Part Six: This Is A Digression on New Zealand
Welcome to a tour on the actual, tangible facts of New Zealand politics! In this adventure, we’ll skim through the past few decades before unpacking how our electoral system and parliament works, and what parties we get to choose between.
6-1: There used to be More Sheep on Our Farms
I don’t need to spend too much time on this because I’ve already given you the basic framing in Part Four: the West was left before the 80s and then it went to the right and now it’s maybe kinda sorta heading back left. In New Zealand’s timeline, we can easily split this in two: the twenty five years of chaos from 1974 to 1999, and the twenty five years of calm from ‘99 to today. (To oversimplify, of course, particularly given the past four.)
In 1974, we experienced one of those history-turns-on-a-dime moments when Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk suddenly died. They lost the next election, and with it their compulsory superannuation scheme. Instead, Robert Muldoon, the abrasive, belligerent populist, led a National government until 1984. You’ve probably studied the Springbok Tour in school? That was him.
Appointing himself Finance Minister to do the two most important jobs in the government at once, he built huge projects like the South Island’s dams, he froze wages and prices, and he tried to cover up the state of the country’s finances and even to cause a minor constitutional crisis when Labour beat him and he refused to obey their commands. History generally views him sharply negatively, like a Richard Nixon who didn’t go so far past the brink. Use him as an example of what not to do - Muldoons are a danger to our system because we’re so unpracticed in dealing with them.
Labour through the 80s faced massive economic problems in a country with too much bureaucracy and a ballooning debt, where the government had taken too much control. They responded with Rogernomics, a sweeping suite of right-wing reforms, which National would continue in the 90s as Ruthanasia. This era will always be the subject of heavy debate: the side for emphasises how we were put back on the path to economic stability, tackled inflation, and made it a lot easier to do business and get ahead in New Zealand; the side against emphasises all those unemployed and dependent on the state left out in the cold and growing wealth inequality.
After Labour unsurprisingly collapsed for trying to do right wing things as a theoretically centre-left party, and National promised to move to the centre then continued down the right, many voters sharply mistrusted both parties and were deeply dissatisfied. In an era where minor parties multiplied and flowered, two impacts last to this day, both of which I’ll explain more later: we voted in a referendum to replace FPTP (the very simple “the candidate with the most votes wins” system) with MMP, and Winston Peters made his name and broke with National to found NZFirst. (Confusingly enough, former Labour MPs also founded ACT, and the Greens broke away from the now-defunct Alliance.)
Helen Clark, after winning the 1999 election, faced a “winter of discontent” of poor business confidence to start out, but trudged on in a determined drive towards the centre; aping Tony Blair’s example in the UK, she tried to reduce Labour’s programme down to small, manageable centre-left steps that could be trusted. She put paid years of conflict and chaos…mostly.
The one exception was the 2004-2005 period, where racist backlash against perceived Māori advances snowballed out of control. The government seized the foreshore and seabed of the entire country to preempt any Māori claims to parts of it through the courts. This spawned huge protests and the splintering off of the Māori Party from Labour. National’s Don Brash whipped up resentments and his party benefited hugely in the polls, proving once and for all that Trump-style politics does have a place here: approach this sensitively in debates, but there absolutely is a large political constituency (predominantly white rural voters) who can decide to flip to a party over goofy fears that Māori are getting unfair privileges.
Though the 2010s saw a series of disasters - already in the Great Recession from the 2008 financial crisis, we endured several earthquakes, the anti-Muslim terror attacks, and other catastrophes like Pike River and White Island - these were a remarkably calm time for our politics. John Key achieved peak political success in New Zealand history: he consistently rated over +40% in net favorability, i.e at worst, only 30% of people disliked him while the other 70% liked him.
He achieved this by, in contrast to the 80s and 90s, basically totally lacking a coherent agenda and pushing relentlessly towards the centre, forgoing any opportunity to move back towards the right in favour of steady as she goes leadership. The argument for was that this averted the polarisation seen overseas while delivering a steady economic recovery and middle class affluence, the argument against that nine years of neglect let crises grow throughout government services and for poor people.
2016-2017 was an unexpected whirlwind - Key stepped down for Bill English, then the leader of Labour (after a long period of internal warfare mirroring National’s own in the 2000s) gave Jacinda the reins, and proved there’s a large constituency in New Zealand that rather like the idea of kindness and compassion. The trouble was that the subsequent Labour government proved highly ineffectual at progressing towards converting ideas into practical outcomes, with public services largely failing to take big strides forwards.
You, of course, know the story of COVID, how Labour had a miraculous election result in 2020 and a disaster in 2023, and now National are back. This is a fractious time for our politics. The past couple years were a return to that 2004-2005 type politics of racism, and the government is less centrist than the last few, more committed to making big cuts to public services (and firing the public servants that provide them) to save money and scrap inefficiency. While it’s yet to materialise in much of substance outside race relations, there’s also a decidedly socially conservative undertone.
They also already face issues of coalition tensions and jostling - none of the three governing parties appear to have a warm relationship with the others - and there are questions, particularly for NZFirst, around conflicts of interest or corporate-politician corruption. The Opposition are currently polling ahead of the government, and while you should take that with a grain of salt, it clearly indicates New Zealanders are already unusually unwilling to lend a new government the benefit of the doubt.
6-2: We Sleep in a Well Made Bed
New Zealand’s democracy is mercifully not all that convoluted to explain. For our elections we used to have first past the post: if you won the most votes in an electorate, you would win and become the member of parliament for that electorate, and after the election either National or Labour would have more MPs and thus would form the government. (Technically coalitions can occur under first past the post if neither party has a majority of MPs, but they never did.) Every electorate represents around 65,000 New Zealanders; seven of the ~seventy electorates are Māori seats, which are much bigger than general electorates, overlap with general electorates, and are intended to be solely voted for and represented by Māori.
Since the 90s, we are blessed with MMP, the highly subjectively best electoral system in the world. MMP keeps FPP for electorates but bolts on list MPs: as well as voting for electorates, everybody votes for parties, and if a party gets, say, 10% of the party vote, they will receive 10% of MPs. If they already have 10% of MPs from electorates, great, but if they have less, they’ll get enough list MPs to have 10% overall.
There are a couple of exceptions going on - parties without an electorate and without 5% of the party vote don’t get MPs, and parties with more electorate MPs than their party vote should give them just get to be “overrepresented” (which can create overhang seats, marginally meddling with Parliament’s number of MPs for that term), but overall it’s pretty straightforward: the major and minor parties aim to win an electorate or 5% of the vote, and so long as that’s done, they will get a proportionally fair share of Parliament.
After Labour’s 2020 landslide, they had a majority of MPs and could run the government alone. Under every other MMP election, neither National nor Labour have had a majority, so they’ve needed to negotiate a coalition or other form of agreement with other parties to create a combined majority. Unlike in many democracies in Europe and elsewhere, it’s the norm here that our coalitions make it through the entire term without collapsing over disagreements and causing new elections or negotiations.
In Parliament, parties (typically the government, as only they have the majority of votes needed to advance them) propose bills, which could become laws. Bills go through three readings, each of which involves debating the bill then voting. The first reading is generally just about deciding whether the bill is worth discussing at all; the second reading is the meat of discussion about the merits and flaws of the bill, and a good chance to amend and improve an idea; and the third is a final chance to evaluate the bill and decide whether to make it law or not.
Parties can change their votes between readings, and will often support a bill up to a point in the hopes that they can modify it to their liking, then vote yes or no based on whether they got what they wanted. Laws are occasionally deciding by Parliament passing a law to hold a referendum, which tend to be on controversial social issues or fundamental questions about how government should run.
Government ministries are where the bulk of governing happens as they implement the laws and run public services. After a government is formed, they allocate some of their leading MPs to serve as Ministers leading ministries, with governments typically being led by the Prime Minister and Finance Minister, and other important figures being the Ministers of Health, Education, and Housing by virtue of how mega-important these areas are. These are currently Auckland’s Christopher Luxon, Wellington’s Nicola Willis, Whangārei’s Shane Reti, Auckland’s Erica Stanford and the Mighty Hutt’s Chris Bishop, respectively, all National Party.
Whereas in New Zealand we have a strong legislature and our ministries either do everything or fail trying, we have a weak judiciary and unwritten constitution (i.e a bunch of documents and norms that have mounted up over the years). Whatever opinions the courts hold, they generally have to submit to what the politicians want and can't restrain them.
The big exception to this weakness is around the Treaty of Waitangi, where politicians have generally given a lot more deference to the Waitangi Tribunal (established in 1975) since the 80s. Going through the Tribunal is typically a laborious process that takes years and goes further than skin-deep commercial transactions, but the result is often meaningful settlements for iwi, even if the amount given is a tiny fraction of the amount once taken. One of the looming political battles of this era is ACT’s attempt to rewrite the Treaty Principles and thus change how the courts can interpret them, but it remains to be seen whether that will go any further.
6-3: Oh, but Everybody's Talking about these Parties
Capitalisation practices remain my nemesis. Real Frozen Peaches fans will know.
I’ll go by the parties from largest to smallest. These are the parties currently in Parliament and no new parties are projected to enter Parliament at the next election. The tiers basically go as follows: National and Labour are the major parties; the Greens, ACT, NZFirst and TPM are the minor parties; and the rest out of Parliament don’t have a commonly used name but I call them the “minnows”, with their vote splitting between TOP’s 3%, the odd single cause or joke parties like Legalise Cannabis or Animal Justice, and the fringe conspiracy theorist parties like NewZeal and Freedoms NZ.
The National Party have ruled for about 60% of New Zealand’s modern history and are usually the largest party. They’re good at winning! A centre-right party, they unite a lot of groups with a right-wing tendency - farmers, committed Christians, businesspeople - and add on more voters (often from immigrant communities) just generally concerned about good governance, particularly on the economy and law and order. This is not assuming that National automatically are always great at good governance, just that they tend to be given that credit by a lot of voters.
Of course, that diffuseness of purpose, as exemplified by the Key era, often leads to the charge that it’s not really clear what the National Party exists to do except take power and keep Labour out. With the exception of the 90s, they’ve never really tried out a strongly right-wing agenda for the times, and even then they were following Labour’s lead! We’ll see where they currently go, but as it stands the perception is that New Zealand tends to be a progressive country by global standards in large part because, once Labour makes whatever advances, National often tends to bed them in and implement them better rather than get rid of them.
If you want to mechanise how the National Party’s internal politics and motives work, the best way to explain them is as a liberal-conservative broad church. Some National MPs are older conservatives, often rural, who don’t like to see much change, so they’re socially right-wing but also aren’t the most supportive of economic reform. Others are younger liberals, often urban, who like to pursue more right-wing economic changes but aren’t pressed about social issues. Together, they can balance each other well, but they can also create inertia.
National’s internal scraps are often, compared to Labour’s, relatively more about personalities and vibes than political positioning. National spent six messy years in Opposition after winning the most votes in 2017 but flubbing the negotiations for a majority. You may have heard about the antics of Simon Bridges or Judith Collins during these years, but in the end the winner was Christopher Luxon. He is hard to identify so far on the liberal-conservative axis even though the tendency is to write him off as a conservative. All the names I listed in chief ministries besides Shane Reti are urban liberals. This partly explains National’s commitment to making noise about economic reform, but they’ve also been wagged by the tail on social issues. Having largely coasted to victory at the last election, their mandate is unusually weak, and above all Chris Luxon is really unusually not popular for a Prime Minister.
Labour are usually New Zealand’s runner-up party and form the government around 40% of the time. They bear the scars of the past far more than National, which tends to shrug them off; the 80s have implanted a deep aversion to pro-market behaviour from Labour throughout the left, but Labour's suffering in Opposition against John Key has contributed to a heavy suspicion amongst the party leadership of going too far to the left.
Labour's own broad-church is urban. You can argue about what electorates count as rural, but at the last election you absolutely could count Labour's rural or semi-rural electorates on one hand. Their split is, instead, between their heritage - predominantly blue-collar and non-degree Pākehā, Māori and Pasifika voters in areas like South Auckland and Christchurch - and their increasingly dominant new voter base, which has swelled in numbers over the decades - predominantly white-collar and university-educated voters in areas like Dunedin and Wellington. Both blue-collar and white-collar unions have typically been closest to Labour, but are not slavishly loyal to the party.
Labour right now remain the second largest party, but are licking their wounds after the total collapse of their government: they ran out of talent, they couldn’t get anything done, they seemed fresh out of ideas and the public was sick of them after COVID and in a troubling economic situation. The argument will probably grow over the coming years over whether to drop Chris Hipkins, who took over as leader after Jacinda Ardern and is about as unpopular as Luxon - a better debater but worse out and about with swing voters. While most parties choose their leaders by a simple majority vote of their MPs, if Labour’s MPs can’t consensus, their members and union affiliates get 40% and 20% of the vote for the leadership respectively against the MPs’ 40%.
The Greens are at their largest yet and they’re a really straightforward party to understand compared to the rest. They’re left-wing environmentalists: they want the government to do a lot of good things and they’re happy to tax rich people and big businesses to do it. Unlike other parties that have a single leader in charge and a deputy leader who’s usually a loyal assistant (and often comes from a different wing of the party - e.g Carmel Sepuloni is a Pasifika woman from Auckland more in tune with the old party, Chris Hipkins a white guy from Wellington more in the vein of the new), the Greens have two co-leaders who fulfil that same balancing role but make important decisions together. One co-leader must be Māori and one must be a woman; Marama Davidson, who is aligned with the Green membership and not very influential with the wider public, fulfils both currently.
The Green membership are the only ones who get to vote on who can be co-leader, and get to vote every year, which is how they embarrassed James Shaw the other year; they recently made Chloe Swarbrick leader. The Greens are hoping to supplant Labour as the main party on the left or at least take significantly more of the left-wing vote share, to steer the conversation in Opposition in a more left-wing direction and to have more influence in government. In particular, they have started winning multiple electorate seats, highly unusual for a minor party, which they’ll be hoping to hold in the urban centres. However, they have had a series of MP scandals over the past few months, and this may mess with their prior rise at Labour’s expense.
ACT used to be an absolute minnow kept in Parliament only by David Seymour winning Epsom, Auckland, as their sole MP. However, they made the most of National’s struggles in Opposition by moving to the right on social issues like Te Tiriti and grew significantly. As a result, almost all of their MPs are quite new and not well-known; the party largely remains the David Seymour show. He’s widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most effective politicians; time will tell whether he and his other four ministers can get stuff done in government. ACT will be looking to compete with National for farmers and businesspeople and NZFirst for the populist anti-Treaty vote so that they can hang onto their expanded caucus and continue to influence policy.
NZFirst are effectively the Winston Peters Party. Winston Peters is one of a kind, a man utterly consumed by the endless drive to do politics and lash back against all his critics, and, as a result, many of his key issues have changed over his decades in politics, epitomised with how he’s entered coalitions with both National and Labour. The consistent note tends to be racial rhetoric, whether it’s against immigrants or the Treaty processes. He initially represented conservative Māori and other regional blue-collar, non-degree voters left unemployed in the Rogernomics era, which caused his split from National when they doubled down on those policies. Most of his voters are old by now, and his signature policy is the Super Gold Card, which gives various benefits to pensioners.
NZFirst always bomb out of government after a term in it, so Winston will be looking to get enough attention (and enough corporate donations - it’s well known NZFirst are close to industries like fisheries and forestry) to make the difference this time. Keep an eye on Shane Jones; he’s their other big personality and, if the 79 year old Winston Peters should ever be taken out of commission, he’ll be the one to step into the breach and try to keep them in Parliament, probably by winning Northland.
Te Pāti Māori, after their formation, won most of the Māori seats, entered a coalition with John Key and shrivelled on the vine until they fell out of Parliament. As a party built by and for Māori voters, they can only hope to win majorities in those seats, but most Māori voters lean centre-left: Māori voters are likelier to have lower incomes, to not have a degree, to be younger and to use public services more or be dependents, all of which tick the boxes for left-wing affiliations, and many older Māori voters have long-term affiliations with the Labour Party built up without equivalent investment from the historically very white National Party. Accordingly, TPM lost its support from its voters when it teamed up with a centre-right and rather white National government.
Te Pāti Māori snuck back in in 2020 and roared back to life last year, claiming all the Māori electorates but one. They’ve done so by pivoting to the left - these classifications can be at their most simplistic when it comes to something like a party that entirely rejects the premise of Westminster-style democracy in the first place, but the obvious fact is that they’ve embraced turning out younger voters by promising to tax the rich, vigorously battling against racism and refusing to work with the right. They’ll be hoping to hang on to the Māori electorates in 2026, take the last of them, and ensure that the seats (which for most of their history have defaulted to Labour) become permanent TPM fiefdoms.
And that does it! You’re informed as can be on New Zealand in a nutshell right now. Next time, we’ll do a brief global tour of political hotspots and trends in the different regions of the world with some nods to IR, before concluding with my practice example. Until then!
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