reelection. Try the same thing in an inflationary environment and you will be spending your way to defeat as you’re blamed for making things worse. The Cyclone Gabrielle rebuild is swallowing up most budgetary expansion anyway. Interest rates have climbed considerably. Meanwhile, Labour’s failures mean that there is little trust in them to keep their promises for the third election running. Nor can Labour rely on the Greens to swell with new votes: they have been stuck for years and sullied lately.
Labour itself looks a little sooty. “Third-term-itis” has already crept in: high-handed entitlement and a lack of respect for the Hipkins premiership from minister after minister. I grant, Hipkins himself appears to have been implying he is privately dissatisfied with how lax our standards for ministerial misconduct have been in the past. By making himself a crusader against corruption and driftwood, placing himself in opposition to the flawed Labour of the past, Hipkins could yet make a strength out of dispatching his inferiors.
Finally, everybody has underestimated how big of a loss Ardern’s departure is for the government. Yes, she was tired and many people were tired of her. Yes, Hipkins has refreshed Labour; but under the pressure of election season, we know she can always defend her side’s values and commitments, making an attractive presentation for a kind of nothing programme. No such guarantee can be made for Hipkins, who still Schrödangles between “likeable boyish Kiwi” and “ruthless no-tolerance operator”.
Ardern would smash Luxon in a debate. Hipkins will still have the edge, but cannot definitively destroy him. Most particularly, Hipkins’ team may be seen as able to engage in aggression that Ardern could not, but she could press Luxon where he is weakest - on matters of reproductive rights and motherhood - and Hipkins cannot. (I’ll pay to see Megan Woods try, though.)
I don’t blame Hipkins for his reset. All governments could do with cutting away some excessive expenditure outside the core mission. This was an appropriate response both politically for the current mood, and economically from his Keynesian perspective. This is all he is offering. Again and again, he has hammered away that the government is tightening its belt and focusing on the cost of living crisis, but as he can’t actually spend to alleviate the crisis, this is effectively just a promise of austerity. That makes for a miserable focus. A Labour Party will never beat the right on the grounds of who can most effectively cut spending and lower deficits and debt. He is doing the work to clear the ground without building anything new.
Labour must give people something to vote for. The reset should have been an opportunity to drop this government’s unfortunate tendency to deflect, dismiss, and distract. Admit where things have gone wrong and show how you will get them right next time. If you can’t even do that, you don’t deserve to be in government.
Instead, Labour hope to make you dislike the Opposition more than them. People are not looking for more negativity and bickering from their politicians. In 2020, voters responded effusively to a governing message of hope and help. By all means criticise the Opposition, but do not predicate your campaign message on trying to make yourself a small target and the Opposition loom large and terrifying. You are the government, and there is nowhere to hide. When push comes to shove, most undecided voters will choose unproven, hypothetical harms over a very troubled status quo present right now.
Labour have done this right before and they can get it right again. Paint Luxon and his ilk as people who dislike and look down on ordinary New Zealanders, who see them as flawed and needing a values adjustment. Contrast that with Labour, a party that cares about and for people. National in particular are a bunch of business managers and lawyers trying to posture as cops and priests; ACT pull off the tough guy act much more credibly. Do not let them get away with their paper-thin pretensions to be of the people, not above the people. Just like Ardern did so well, Hipkins must show he understands how people are feeling at this time of crisis.
Of course, the cost of living crisis requires not just trustworthy vibes but delivery on that promise: action to make everyday goods more affordable. Where the inflationary effect is minimal, they should engage in targeted spending that is small in the overall scheme of things, but which can mean the world for particular interest groups. As an example, build on what was in the budget and offer people with disabilities expanded support. Every % of the vote counts politically and every group usually left out in the cold deserves attention morally and practically.
As Labour cannot spend hugely across society, then they must use the other powers of the state. Through the ability to reshape our laws, they can rewrite regulation to make goods cheaper. A great example here is targeting the supermarket duopoly. Develop a plan to break them up and lower barriers for competitors to enter the market and stay there.
There’s so much potential here. By freeing up the market and creating a more competitive space, they engage in activist right-wing policy, laying out a difficult landscape for Opposition critics to navigate. The big supermarket owners are an easy target to rail against without making the whole election negative. The end goal is as real as it comes, in making your everyday purchases a lot cheaper. Of course they cannot get this done before the election, but they can make a good start and contrast what they would do with the Opposition, who would surely never dare agree.
Finally, Labour must return to a theme they have forgotten since their own days in Opposition: they are the party truly for the Kiwi dream, who will remove barriers in your path and enable you to get rewards for your hard work. Place that against a right wing more interested in maintaining and concentrating wealth where it has already accumulated. Hammer that home as your theme for the election.
People don’t just worry about a cost of living crisis because of the immediate, everyday stress of how you’ll afford this month. It’s the existential dread that seeps in, the societal miasma that compared to past generations, your solo household or young family won’t be able to get onto the property ladder, to get out of your snoozer job or dead-end town, that the grass is greener on the Australian side. Again, all of that deserves empathy from the people who can do something about it, and those who accept this state of affairs rightfully earn the scorn that should be heaped on them.
To that end, on the policy front, there is the tax switch to consider: decrease consumption and deter inflation with a wealth tax or further top bracket rise, and compensate with abolishing the bottom bracket to leave the vast majority of people with more money. It’ll probably still be net inflationary, but that will be lost in the whirlwind such a move would kick up. You could always break glass and tax capital gains if you want to draw the battle lines of this election with vivid, but you can’t throw a rock ten feet in the NZ pols space without hitting a refresher on CGT so I won’t belay the point.
The final thing for Labour is the most stupefying miss of Hipkins’ premiership so far: education, education, education. This is a critical priority for many voters and Labour clearly thinks the swing vote lies amongst parents concerned for their kids’ futures. This is the sector that Hipkins presided over and his reason for being in politics, and yet all we’ve had so far was the one pupil policy flop.
Labour can do much better here and they must. To win back voters concerned through the COVID years about their children losing out. To counter Opposition narratives of a society in decay and trailing behind the world. To build their own story about how only a third Labour term can give your tamariki the tools to climb the socioeconomic ladder and secure a brighter future for themselves. If Jan Tinetti gets into deep trouble, this will be the culmination of what should be the greatest strength of the Hipkins government turning into an unacceptable weakness.
I make no secret of the fact that I have thought for some time, and with confidence since the Hipkins downgrade, that the Opposition are on track to win this election. The case is simple - when the economy is bad voters usually change government, and to boot the government lack a coherent explanation of what they have achieved. Ardern versus Luxon might have made for an unassailable gap in the preferred PM polls, a Clark-English level gap; without her, the Labour team does not look clearly stronger than National’s.
Pretty much all arguments I see for why the left bloc has a good shot are, no offence intended, left-wing wishcasting. They all stem from the fact that they see National and ACT as neoliberal stooges of the rich transparently pitting tangata whenua against tangata tiriti for political gain. From that point of view, no everyday voter should have a reason to vote for them.
Au contraire, polling shows most voters think the country is on the wrong track, and the Opposition hold a comprehensible narrative that everything is getting worse. The analysis on why is pretty weak, but it is hard to persuade the median voter to stick with things getting worse when the Opposition keep claiming they will make you safer and richer and unite the country again.
And yet…
Labour is keeping pace with National after the marathon of the past few years, and the sprint is about to kick in. Luxon is not a Collins, a Cunliffe, or an English the first time around, but he polls like one in the preferred Prime Minister stakes. Even after Labour lost their brightest asset in Jacinda Ardern, and even after three years to introduce himself, Luxon has not made any steps forward. Talk of a second John Key is dead.
At the bowls club he was at ease and unembarrassed of himself around his people. I can tell you that when the election forces him into contact with ordinary New Zealanders, it’s not going to be pretty. Having a leader who doesn’t second-guess what socks the public will like today is good, but he needs to sit down with everyday people and hear different points of view.
In particular, National cannot afford to yet again underestimate why they fail to connect with women or how unnerving a Luxon premiership could be. Luxon is up against a pack of high-handed career politicians and the “likeability” contest is winnable.
The team around him can certainly help with that: Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford are both strong performers, and nobody backs a coup this close to the election. They can afford to move up front and centre and overshadow him a little. (Whisper it quietly, but National doesn’t have a leader-in-waiting right now, and they could stand to cultivate some backups in case they lose.) They are also critical to solving National’s other big problem: nobody really knows what National will actually do once they’re in government.
Opposition parties that are on track to govern tend to keep their intentions tight-lipped. Some, such as Albanese’s Labor, pursue a genuine small-target strategy: start to finish, they say as little as possible to keep the focus on the failing government. Others claim that they are just keeping their powder dry: publishing their policy as close to the election as possible prevents flip-flopping or the government copying ideas along the way. Better to wait, the thinking goes, until people are paying attention for the election proper.
The Opposition have a full-time job to do. They are not paid taxpayer dollars just to wait their turn. National’s collapse in 2020 left a vacuum on the right of New Zealand politics and they have abdicated their responsibility to step back in with ideas and vision. ACT has seized this opportunity full throated over the past few years. National could accept the challenge to improve themselves. Instead, they resent and fear ACT’s success. The Nats are, accordingly, belatedly, coming for ACT’s voters.
Luxon has, amongst other things, sniped at the growing place for te reo Māori in te ao Pākehā (next it’ll infect our pre-flight safety videos!), postponed any agricultural action on the climate crisis, and flip-flopped on the MDRS. The last of these is a particularly calamitous position: at a stroke, attacking free market principles, destroying investor confidence in residential construction, perpetuating a dispossessed generation of future centre-left renters, and embarrassing his own deputy after she made her career on this stunning success.
National pursuing an election year campaign strategy of undermining their own coalition partner destroys each side of the three-legged Opposition stool. The first is their ability to cooperate during the campaign and once in Cabinet. Gossip is bound to get around eventually that National and ACT just can’t abide each other’s success. Even if Luxon and Seymour like each other on a personal level, they have ambitious and opinionated underlings, and the media love to look for conflict. Conservative commentators will help these rumours along with nervous and preemptive instructions that the Opposition must learn to work together for their own survival.
The second is ideological moderation and appeal to the centre voter. Here’s what the brightest minds at True Blue HQ have cooked up: National ought to move to the right to ensure they have more seats and ACT has fewer. This is because the median voter fears a coalition with a prominent ACT voice would look too right-wing. Besides the fact that a difference of a few MPs probably is a matter of inches between David and the Tory Goliath, the logic of becoming more right wing to look less right wing just plain hurts my head. Sometimes you are badly in need of a sense check and this is one of those times. They have undone all of their work in the past few years to reach back out to swing voters.
The third is humility and understanding one’s priorities. National are a party who nosedived just three years ago. The party has not been fundamentally reformed. Yet they assume that, so long as they choose to do it, they can go to thousands of voters who make up their own minds, and woo them away from what Stuff’s chief political editor calls the best-run party in Parliament. The task would always be hard; with every day burning up their time until votes are cast, they cannot afford to waste these critical months assailing an allied fortress.
National must make one decision: do they draw hard lines on what they will never do and dismiss ACT’s ability to win much in negotiations, or simply agree that they disagree on what change entails and focus on presenting a united front? Once they have decided, they must move on from the ACT question and not look back. (After all, experience suggests the easiest way to cannibalise a small party is to get into government with them.)
National must forget about pandering to their base and refocus. The only way to improve their odds of actually winning the election is to take swing voters who have a chance of going with the left bloc. Those people are not seriously considering ACT. Luxon has clearly wanted to talk about education from Day One, and he should return to that theme to get Hipkins right where it hurts: if Hipkins had six years to get his own Ministry in order and he couldn’t do it, how can he right the ship of government?
There is value in this kind of work focused on swing votes and avoiding partisan positioning, on healthcare, on transport, and consolation prizes on housing and climate change. Critically, they must also explain what they will do about the cost of living that goes beyond making Liz Truss proud with tax cut promises. National clearly believe that a top priority is to finally make New Zealand a high productivity economy, and they ought to be coming out with sharp analysis about how we can produce what we’re best at and trade for the rest.
National are currently on track to, at best, scrape out a narrow win that leaves their government vulnerable to their favourite kind of MP (the unruly backbencher), and at worst, do what Labour cannot and defeat themselves. Get Air Luxon off the tarmac and on the intercom, talking about more issues than Te Tiriti and the gangs, and they can glide to a comfortable landing.
More importantly, if they clearly set out now what they will do differently, they can engage with the public and secure buy-in for their program across all sectors of society. The alternative is to repeat Labour’s problem of the past three years: making the election all about a current crisis, then embarking on a policy programme that nobody voted for. The cost of living crisis likely won’t last for the next three years, so what’s the plan for afterwards? Let us know, Blue Leader.
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