Helen Clark narrowly won a third term, against race-baiter Don Brash’s re-energised National. John Key peaked against a left bloc of the growing Greens and David Cunliffe’s cave-in Labour. How will Jacinda Ardern fare?
Neither queenmaker (NZFirst or TOP) have presented any route past the 5% MMP threshold. Nor has right bloc party New Conservative.
The strong performance of Peter Dunne in 2002 brought seven new MPs to his party, United Future. Sound familiar? These unknowns were revealed as divisive Christian conservatives. UF were massacred to a last man in 2005.
However, Seymour may learn from precedent, and solidify ACT as “the real opposition”. Being the opposition, though, what do they gain from having more, untested MPs? Him, and Deputy Leader Brooke Van Velden (who worked on the End of Life Choice Act), are their only proven performers.
National lost hard, and has hardly cleaned house; Peter Goodfellow remains party president. Judith Collins has not shown that her competence equals her honest fervour. Bill English took 15 years to go from 22% to 44%. Collins has been in politics longer than that and managed 25%.
Two alternatives - Christopher Luxon and Mark Mitchell - are both older, white men - nothing new from National. Luxon being John Key’s favourite suggests an undertone that he lacks his own beliefs or style. Mitchell is a lesser Collins: their main reason for leading is that they want to. He contracted private security for eight years, including in Iraq. That’s the last closet you want skeletons (perhaps literal) to spring out of.
National’s prominent challenges may obscure the potential of their economic message. Paul Goldsmith’s incompetence cannot erase that forever. He himself has been scrubbed off. What might delay recovery is Collins’ bizarre, bureaucratically baffling division of economic portfolios between the unproven Andrew Bayly and disgraced Michael Woodhouse.
If they can put out their points on economics, the next three years will be the time Kiwis want to hear them. We’re doing well, but the world is in the grips of recession. We depend on exports: dairy, meat, forestry, education.
Western governments were punished in post-Great Recession elections, like Helen Clark’s Labour in 2008, and the UK’s Gordon Brown’s Labour in 2010. Labour has a one-word solution to recession - spend! Is that enough to deliver sustained growth? Will the planning be there?
For that matter, will the Labour formula work this time? They may not even have Ardern. Grant Robertson is her obvious successor, but nobody in politics can inspire and communicate like she can. If Jacinda Ardern is our Tony Blair, Grant Robertson is our Gordon Brown, and Brown lost his first election.
The Labour Māori caucus may criticise Labour within for failure to deliver for Māori. They have an honest interest in improving Māori outcomes, and an incentive to fortify their Māori electorates against the Māori Party, who will also push from the outside.
The Green Party is not too closely bound to Labour. They have latitude to criticise, though they may decline to exercise that, and can threaten to sway votes within the left bloc. NZFirst is no longer an accepted excuse for government inactivity.
If Labour loses in 2023, two courses lie ahead. One is that the incoming National government focuses on paying down debt, which means austerity. At minimum, that looks like freezing any increases in funding outside core services like education and healthcare. The other is a National win on a centrist platform close to Labour’s: business as usual.
If Labour wins...the only government to win a fourth consecutive term was Labour (1935-1949), on the heels of recession and through world war. 2026 will test whether placing politics ahead of pursuing a transformative agenda can turn out tremendously. But who’s really winning?
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