“Follow the money” is the classic directive to journalists trying to understand where power and influence lie in society. In terms of uncovering who influences various New Zealand political parties and governments, it therefore pays to look at who is funding them.

The political parties are legally obliged to make declarations about the donations they’ve received each year. They pass this information on to the Electoral Commission, and the donations from the 2023 year have now been published on the Commission’s website.

Below are the aggregated total donations for each party elected to Parliament last year. The total donations received by these parliamentary parties were nearly $25m. Of this total, the parties of the new government (National, Act, and NZ First) received 16.5m, and the parties of the Opposition (Labour, Greens, Te Pati Māori) received the lesser amount of about $8.2m.

Total donations

Huge totals of donations received

National has declared a total of $10.4m of donations for the 2023 election year – which has captured media headlines about the release of the donations declarations. Journalists reporting on this have used the terms: “staggering” (Stuff), “enormous” (Newshub), and “massive” (The Herald and Newsroom).

The $10.4m raised is indeed significant and illustrative of just how popular the National Party is at the moment with wealthy individuals and companies. However, some caution is also required in the interpretation. For example, some reports have compared the $10.4m figure with smaller totals that National have received in the past, suggesting a significant increase in funding for National. But this is a case of apples being compared to oranges.

The reporting rules have changed significantly for the 2023 election-year donations. Whereas previously, the parties were legally required to declare donations of $15,000 or more, this threshold has now been considerably lowered to include any donations over $5000. This means National’s donation reporting captures many more donations than in the past.

Furthermore, parties also now have to report on the quantum of donations received that are below the declaration threshold. For 2023, National has declared about $6m of below-$5000 donations. The larger donations only make up about $4m, or about 40 per cent, of National’s declaration.

The $10.4m raised by National is still highly significant and note-worthy. However, there should also be caution with the claim made in the media in the last few days that this figure is the largest ever received by a party in New Zealand’s political history. It’s worth noting that at the 1987 general election, the Labour Party of David Lange and Roger Douglas received about $3.5m in donations. When this figure is translated into 2023 dollars, it’s about the same as National received last year.

Large donations

The 2023 election year certainly contained quite a few huge donations from wealthy individuals and companies. By far the biggest was the $500,000 donated to National by business owner Warren Lewis. Although this has been reported to be the largest recorded donation given to a political party, back in 2005, businessman Owen Glenn infamously gave $500,000 to the Labour Party.

The second-largest donation was $200,000 given by property developer Mark Wyborn to New Zealand First.

National also received a $200,000 donation from Buen Holdings, which is owned by Guemsoon Shim and Lian Seng Buen. However, the records state that this was received on 10 August last year, but it was then returned to the donor on 23 August – the same day that the donors were in the news for a story about the Auckland Council and Tenancy Services investigating alleged unlawful tenancy management in one of their buildings.

The table below lists the biggest donations received.

Large donations

While the above table includes all the donations of $100,000 or more, it’s also worth noting the amount of lesser amounts. Taking an arbitrary threshold of $20,000, the following table shows how many medium-sized donations the parties have received.

It’s also useful to look at how many large donations each party received. If you take an arbitrary threshold such as $20,000, the list below shows how many large donations above this figure were received by each party.

Once again, of these 131 medium-sized donations, most have gone to the parties of the new government (101), and few have gone to the parties in opposition (30).

Medium donations

Donations under $5000

In the past, parties only had to declare donations over a certain threshold (which has been $15,000 in recent years). But now parties also must account for donations under $5000. Rather than detailing each donation and the identities of the donors, the parties simply declare how many such donations they have received and what the aggregated amount of money is. The total number of sub-$5000 donations received by each party is below.

Small donations

The donations below $5000 appear to make up the vast bulk of money received by the parties. As already mentioned, 60 per cent of National’s donation income in 2023 came from these smaller donations, and for some of the other parties, it is even higher. Interestingly, the parties of the opposition, in particular, have received more of the smaller donations (88,253) than those of the government parties (53,397).

Anonymous donations

Political parties’ ability to receive anonymous donations has been clamped down. Parties can now only receive such donations in two highly regulated ways.

Firstly, parties are only allowed to accept anonymous donations of less than $1500. The table below shows how many such donations each party received in 2023 and the total amounts of these donations for each party.

Anonymous donations

Donations can also now be given anonymously to political parties by sending the money to the Electoral Commission, which then passes the money onto the parties without any identities attached. These are called “Protected donations”, and the Electoral Commission is only allowed to distribute a maximum of $373,520 to any one party in a year. Below is the list of protected donations passed onto the parties.

In 2023, there were only eight such donations, six of which went to National, totalling $363,000 (just below the allowable limit). NZ First and Act received one protected donation each. This information can be seen in the table below.

Protected disclosure donations

MP donations

Parties raise much of their income from MPs’ high parliamentary salaries. Some parties, traditional on the left, have a “tithing” rule in which roughly ten per cent of their MP or Ministerial salaries are donated to the party.

Such tithing didn’t always appear in the Electoral Commission records – because, in the past, when the threshold for disclosure was higher, many of the MP tithing amounts were lower than needed to be declared. But in 2023, all the tithes for Labour and Green MPs were published. See the table below for the biggest MP levies in 2023.

MP donations

Donations from election candidates

The records of donations released by the Electoral Commission include some curious donors – the candidates themselves running for Parliament. It’s pretty standard for party organisations to raise money to give to candidates to help their local election campaigns, but in this case, some of the candidates have also been making donations to the head office.

The most prominent example in the table below is the $50,000 given to Te Pati Māori by list candidate John Tamihere, however in his case, he’s also the President of the party. Just as Tamihere didn’t make it into Parliament, National’s Auckland Central candidate Muralidhar Mahesh – who donated $37,199 – also missed out, along with TOP donor-candidate Ben Wylie-van Eerd ($6098). More successful were Jenny Marcroft ($32,000) for NZ First, Vanessa Weenink ($26,357) for National, Tanya Unkovich ($5970), and Karen Chhour ($5200) for Act.

[ Donations from candidates

Donations from former politicians

It’s normal for political parties to seek extra fundraising from former MPs, especially those in retirement who might have accumulated decent fortunes from their time in politics and afterwards. While the example in the table below of Clayton Cosgrove’s consultancy firm giving $6000 to NZ First is the smallest, it’s possibly the most interesting, given that Cosgrove is a retired Labour MP.

[ Ex-MP donations

Loans to political parties

Although donations to parties have been regulated for decades, the loans provided to politicians have often flown under the radar, even though such loans have in the past been written off. Loans can often turn into donations, so they are now required to be disclosed. But in 2023, only two loans were disclosed, and they were both given to the NZ First party from the families of candidates—see the table below.

Loans to parties

Donors giving to multiple parties

Several donors have given to more than one political party. Clearly, some donors wish to support many different parties on the same side of the political spectrum. Hence, New Zealand’s richest man, Graeme Hart and his company The Rank Group, gave $204,000 to Act (in separate donations), $150,000 to National, and $110,000 to NZ First – all totalling $464,000.

Another Richlister, Trevor Farmer, gave $115,000 to Act, $100,000 to National, and another $50,000 to NZ First.

AJR Finance has only given to two of the new Government coalition partners: $55,000 to NZ First and $20,000 to National.

Another company, Christopher & Banks, gave National and Act $100,000 each. The private equity firm is run by Christopher Huljich, who gave National another $10,000.

Property developers Christopher and Michaela Meehan have given $103,260 to National and another $50,000 to Act. Similarly, Wellington’s Chris Parkin gave $24,500 to National and $10,000 to Act.

Wellington businessman Troy Bowker – a previous donor to Labour’s Stuart Nash – gave $15,000 to Act and $10,000 to NZ First.

On the left, gym company boss Phillip Mills gave $50,000 both to Labour and the Greens. Similarly, property developer Mark Todd gave $50,000 to Labour and $20,000 to the Greens.

Donating to more than one party

Housing property donations

A large number of donors appear to be involved in the housing and property development industry. These donations have featured particularly strongly in the declarations from the parties now in government.

The largest donation of the year – $500,000 from Warren Lewis – is not directly involved in property but the wider construction industry. Lewis’ business, FMI Building Innovations, is described as a “building systems and materials supplier”.

Various property developers have made some large donations. For example, Mark Wyborn has given $200,000 to NZ First and $24,000 to National. His business partner Trevor Farmer has given $115,000 to Act and $100,000 to National.

Property developer Winton is partly owned by CEO Chris Meehan and his wife Michaela Meehan. Together, they donated $103,260 to the National Party in 2023. In addition, Chris Meehan donated $50,000 to Act. Christchurch property investor Philip Carter donated $59,500 to National.

One of the largest private developers in New Zealand, Manson TCLM, is partly owned by Culum Manson, who gave $70,000 to National. Real estate boss Garth Barfoot, a long-time National donor, gave $20,000. National received a further $22,000 from Auckland commercial landlord Andrew Krukziener, who also donated $19,999 to NZ First.

NZ First also received $145,000 from Wellington property developer Vlad Barbalich.

One of the more interesting property developers, Ockham Residential, appears to have hedged its bets with political donations. Owner Mark Todd gave $50,000 to Labour and $20,000 to the Greens. The company’s Chief Executive, William Deihl, gave a further $20,500 to National.

Housing donations

Mismatch between donations and spending

The $25m declared in donations by the parties in Parliament for 2023 was obviously used for fighting that year’s general election. However, caution must be taken when comparing the donations and expenditures declared to the Electoral Commission.

At first glance, there might appear to be a major discrepancy between the funding and expenditures. For example, National declared $10.4m in donations but only spent about $3.6m. Labour spent more than this ($4.8m) despite declaring a smaller amount of donations.

The two figures aren’t immediately comparable. First, the spending figures only relate to the 12 weeks before polling day, whereas parties generally spend money on campaigning throughout the year.

Secondly, the spending figures only account for money spent on paid advertising. There are plenty of other party and election expenditures that aren’t captured by the legal declarations – such as money spent on staff and opinion polling.

Further columns will dive deeper into this and look at the donations received by individual parties.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the government – works in the public interest, and doesn’t encourage corruption and lobbying that produces poor decisions.

A bright light needs to be shone on the whole process, in which three ministers will be able to greenlight projects such as mining or housing development without the usual resort to the Resource Management Act processes. As I wrote about in early March, the whole new Fast-Track process will inevitably encourage closer linkages between vested interests and politicians, risking cronyism in decision-making – see: The Government’s new fast-track invitation to corruption

Because the normal democratic processes will be bypassed for projects chosen by the three ministers, what will be sorely needed is scrutiny from outside. I’m therefore proposing to run a campaign of analysis and awareness about everything to do with the new Fast-Track process, but especially of the projects that are being lined up for inclusion in the Schedules being inserted into the Bill. So far there has been a dangerous lack of transparency about this process – especially about which businesses and organisations are being invited to submit projects. Overall, the ethos of this reform programme seems alarmingly secretive and anti-democratic.

The name that I’m proposing for this campaign is “Fast-Track Watch” (Hashtag: #FastTrackWatch), to be hosted by the Democracy Project, which I run at Victoria University of Wellington. The main vehicle and output for this investigation and scrutiny will be a series of columns I’ll send out on the Substack platform, which I will make available to all media for free publication. Together, I hope that this campaign will be something of a watchdog on the Fast-Track activities.

In order to analyse the various organisations and businesses involved, and particularly their linkages with each other and politicians, I’ll be using the research databases I am developing as part of my broader programme of work on vested interests at the University. I will try to identify potential conflicts of interest and dubious relationships involved.

But I will also need the help of others: I’m hoping to crowdsource information about the potential Fast-Track projects and processes. Therefore, hopefully whistleblowers and well-informed citizens will provide additional information. Please send me your tips, ideas, feedback, or offers of assistance.

Likewise, if you’re a journalist or involved in media, please contact me if you want to collaborate in any way to help get material out to the public that helps keep scrutiny on the Fast-Track processes.

There will, of course, be many bona fide projects and proposals that deserve to be given resource consents or even fast-tracked by the government. This campaign isn’t against development per se, but merely being done to provide additional scrutiny and transparency, so that there is less chance of unscrupulous and damaging projects getting through the Fast-Track process simply because they’ve employed smart lobbyists, or have good connections with politicians and officials.

If you’re interested, please get in touch, in confidence. Contact me: bryce.edwards@vuw.ac.nz or just reply directly to this email. And please forward this “call” to other interested people, to grow #FastTrackWatch

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington.

Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards – Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Elections in the United States are dominated by big money. But what isn’t commonly understood is that most of it is raised and spent, not by the political parties and candidates for office, but by special interest groups who run their own election campaigns to influence the outcome.

Billions of dollars are channelled into campaign groups to run what are normally attack ads against politicians. The reason for this is because the political donations rules are designed to encourage this – with big clampdowns on people funding the politicians, but allowing them to more easily give to advocacy and lobbying groups instead.

This is a trend that is finally starting to occur in New Zealand. As the rules tighten on money going to candidates and political parties, this is pushing the big money towards less regulated and less transparent special interests. Critics call this “dark money” or “soft money” because it’s outside of the party system and therefore more difficult for officials and the public to scrutinise.

As with the US, such groups are incentivised to run negative attack campaigns, because if they run positive campaigns in support of a party or candidate, then that spending has to be allocated against the expenditure limits of the politicians, who also need to sign off their agreement with the campaigns (which they never want to do).

Dark money spent in the 2023 general election

Some of the money spent by campaign lobby groups must be declared. The Electoral Commission has just published the declarations of those organisations that spent more than $100,000 on advertising at the last election. However, there are many ways that “dark money” spending can stay below the threshold, and so most lobby group campaigning isn’t captured by the Electoral Commission.

The amount spent by these so-called “Third-Party promoters” has escalated quickly in recent elections. At the 2020 election, only $147,000 was spent. This increased by 13 times in 2023, with nearly $2m being declared. You can view all the declarations here: Registered promoter expenses for the 2023 General Election

The top spender lobby groups were the following, in order of money spent:

1. Vote for Better Limited: $386,515
2. New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union: $371,565
3. New Zealand Council of Trade Unions – Te Kauae Kaimahi: $299,344
4. Hobson’s Pledge: $283,899
5. Family First New Zealand: $204,771
6. The Better NZ Trust: $266,069.39
7. Groundswell NZ: $283,899

Lobby group spending dominated by the political right

This big spending list is dominated by rightwing campaigners – with only the CTU and Better NZ Trust being aligned with the leftwing parties. The latter carried out a campaign promoting policies to enable greater electric vehicle uptake. It’s unclear who funded the group, but previously they had listed one of their supporters as being Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority (EECA) – a government agency – which led to allegations that they were a “sock puppet” group. And the CTU ran an attack campaign against Christopher Luxon, with advertisements saying he couldn’t be trusted.

On the right, there was a real mix of socially and fiscally conservative lobby groups. The biggest spender was the mysterious Vote for Better group, run by businessman Tim Barry, whose main interests are in the horse racing industry.

The next biggest spender was the Taxpayers’ Union, run by director Jordan Williams, which ran anti-Government campaigns, mostly focusing on extravagant spending. Some of the TU’s declared advertising expenses were paid to The Campaign Company, which is also owned by director Jordan Williams. The Campaign Company was also contracted to several other lobby groups – such as Groundswell and Hobson’s Pledge. The company was also employed by electorate candidates, such as NZ First’s Casey Costello.

Some of this is covered today by Farah Hancock’s very good RNZ report, $2m surge in election campaign spending by third-party groups. In this she raises whether some groups such as Hobson’s Pledge have been involved in “astro-turfing”, in which elite well-funded campaigns are passed off as grassroots movements. She also draws attention to the increasing amounts being spent by the conservative groups – Hobson’s Pledge increased their spend from $254,115 in 2017 to $283,899 last year, and Family First went from $141,224 in 2020 to $204,771 in 2023.

There were 31 “third party promoters” that were registered with the Electoral Commission because they were planning to spend significant amounts of election advertising, but 26 of these didn’t make a declaration, presumably because they say they didn’t spend above the $100,000 threshold that necessitates one.

RNZ’s Farah Hancock has also investigated some of these groups. One appears to have been politically successful in its objectives: “The Natural Health Alliance encouraged voters to choose NZ First to get the Therapeutic Products Act repealed. It ran several full-page advertisements in the New Zealand Herald. Chairperson Paddy Fahy indicated these cost close to $10,000 each. Repealing the Act formed part of National’s coalition agreements with NZ First and ACT and is included in the government’s 100-day plan.”

While we know some of what these campaign groups have spent money on, it’s difficult to discover where they raised their money from. Although New Zealand’s political donations rules keep tightening up – and some scholars think they should be tightened significantly more – this has merely pushed the big money into these more mysterious groups, who don’t need to disclose their funding. This trend is only likely to worsen. And because such groups are incentivized to run campaigns against political parties (because the rules discourage them from campaigning in favour of parties or candidates), New Zealand is likely to go further down the route of elections dominated by Americanised attack advertising funded by dark money.

Fights between left and right activists about such dark money are likely to escalate. The Labour Party’s Greg Presland, who is also a part owner in corporate lobbying-PR-consulting firm Polis Consulting Group, has been drawing attention to the funding of groups on the right, asking questions about the rightwing Vote for Better Limited, which was the biggest campaigner last year – see: About the promoters electoral returns

Here’s his key point about this campaign run by businessman Tim Barry: “There is nothing to suggest that he is a well healed individual who is deeply upset with the direction of the last Government and the thought struck me what if he was paid by someone to do all of this? What if he was instructed by a Fisheries Company or an Oil Company or a fundamentalist American Christian Church or the Atlas Network for that purpose to do his best to undermine confidence in the left during the election campaign? The problem with the promoter rules is there is no obligation for them to say who they were paid by. And it can be an overseas person or corporation.”

Other political donations scrutinised

Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne has also drawn attention to a big mining company that appears to have successfully influenced an election race on West Coast last year. He has been investigating the spending of $32,600 by Bathurst Resources to bankroll the campaign of an Independent candidate at last year’s election, which is said to have been a decisive factor in leading to Labour’s Damien O’Connor losing to National’s Maureen Pugh – see: Big coal company bought West Coast election campaign

The mining company was opposed to the Government’s mining policies, and so funded the contest of independent candidate Patrick Phelps who was campaigning for more mining on the West Coast. Phelps is the manager of Minerals West Coast Trust, which last year was given $220,000 by various mining companies.

The donation from Bathurst Resources meant Phelps was the biggest spending candidate, and according to various sources was able to pull enough votes off O’Connor to let National win the seat – something that the Bathurst Resources company also boasts about.

The experience has made Labour’s O’Connor even more critical of the role of the wealthy in the political process: “There are many international companies and organisations wanting to influence New Zealand elections for their own purposes – the smoking industry, the investment and real estate industry as we’re starting to see. And there’ll be many more… I think what people have to do is follow the money, ask the question: why such investments would be made? And for the most part, no business makes an investment without some realistic expectation of a return.”

The big fundraising and spending electoral candidates

The Electoral Commission released the donations and expenditure declarations of all electorate candidates last week, which means the public has a better understanding of the money being used by politicians at the local level. Below are some of the top figures from these declarations, detailing whether they were successful in their campaigns.

The top ten donation recipients:

1. Siva Kilari, National, Manurewa – unsuccessful: $110,483
2. Mahesh Muralidhar, National, Auckland Central – unsuccessful: $109,496
3. Shane Jones, National, Northland – unsuccessful: $95,524
4. Chlöe Swarbrick, Greens, Auckland Central – successful: $95,023
5. Chris Bishop, National, Hutt South – successful: $98,549
6. Cameron Brewer, National, Upper Harbour – successful: $86,659
7. Tim Costley, National, Ōtaki – successful: $79,679
8. Hamish Campbell, National, Ilam – successful: $70,677
9. Scott Sheeran, National, Wellington Central – unsuccessful: $64,260
10. Catherine Wedd, National, Tuktuki – successful: $61,920

The top ten election advertising spenders:

1. Scotty Bright, Democracy NZ, Port Waikato – unsuccessful: $41,905
2. Rachel Boyack, Labour, Nelson – successful: $32,560
3. Julie Anne Genter, Greens, Rongotai – successful: $32,554
4. Raf Manji, TOP, Ilam – unsuccessful: $32,502
5. Tim Costley, National, Ōtaki – successful: $32,089
6. Chlöe Swarbrick, Greens, Auckland Central – successful: $31,643
7. Dana Kirkpatrick, National, East Coast – successful: $31,565
8. Cameron Brewer, National, Upper Harbour – successful: $31,243
9. Katie Nimon, National, Napier – successful: $31,191
10. Carlos Cheung, National, Mt Roskill – successful: $31,072

Some of this information is also available today in Glenn McConnell’s very good Stuff article, The politicians who were flush with cash and broke the bank campaigning

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards: Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

The Labour Party’s fortunes go from bad to worse. Ever since the party was turfed out of power in October, incurring its biggest-ever loss, the party has shown no real sign of learning any lessons from its defeat, nor does it show any capacity to revive itself.

Last week is being labelled its “worst week yet” by commentators. One of them, Vernon Small, who until recently was the senior adviser to David Parker, wrote yesterday in the Sunday Star Times that Labour appears to have finally hit rock bottom last week, with another poor opinion poll result of 28 per cent support, Grant Robertson abandoning ship, and a new report out showing that in government Labour had failed on child poverty – see: Was that Labour’s worst week yet? (paywalled)

Not only is Robertson a major loss of talent for the party in opposition, Small points out that most of the other stars have been departing: “As well as Robertson and Ardern, Kelvin Davis, Nanaia Mahuta, Andrew Little, Michael Wood and Kiritapu Allan have all jumped ship or been thrown overboard. Third-ranked Megan Woods is being equivocal about her long-term plans.” Meanwhile, Small points out that Chris Hipkins has demoted other solid talent, such as Damien O’Connor and David Parker, leaving Labour’s front bench “looking decidedly callow.”

Small suggests that Labour views tax reform as a recurrent campaign nightmare” to avoid rather than “an opportunity to define itself, and fund its policy platform”. And he says that in keeping Parker away from the revenue and economic portfolios, he’s signalling that a wealth tax is off the agenda. Instead, Hipkins has put the rather dry Deborah Russell in charge of tax, and she says that wealth taxes are “largely unknown” and too complicated to explain.

And in the weekend another Labour insider wrote an analysis on the Labour-aligned blogsite The Standard about how Hipkins is more interested in preserving his leadership than giving MPs like Parker a chance to innovate on tax policy: “Hipkins is also using the elevation of Edmonds and Russell to shank David Parker. Parker is the only guy left with that combination of progressive chops, huge track record, and the merest mote of charisma to be an alternative leader to Hipkins. Hipkins has sent yet another signal to Parker to retire. This leaves Hipkins free to turn the entire Labour effort into an even more ineffectual Wellington-circling wankathon taking two terms to recover from the smashing he got it in 2023” – see: What’s Left?

Labour failed on poverty and inequality

It’s last week’s Statistics New Zealand report on child poverty that is truly eviscerating for Labour. As Small argues, Labour MPs and activists now need to acknowledge their government “didn’t adequately protect the most vulnerable being hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis.”

This is why many on the political left have been so disappointed by the last government. Arguably things got much worse for the poor and working class, while the rich got richer under Hipkins, Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson. Hence, some of the farewell commentaries for Robertson have been less than positive.

Some of the most scathing are from those on the political left. For example, activist Steven Cowan sums up what a lot of those on the left think: “The unvarnished truth is that, despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promising to lead a government focused on economic transformation, very little changed. The Labour Government, supported by the Greens, merely tinkered. Working people were, again, like Oliver Twist, left pleading for more. The new child poverty figures only serve to underline the fact that the Labour Government continued to deliver out thin gruel for the working class its so-called ‘socialist’ MPs claimed to represent. And, presiding over it all, was Finance Minister Grant Robertson. While he wrote, in a nod to New Zealand’s myth of egalitarianism, that he wanted to give everyone ‘a fair suck of the sav’, in reality he was a resolute defender of the neoliberal status quo” – see: A loyal lieutenant of capital

Robertson’s end of an error

The toughest column on Robertson’s time in power has been written by Newstalk’s Heather du Plessis-Allan who says that his departure is not being accurately evaluated by the commentariat and press gallery because he’s the sort of politician that they like having a beer with. She rightly reckons that Robertson won’t be willing to have any more beers with her once he’s read her column: Grant Robertson is a great bloke, but he was a terrible Finance Minister (paywalled)

Robertson is praised by du Plessis-Allan for many of his talents, but she says he should be ranked as New Zealand’s worst finance minister on record – even worse than Robert Muldoon. This is mainly because he took the public’s debt from “$5 billion in 2019 to a projected $93b this year” without producing anything much to show for it. She says at least when Muldoon wasted money on building dams and energy infrastructure the country was left with some assets as a result – but in Robertson’s case, he seemed to blow all those billions without anyone really knowing where it went. She poses the question: “What can we point to and say ‘Grant paid for that’?”

Here’s one good example she gives of Robertson’s propensity to spend very poorly: “He said yes to Michael Wood’s bike bridge, which is the perfect example of wasteful spending. It was a stupid idea. It cost us more than $51m in consultants and rented office space. Then it was canned. We spent money and we have nothing to show for it. The implications are serious. We now don’t have enough money to pay the nurses their backpay or the police the pay rise they’re due. Or the GPs.”

Robertson also failed to advance any real economic reform. And despite lots of talk about how unfair the tax system is, Robertson mostly retained the status quo: “If he really believed the tax system needed to be fairer, he had his chance. He had the ear of Jacinda Ardern. He is one of her best friends. And he either couldn’t convince her or didn’t really try.”

Should Hipkins be replaced as Labour leader?

The worst part of the 1News poll for Labour last week was Hipkins’ plummeting numbers for preferred prime minister. Falling by ten percentage points revived speculation about whether Hipkins had to go. The NBR’s political editor Brent Edwards argued in the weekend that Hipkins is safe for the moment: “the knives will not be out now. It is surely too early in the electoral cycle to consider a change of leader, but the question might arise closer to the election if Labour is unable to lift its support and bridge the gap between it and National” – see: Tragedy, polls, retirement, forced apology and a grim scorecard

Herald political editor Claire Trevett also says that Hipkins is currently safe: “He does have some time up his sleeve. There are no signs as yet that any other credible leadership contender is ready to put their hand up. Once regular speculation starts around one or two names, that will become a more present danger for him. But until there are proper contenders to be a new leader, there is no point in rolling the old one. That gives him a window of opportunity to make sure that those names do not emerge, and that he is the one still standing in 2026” – see: Ginny Andersen’s attack on Mark Mitchell does Chris Hipkins no favours (paywalled)

Trevett also points to another low point in Labour’s past week, with another rising star in the party displaying questionable judgment, and making HIpkins’ job harder: “Ginny Andersen has done no favours for him with her bizarre attack on Police Minister Mark Mitchell on Newstalk ZB about his past as a security contractor in the Middle East. Mitchell quite rightly described it as a character assassination. Hipkins has said it went too far. Andersen has apologised to Mitchell personally, but not publicly and clearly not satisfactorily. She is now refusing to front on it.”

Nonetheless, Anderson is still talked about as the “running mate” for Kieran McAnulty in any attempt to replace the current leadership with a new generation of leaders that might be more able to connect with working class voters.

Labour is still the party of the Professional Managerial Class

The Labour’s progressive agenda and identity is very much their strongest sales pitch. And with the departure of Grant Robertson, the party’s reputation as a feminist force has become stronger – 70 per cent of its front bench is now female.

Also, by appointing Barbara Edmonds to replace Robertson as finance spokesperson, she creates a record as the party’s first female in that role and the first the Pasifika person as well.

This achievement is saluted in yesterday’s Herald with an editorial that says “The once impossibly high glass ceiling has been smashed”, with Edmonds creating “a new pathway not only for herself but one for other Pacific politicians and those aspiring to be so one day. She also represents something that was not always evident in New Zealand and overseas – brown women in leadership roles. Brown women in politics” – see: Barbara Edmonds’ new appointment another step forward for Pasifika (paywalled)

However, as to whether the party still represents working people is more in question these days. In recent years it’s become more apparent the party has been captured by the Wellington “professional managerial class”, pushing the party away from its traditional working class politics towards a middle class social liberalism.

This was discussed in the weekend by political commentator Janet Wilson: “October’s election result proved Labour has a problem of Democrat-sized proportions; they’ve become disenfranchised from their base while other left-wing parties enjoy the benefits. Which is how the Greens managed to snaffle the red strongholds of Rongotai and Wellington Central, and Te Pāti Māori grabbed six of the seven Maori seats. That’s what happens when there’s a divide between the professional managerial class running the party and the supposed blue-collar workers they’re meant to represent” – see: As Robertson heads for the exit, Labour’s reset becomes critical (paywalled)

Wilson explains that Hipkins epitomises that professional managerial class, and continues to hamper any tax reform that might threaten the interests of his own wealthy milieu: “As a paid-up member of that managerial class, having worn the well-trampled path from student politics directly to Parliament, the question must be, is Chris Hipkins the man to represent the workers in an age when AI threatens to disrupt all jobs? Can a leader who scuttled the tax work of his peers in one election hope to stop increasing dissension in the ranks if its polling numbers continue to slide and party irrelevancy beckons?”

There’s a hollowness to a party that continually refuses to implement reforms that would benefit Labour’s traditional base. Wilson says the party has therefore “lost its ideological compass and is adrift in the wilderness of what-it-doesn’t-stand-for. All while applying the magical thinking of all opposition parties – that the government of the day will only last for a term before they are ushered back into power.”

The hollowness has been recently discussed by Matthew Hooton, who has argued that Labour (along with National) has become a “mere empty vessel” for “the personal ambitions and brands of whoever gets control” of the party. Therefore, in lacking any real connection with social forces apart the Liberal Establishment of places like Grey Lynn, Hooton says the party can’t enthuse working people anymore.

In his recent column, What Labour must do to reclaim its core support (paywalled) Hooton says that Labour was “supposed to be about redistributing at least some power and wealth, from capital to labour and from the ruling establishment to ordinary people.” But looking through Labour’s last two times in office, Hooton suggests that the party has given up on its traditional constituency in favour of conservatism, and this will need to change if it is to be re-elected: “Labour will never win back the working-class and middle-income voters who switched to National in 2023 until it offers more change than Ardern and Hipkins were comfortable with. If there is to be a do-nothing Government, former Labour voters may as well stick with National, which is historically so good at it, but isn’t seen to pander to the woke, Wellington, pounamu- and David Jones-wearing, yet mainly Pākehā elites.”

A similar argument was made two weeks ago by Andrea Vance, writing in The Post, saying that Labour’s “existential crisis” relates to its inability to relate to working people, and the fact that it has evolved “into a clique of career-driven politicians who marketed themselves at the progressive middle class”. In lieu of an interest in working class politics, Labour now specialises in “futile culture wars and identity politics” – see: What’s left for the left? (paywalled)

To find a way forward, Vance argues “Labour should be asking: who does it now represent?” And “this requires a more fundamental reshaping of how the party thinks about workers.”

Is there anyone in Labour that can at least pretend to be in touch with working people rather than the professional managerial class? Hooton wrote a column for the Herald at the start of the year that singled out who the best replacement for Hipkins might be – see: Apologies needed for Labour to be taken seriously (paywalled)

Here’s his conclusion: “Thirty-eight-year-old list MP Kieran McAnulty is on manoeuvres, with speculation list MP Ginny Andersen would make a good running mate. Both served briefly as ministers in the last year of the defeated regime. McAnulty, while assuring Labour activists he is well to the left of Ardern on economics and tax, has built a blokey non-woke brand based on driving a ute and liking a beer and a bet. He’s certainly more in tune with today’s post-Covid, recessionary New Zealand than anyone from Grey Lynn.”

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

When countries’ national elections are closely fought, it means that the median voters critically determine the parliamentary or congressional outcome. But, though depending to a considerable extent on the prevailing political culture, the centre-of-gravity of the resulting government may be far from that median usually ‘centrist’ position of the voters.

The Aotearoan case

Aotearoa achieved something very rare in 1992 and 1993; a complete change of electoral system. Aotearoans were fed up with extremist winner-takes-all politics, where the ‘winner’ almost never got a majority of votes; and where the outcome in non-battleground electoral districts was purely academic, though ‘academic’ in the best sense of that word.

Ironically, the change was initiated by New Zealand’s ‘right-wing’ government of the last half century; the Bolger-Richardson National government which edged out the Lange-Douglas Labour government for this ‘honour’. (In both cases, the Prime Minister was comparatively ‘centrist’, but with extreme economic liberals as Ministers of Finance, although Roger Douglas was a relative latecomer to the cause of neoliberalism. In a sense, Prime Minister Jim Bolger did a ‘David Cameron’; expecting to put the matter of proportional representation to rest, just as Cameron expected his referendum in 2016 to dispel agitation for British exit ‘Brexit’ from the European Union.) We may also note that the Shipley-Birch government in 1998 and 1999 was very right-wing, having – in 1997 and 1998 – ousted both Prime Minister Bolger and Treasurer Winston Peters; in this case it was Prime Minister Shipley who was seen as more right-wing than Finance Minister Birch.

(There is some chatter – eg Chris Trotter, Nothing Left without Labour, 19 Dec 2023 – about as to whether the new government of Aotearoa New Zealand will be its “most right” ever. Time will tell of course, and there are alarming similarities showing between present Finance Minister Nicola Willis and 1990-1994 Finance Minister Ruth Richardson. For the last 100 years, I would rate the early Depression governments from 1930 to January 1933 as the most right-wing. This period from 1930, which commenced with the death in office of Prime Minister Joseph Ward, includes a Depression election at the end of 1931; an election which saw Labour, already in Opposition, trounced. In 1930 and 1932, Prime Minister George Forbes was also Finance Minister. In 1932 the extreme economic liberal, William Downie Stewart, was Finance Minister. In 1933, as in 1994, the government turned towards the political centre after the ousting of Stewart. The catalyst in 1933 was a critical change to monetary policy; the devaluation of the New Zealand pound which set New Zealand onto its eventual recovery path. Today’s byword for the 1932 and 1992 governments was ‘austerity’; we in Aotearoa sense – palpably – that austerity is also how the mid-2020s will be remembered.)

The hope in 1992 was that proportionally-elected governments would be loose coalitions, and that all parties in Parliament would contribute to some extent to the governance of New Zealand. And indeed we have seen that at times, with the ‘left-wing’ Green Party contributing to some policy delivery under a centre-right National-led government, and with the then radically-centrist Māori Party accepting the Prime Minister’s invitation to contribute formally to the governance process in the early 2010s.

The political culture in New Zealand – or at least the elite political culture – remained committed to binary politics; to the adversarial politics of Governments and Oppositions shouting at each other across a political theatre designed precisely for that kind of politics. As Peter Dunne – former leader of the former centrist United Party, a man who held the balance of power in three Parliaments this century – once said, the parties form into (or are formed into) “job lots” of the Left and the Right. In New Zealand’s history since 1996 of proportionally-elected governments, only three successful parties have resisted pre-election binarisation, and each only partially so: United, New Zealand First, and the previous incarnation of Te Pāti Māori (generally known then as the Māori Party).

As 2023 unfolded, it was looking like two distinct job lots would be fighting it out: National and Act as the Right; and Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori as the Left. National and Labour were understood to be quasi-centrist neoliberal parties with nearly identical macroeconomic policies: fiscal conservatism laced with monetary austerity. But they had different political cultures: whereas National still represented the Old Right Elites (and rural New Zealand in general), Labour’s power base was the expanding New Left Elites, including the New Māori Elite. Elite politics – the politics of optics over substance, the politics of wilful neglect of the disadvantaged, and the politics of health and education mandates – was becoming increasingly adversarial, indeed becoming visceral.

Out of this cocktail of despair, Winston Peters’ nationalist New Zealand First Party – sometimes semi-radical, genuinely centrist – re-emerged, to the chagrin of the entire political class. But it New Zealand First had to be attached to the National-Act job lot. Peters and Labour had ruled each other out in 2022; and in a way that could not easily be undone. So one of the election campaign’s main ‘gotcha’ games was for the mainstream political media to force National leader Christopher Luxon to explicitly admit New Zealand First into his job lot of Parties, and then to blame Luxon’s ‘moment of weakness’ for Peters’ concurrent rise in the political polls.

The political polls had always indicated that the 2023 election would be a close – even ‘knife-edge’ – contest between the two designated job lots. The voters’ quandary was how to choose a moderate rather than an extreme government, given the relatively extreme positions on the left-right spectrum being taken by Te Pāti Māori, Green and Act. The quandary was exacerbated by the voters’ wish for a non-austere government, when both Labour, National and Act were firmly committed to fiscal austerity, and there was no intellectual commitment from Green or Māori towards an alternative to fiscal austerity.

(2023 was looking like an MMP – proportional – rerun of the 1931 and 1990 elections. We might note here that Joseph Ward’s United Party – unconnected to Peter’s Dunne’s more recent United – was a centrist party in the 1920s, the remnants of Richard Seddon’s Liberals. And, or at least it’s commonly believed, that Ward – then 72 years old, and perceived by some as a bit doddery – won the 1928 election because he misread his speech notes, and promised to raise a 70 million pound loan, when it’s believed he meant £7 million. Fiscal non-austerity is popular among the non-elite; and 1927 had been a terrible year for the New Zealand economy, under the public financial management of the fiscal ultra-conservative William Downie Stewart. More farmers walked off their farms in 1927 than in the Great Depression of the early 1930s.)

There is a party of the ‘radical centre’ in New Zealand – TOP, the Opportunities Party – but it never stood a chance of breeching the five-percent party-vote threshold in 2017, 2020, or 2023. And even TOP has deradicalised, presumably to edge closer to the mainstream fiscal narrative. I heard no mention from TOP or anyone else, in 2023, of a Universal Basic Income; a UBI, once TOP’s cornerstone policy, is counter-elite, hated equally by the elite left and the elite right. The message in 2023, to non-elite voters, was to vote for the elite job-lot they detested least, rather than to risk ‘wasting’ one’s vote on a party that couldn’t make the threshold. Since the first proportional election is 1996, no genuinely new party has made it past the five-percent barrier. (The ‘minor parties’ are all offshoots of ‘major parties’: the Green Party and Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party were offshoots of the Alliance, itself formed as New Labour, a Labour Party offshoot; Act was another offshoot of Labour; New Zealand First was an offshoot of National; Te Pāti Māori was an offshoot of Labour; United was an offshoot of both National and Labour.)

New Zealand voters have developed two techniques for moderating the left-right job-lot fait-accompli. They could tactically switch to United (as they did in 2002) or New Zealand First (as in 2005 and 2017) or the Māori Party (as they might have done in 2008 or 2017, but didn’t). The other possible tactic is for supporters of one of the ‘major parties’ – National or Labour – to switch to the other as a way of minimising the input in government of the minor party which they dislike the most. We saw that in 1999, 2008, and 2020. (In 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called this other-party supporters “lending their vote” to Labour.)

What can happen is that a close ‘job-lot’ outcome – a close binary outcome between Left and Right – can increase the leverage in government of a small but extremist coalition partner. Act played that role of fear-nemesis to the Left, whereas Green is the traditional fear-nemesis of the Right. This is what is really meant by the ‘tail wagging the dog’; when an extremist party – or at least an adjudged extremist party – has excessive leverage, especially in close-election cases when the median voter supports a party like TOP.

Imagine if this present New Zealand government did not have its New Zealand First “hand-brake”, as Winston Peters accurately paints his intermittent role in New Zealand’s post-1993 proportional governance culture. That ‘hand-brake’ culture hasn’t developed to the point where the political class would be able to countenance a ‘grand-coalition’ of National and Labour. Indeed the median voter in New Zealand is not a bland centrist; not an elitist centrist. A bland-grand-coalition would only have the optics of centrist politics; it would not at all be in touch with non-elite voters.

Very few Prime Ministers in New Zealand have found a centrist position that’s in touch with middle New Zealand. Michael Joseph Savage did. Richard Seddon did. Joseph Ward did, briefly and too some extent inadvertently; but Ward wasn’t a fiscal conservative. And, perhaps belatedly, nostalgia is reviving the legacy of Robert Muldoon; he who helped New Zealand get through its second worst global economic crisis. On RNZ’s The Panel a few weeks ago, I heard someone suggest that Muldoon was New Zealand’s last “socialist” Prime Minister. To the great surprise of that show’s host, people texted in, in full agreement with that ‘last socialist’ proposition, and in a distinctly approving way.

Despite proportional representation, New Zealand’s political culture favours unpopular governments, and adversarial processes of rhetoric and repeal. Aotearoa New Zealand, one of the most privately indebted countries in the world can only elect governments which don’t pursue a ‘duty-of-care’ approach towards ordinary Aotearoans; the main parties are averse to spending money on social-wage services or universal public income support. Indeed, since 1994, ‘fiscal responsibility’ – read ‘wilful neglect’ – is embedded in the Public Finance Act; an Act which I would argue has become central to New Zealand’s de facto constitution.

To understand a political culture, comparisons need to be made with other political jurisdictions, with other sovereignties.

United States

The United States’ ‘parliament’ is Congress, elected on a two-year electoral cycle. Sometimes – like now – two years seems too long. The United States’ polity represents the ‘mother of all adversarial cultures’.

In the 2022 election, Congress flipped, giving the Republican Party a narrow win. That Republican Congress is significantly more extreme than just about any previous Congress, in large part because of the narrowness of its majority. This situation mainly arises because American culture has become so adversarial that the large Democrat minority voted with the Republican extremists to oust the Republican moderate – Kevin McCarthy – from his role as Speaker. (Speaker is the nearest to a Prime Minister that exists in the American system.) The result was an impasse of several weeks, and the eventual election of a Speaker – Mike Johnson – who is a conservative hardliner who endorsed the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election.

In the United States system, close elections lead to more extreme outcomes, in complete contravention of the voters’ voice.

Israel

Israel has a proportional system, which allows for a much wider range of political parties than does New Zealand’s ‘MMP’ proportional system. The last two elections have been very close, with its multiparty ‘job lots’ only partly determined by the left-right political spectrum. Personality politics plays a big part.

Two elections ago the ‘man who would be king’ of Israel – Bejamin Netanyahu – was disempowered by an assortment of parties across the spectrum, including a small party supported by Palestinian Israelis. The temperature in this Levantine ‘powder-keg’ turned down a notch. But not for long. In the next election, with a sliver of a margin, Netanyahu was able to resume power by turning to the small ultra-Neozionist rump of his Parliament. The result is ‘history-in-the-present’, as we witness the brutal programmes to ethnically clear Gaza, and to squeeze the Palestinians out of any form of meaningful life in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. To maintain power during this electoral cycle, Netanyahu has no choice but to fall in line with his government’s most extreme voices. For perhaps most Israelis, the next election cannot come soon enough.

Again, given the prevailing political culture, close elections can lead to extreme outcomes.

France

In France – a European exception, without proportional representation – there has been a complete turnover of major parties. France’s equivalents of National and Labour both died in the 2010s. Neither seems capable of resurrection. In their place is a centre party – Renaissance – that looks like a mini-grand-coalition, a populist right party, and a new leftwing alliance. There are no multiparty job-lots as such; rather each party itself is a coalition of factions.  A degree of stability is ensured by the two-ballot system; a system that was used in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1908 and 1911, but abolished in 1913 by one of New Zealand’s most right-wing governments (led by William Massey), and one with a paper-thin majority. (Massey’s first government formed mid-term when ‘Independent Liberal’ Gordon Coates was coaxed by Massey to join the conservative Reform Party. Massey’s first action was to abolish the two-ballot system – effectively preferential voting as in Australia – and return to the First Past the Post system whereby many elected representatives receive well under half of all votes cast.)

Under its present configuration of parties, it’s hard to see how Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party cannot control France’s parliament. So, it will be the back-room coalitions which determine the extremity or otherwise of future French parliaments.

United Kingdom

The next election in the United Kingdom looks like being fought between a divided – and somewhat conservative Labour Party – and a Conservative Party which has outstayed its welcome. I am guessing that the centrist Liberal Democrats will score well, though the outcome will be determined by the balance of unpopularity between Labour and Conservative. If the balance of unpopularity is a fine one, and the Liberal Democrats go for a programme like that in New Zealand of TOP, then the United Kingdom may eventually achieve an outcome in line with popular appeal. But there are many ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’.

The United Kingdom has had a deeply frustrating time with its democracy, of late. The point to note here is that those people voting for large small parties – like UKIP in United Kingdom, and the former Social Credit in New Zealand – and people in ‘safe’ constituencies, are rendered invisible to the elite political classes. One result is that David Cameron made a huge political mistake in 2015, promising a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. The unexpected outcome was the result of a rare opportunity by those rendered invisible by the First Past the Post system, to render themselves visible.

Germany

Germany uses the MMP proportional system, the prototype of the New Zealand system. Before World War Two it had a different proportional system, with lower thresholds. As is well known, Germany gained a very extreme government in 1932, as the Great Depression peaked; a great depression made especially severe by both the post World War One Treaty of Versailles and the needless fiscal conservatism (ie austerity) of the centre-left coalition government prior to 1932. The Nazi Party came into the Bundestag (Parliament) on an anti-austerity economic programme, revealing its true colours (of national expansionism and ethnic scapegoating) later, once entrenched in power. The path to the Nazi outcome was a leftish government pursuing deflation, extreme fiscal conservatism; a mix of austerity and unimagination.

Elections were held in Germany in May 1928 (2.6% to the Nazis), Sep 1930 (18.3% to the Nazis), July 1932 (37.3% to the Nazis), Nov 1932 (33.1% to the Nazis), March 1933 (43.9% to the Nazis), and Nov 1933 (92.1%! to the Nazis). Before the Great Depression the Nazi party was a ‘lunatic fringe’ party. Adolf Hitler rode to power on the path of political instability and fiscal austerity.

In Germany today, while the parties in the present Bundestag cover a wide spectrum of ideologies, the post-war culture is to form coalitions around the centre, especially in a very close election. The problem is that the centre in Germany – defined by the Social Democrats (like NZ Labour) and the Christian Democrats (like NZ National) – is a centre of bland fiscal conservatism and of export-focussed mercantilism. We should not look to Germany to find solutions to the world’s financial problems.

New Zealand again

In New Zealand, consider these three-election sequences. The statistic quoted will be the percentage of votes for the parties to the left of (and opposed to) the leading conservative party.

In each case, in the middle year, National (or its equivalent, Reform) swept to power, following centre-left governments which had ‘lost their mojo’.

In the first three cases (all first-past-the-post elections) the centre-left subsequently swept back in the popular vote. (Though, thanks to the prevailing voting system, in 1978 and 1993 there was no change of government. Even in 1935, Labour’s route to power may have depended on a split in the right-wing vote; the extreme-right Democrats got 7.8% of the vote, and split the vote in many electorates.) The centre-right governments of 1931, 1975 and 1990, which lost favour massively in the subsequent election, moved away from policies of austerity; real austerity (in 1993) or perceived austerity (in 1978).

In 2011, something different happened. The centre-left failed to get its vote back. Labour was looking very divided and uncool, whereas the National-led government managed its optics well, taking credit for a re-emergence from the Global Financial Crisis. Part of that political management was the creation of the impression that the 2008 to 2011 government was more centrist than right-wing.

What will happen in 2026? Just now I heard Sue Bradford – former Green left-wing MP – comparing this new government with the National government elected in 1990. I think she’s correct. My sense is that the present government is as intent on making itself unpopular as that early 1990s’ government was. (Indeed both Finance Ministers were young; Ruth Richardson was 40, and Nicola Willis is 42.)

The difference is that Labour (with the other centre-left parties in Labour’s job lot) also gives the appearance that it is similarly intent on retaining their 2023 levels of unpopularity; as they were in 2011 after 2008, and also as the British Labour Party did after Margaret Thatcher gained power in the United Kingdom in 1979.

The 1935 to 1938 Labour government also gained a degree of unpopularity, with left and right factions seeking to find ways to renege on its radical centrist promises of universal social security and superannuation. In the end it was Michael Joseph Savage’s political skills in 1938 that enabled Labour to storm to victory in 1938, and to stay in power for 14 years. New Zealand voters are looking forward to a non-austere non-elitist non-ideological government in 2026; a government with pragmatic imagination (no, that’s not an oxymoron). Good luck to Jo and Joe Median.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University

It might have taken six weeks to decide the shape of New Zealand’s next government (or three if you count from the final results), but in the end that is the nature of proportional representation. Compromise, trade-offs and haggling are the price of an MMP electoral system designed to avoid single-party rule.

So, after some intermittently passive-agressive political posturing and much striding through airports, the deals were done and signed off in Wellington today. Both the ACT and NZ First parties have agreed, with exemptions, to National Party’s fiscal plan, tax plan and 100-day plan.

With two of the three coalition parties having run on campaign slogans about “taking back” the country and putting it “back on track”, there was a predictable sense of a return to policies of the past.

The Reserve Bank will again be focused on price stability, schools will be required to teach the basics, red tape and civil servant numbers will be cut, the “three strikes” provision will be restored to the Sentencing Act, te reo Māori in government agency names will be reduced, landlords will enjoy interest deductibility, and tax “relief” is again front and centre.

Not everyone got their way, of course. National has had to drop its plan to fund income tax cuts with a levy on foreign property buyers. And ACT’s proposed referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi becomes a Treaty Principles Bill that will go through the select committee process.

Unpredictable internal dynamics

Unsurprisingly, in this coalition of many colours, National secures the lion’s share of the 30 positions in the executive (including positions within and outside cabinet), holding 19 roles. ACT and NZ First both have three positions inside cabinet, with their leaders sharing the deputy prime minister role in turn.

Past coalitions have tended to comprise one major party flanked by a smaller partner on its left or right. Sometimes, too, those governments (single- or multi-party) have been supported on confidence and supply by parliamentary partners who formally sit outside cabinet but occasionally get executive spots.

But this will be the first formal three-party coalition New Zealand has had: one government based on two agreements wrapping together three parties. A government can only ever speak with a single voice, but this one has multiple moving parts.

It will also have an unpredictable internal dynamic. A single relationship between a senior and junior partner is one thing; this government has three discrete relationships, and they will not always be in harmony.

Incoming prime minister Christopher Luxon had the phrase “strength and stability” on high rotation during negotiations: the structural design of his government will test the bar he has set.

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Dispute resolution

The shape of the administration, and the chequered coalition history of NZ First leader Winston Peters, mean the processes put in place to ensure the effective day-to-day management of the government take on added significance.

Those arrangements are surprisingly thin. A coalition committee will monitor progress against the contents of both agreements. But it will only meet once during each House sitting period. This is a strategic committee, not one established to deal with the routine political challenges associated with keeping a three-way coalition on the rails.

Nor is it entirely clear how the daily conversations required in multi-party governments – including finding time on the legislative agenda to get through two coalition agreements’ worth of work, let alone all of the other policy challenges the next three years will deliver – are going to be structured. Surprisingly, there is no reference to holding regular meetings of the party leaders.

Instead, beyond a beige agreement to “undertake their best endeavours to achieve consensus on Cabinet decisions”, and the now standard MMP commitment to a “no surprises” policy, the parties’ respective chiefs of staff will be the key players.

They are the ones to whom disagreements between parties will be referred. Only if they cannot resolve the issue will the party leaders be drawn in. It is a reactive rather than an active model.

Beyond that, there is the standard commitment to maintain collective cabinet responsibility, and to the long-established “agree to disagree” provisions contained in the Cabinet Manual. And that’s it.

Potential fault lines

It is already possible to discern some of the challenges the coalition is going to face. The first will be finding an equilibrium point.

ACT’s more doctrinaire MPs will chafe at being dragged to the economic centre by NZ First. Likewise, NZ First’s social conservatives and economic nationalists will not enjoy aspects of ACT’s libertarianism.

Luxon will be constantly reminded that being a prime minister in a three-party coalition is not like being a corporate CEO – and not all his challenges will come from Peters or ACT leader David Seymour.

For instance, there will be National MPs who were spokespeople during the previous parliament but who now see an ACT or NZ First minister in “their” cabinet seat. In time, ambitious people who missed out on ministerial appointment can become restive.

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More broadly, tensions may well emerge between cabinet’s role as the centre of policy and political decision making and the prerogatives of individual ministers. It is not hard to envisage, say, a National minister pressing ahead with policy in their department rather than having always to run the coalition gauntlet in cabinet.

If this happens on any serious scale, not only will the fundamental principle of collective responsibility come under pressure, whole-of-government coordination (which is likely to be tested anyway by plans to cut the public service) will become challenging.

A loose federation of parties

Finally, small parties that prop up larger ones in office have often fared badly at the next election.

Having returned National to office in 1996, for example, NZ First came within 63 votes in Tauranga from tumbling out of parliament in 1999. In 2020, three years after installing a Labour-led government, it was turfed out.

ACT has no comparable record. But if the past is any guide, if polls start looking shaky for the smaller parties, watch for toys being ejected from political cots.

Today was all about the choreographed unveiling of a new government. But the extent to which the administration’s promises come to pass will depend on how the three parties get on once the gloss has come off and the pressure is on.

The coalition agreements are full of policy. But read the documents carefully and it is hard to escape the impression that, when it comes to the back-office arrangements that make governments tick, this is less a single government in lock-step than a loose governing federation of three parties. Now we get to find out if three parties can fit into one government.

Richard Shaw no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

– ref. Three parties, two deals, one government: the stress points within New Zealand’s ‘coalition of many colours’ – https://theconversation.com/three-parties-two-deals-one-government-the-stress-points-within-new-zealands-coalition-of-many-colours-217673

Government-formation negotiations are ongoing between National, Act and New Zealand First. We do not know how long these will take. Neither it seems, do they.

Importantly, there are fundamentally no hard deadlines on government formation negotiations in New Zealand. It will take as long as it takes. I’ll start by saying that some of the hypotheticals I talk about here are ridiculously unlikely. National, Act and New Zealand First will almost certainly either come to an agreement, or realise they cannot, well before we reach the ones I mention at the end. The point I am making is well-established by them however: there really are no hard deadlines. There is no date by which, if negotiations haven’t resolved anything, there must be a fresh election. Unless they’re still going in 2026, of course, when we’ll need an election anyway.

In New Zealand, a decision to hold an early election is one that is made by the Prime Minister. This power – like all other powers the Prime Minister has – is circumscribed by the caretaker convention. If a Prime Minister has the confidence of more MPs than not, they may exercise the power to advise the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and hold an election.

If a Prime Minister is operating in caretaker mode, that is, is governing without the clear support of a majority of MPs, the power to advise the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and hold an election can only be exercised – like all the other powers – if more MPs than not support the exercise of the power.

This means that, no matter how longs things take, there will be no advice from the Prime Minister to the Governor-General to hold a new election unless at least one of the parties involved in negotiations to form a government agrees to the holding of a new election.

There are soft deadlines all the time. There are soft legal deadlines. Saturday 11 November 2023 was one. It was the date negotiations had to be resolved if we wanted to avoid the necessity of having Chris Hipkins reappointed as Prime Minister because the writ wasn’t able be returned within 28 days of the election. But that date passed, and Chris Hipkins was appointed Prime Minister again (to operate within the confines of the caretaker convention).

There are soft political deadlines too. There was a date that things would have needed to be resolved by for Christopher Luxon to be able to attend this year’s APEC leaders meeting by. That didn’t happen.

And there will be others. At some point, if negotiations continue, this becomes the longest-ever negotiation to form a government. But that’s only politically relevant. It wouldn’t mean anything, legally.

And there’s also a date that this would have to be resolved by so that Christopher Luxon can be sworn in as Prime Minister before the first opening of Parliament for the swearing-in of MPs. But this isn’t a hard deadline either. MPs can be sworn in before Ministers. The opening of Parliament and the first sitting of the House after the 1996 general election occurred before the swearing-in of Ministers from the National-New Zealand First coalition (albeit, the negotiations had been resolved).

They don’t have to be though. At some point, it possibly becomes politically difficult for National. And if it keeps going, it possibly becomes politically damaging for National. They may decide that the harm to them being caused by negotiating is worse than the harm that would be done to them by being seen by the public as forcing New Zealanders back to the polls. But that’s just politics. If National, Act and New Zealand First are content to continue discussions, and none of them wants a fresh election, the can go on basically indefinitely.

Legal things will crop up. Like the re-swearing in of the old Government Ministers. Like the first sitting of the House. But they will just happen. The House will sit to swear-in MPs and to elect a speaker whether negotiations have concluded or not. But once those formalities are done, the House can just adjourn until next year and the talking can continue. The expectation is that the Governor-General will attend at the state opening of Parliament and give a speech from the throne. That can probably happen, albeit the content of the speech will be subject to agreement under the caretaker principle. There is no need for the House to adopt a reply to the speech before everyone is ready to. It can just meet every so often, and National, Act, and New Zealand First would have the numbers to adjourn. One really big soft legal deadline is imprest supply. At some point in the middle of next year, the permission that Parliament has given the government to spend money runs out. But Parliament exists, and there will be MPs. If they’re committed to making negotiations work, they’d just make sure it happens.

Politically, do I think this is at all likely? No. They’ll agree something at some point, or realise they cannot. There are even halfway houses. If it’s taking ages to resolve, but National, Act and New Zealand First are still committed to resolving it, they could even agree in the interim, Christopher Luxon could be appointed Prime Minister instead of Chris Hipkins, to operate under the caretaker principle. I don’t think that’s likely either.

But anyone who tells you there’s a legal deadline this all has to be done by is mistaken, unless the deadline they’re talking about is 10 November 2026. At that point, Parliament will have expired.

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Graeme Edgeler is a Wellington barrister, with a professional interest in constitutional and electoral law.

Incoming Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is now being openly mocked and ridiculed by political commentators for his failure to achieve a coalition government. There are certainly signs that Luxon hasn’t managed the process well, and raising questions about competency at this early stage is a poor start to government.

The most savage criticism of Luxon is coming from the political right. Today rightwing political commentator and former National Beehive staffer Matthew Hooton has a scathing column in the Herald giving his account, obviously based on insider leaks, of how the negotiations have unfolded. Hooton paints a picture of National’s negotiations as a failure, caused by Luxon’s arrogance and hubris.

Hooton records Luxon’s criticisms immediately after the election of how previous Prime Ministers have conducted coalition negotiations and his claims that “I’ve done a lot of mergers and acquisitions”. With the exception of the Air New Zealand-Virgin alliance that broke up when he was chief executive, there is little evidence of any other mergers Luxon worked on in his business career.

Despite boasting of his business experience and relationship-building skills, Hooton says the National leader has astounded those involved in the negotiations by his cackhandedness.

After apparently not achieving much of the promised progress in the three-week period before final results came in, Hooton reports that the presumptive PM then entered talks without bothering to take his coalition partners seriously. Hooton reports, “Act, NZ First and National insiders say Luxon is a talker rather than a listener. He never asked how Act or NZ First thought negotiations should proceed, or what they wanted from them.”

Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan has also criticised Luxon’s management of the negotiations, pointing out on Monday that only the 1996 MMP coalition negotiations have taken longer: “That’s embarrassing for Chris Luxon. Because he’s the guy who’s talked up his negotiating skills, given he’s done a lot of mergers and acquisitions. And he’s the guy who set the deadline of wrapping this up in time for him to go to APEC.”

Why is this important? First impressions matter, and du Plessis-Allan suggests that Luxon and National’s reputation is suffering: “The start of a Government is a really important period. It sets up voters’ expectations for the first term, that’s why Governments often write up 100 day plans. Because they want to create a sense of urgency and give the impression they’re changing things fast. Literally the opposite of that is happening right now. There is no sense of urgency, nothing’s changing fast, there’s no momentum.”

Why the rush? Danyl McLauchlan explains today in the Listener that Luxon “promised to introduce a mini-Budget by Christmas and he’s running out of runway to get that done. They want their ministerial offices staffed and running but they can’t hire anyone because they don’t know who has what portfolio. They’re wasting crucial time.”

McLauchlan says the speed of the negotiations “will be driving Luxon wild with frustration” but Winston Peters will be entirely comfortable: “For Peters these negotiations – the tactics, the games, the stalling, the triumphs – are the quintessence of politics.”

He also points out that, although Peters cannot leverage the threat of supporting Labour instead, “he’s demonstrating his power over his larger coalition partners, making them come to him. He is the most important person in the country, the absolute centre of attention. And he will go on like this: he always does.”

Luxon has, according to commentators, failed to grasp the power that NZ First and Act have in the negotiations. He has assumed they are captive negotiators who will essentially have to agree to whatever he offers them. Hence there have been reports of low-ball offers that both Act and NZ First have been dismissive of, if not offended by.

Seymour and Peters have outmanoeuvred Luxon, not only because they have shown they are willing to work together, but because Luxon has failed to realise that the minor parties can walk away from the negotiations, causing a new election or forcing National to form a minority government that would be even more reliant on them.

As Hooton points out today, the pressure is on Luxon to produce a deal: “It is he who must close a deal before Christmas or there will be new elections. Seymour and Peters can quite happily walk away, leaving Luxon to form a minority Government that would need to win their agreement issue-by-issue. If anything, Seymour and Peters would be more powerful if not limited by a coalition agreement and the decaying but still burdensome rules of Cabinet confidentiality and collective responsibility. Seymour and Peters understood this all along. Luxon needs them if his Government is not to be a complete circus, with the clown show of the past five weeks being repeated whenever it wants to do anything contentious. Seymour and Peters don’t need him at all.”

Does this suggest Luxon will prove to be a weak prime minister? Leftwing political commentator Chris Trotter thinks so, arguing that Luxon’s poor negotiating skills only illustrates how little power he has, and essentially Luxon now looks like “an inexperienced numpty”.

Writing for Newstalk ZB today, Trotter suggests Luxon has overplayed his hand: “Placing insultingly meagre first-offers before such men might be survivable if Luxon had come to the table, as Key did in 2008, with 45 per cent of the party vote. Turning up with this election’s 38 per cent is nowhere near so impressive.”

Trotter argues the troubled negotiations should remind the public just how poorly Luxon has performed since becoming National leader, especially compared to the likes of his mentor John Key. On becoming leader Key made audacious raids into Labour constituency and ideologies by first visiting poor parts of Auckland and then helping Sue Bradford get her “anti-smacking bill” passed.

Luxon’s record is derisory by comparison, and in his first big test all that he has achieved is the own-goal of uniting David Seymour and Winston Peters in a negotiating bloc against him. And Trotter agrees that they now hold the winning cards, and Luxon is under pressure to capitulate: “What Luxon and his colleagues have seemingly failed to appreciate is that all the pressure is on them. As the largest party, they come, not with all the cards in their hands, but with a very large clock ticking loudly in their ears. Covid and a cost-of-living crisis have made New Zealanders ill-tempered and impatient. In the minds of many, the wait for a new government has already gone well over time”.

It’s now five weeks since the election. But there is talk today of an agreement being reached, perhaps on Sunday. But it could take much longer – especially if the three parties take the offers back to their respective parties and fail to get their immediate sign-off. We already know that the big policy sticking points have been over tax and a referendum on the Treaty. These will be the big issues to watch out for, to see who has compromised.

Hooton says today that if the minor parties aren’t happy with what Luxon offers on tax and the Treaty, they will be happy to have another election and campaign on those issues – which is likely to only make them more popular.

Then there are the portfolios and baubles. All parties deny these are big issues, but they always are crucial to the minor parties. And they might prove to be a big headache for Luxon. Who does he give Deputy PM to? And Peters is rumoured to have demanded the role of Attorney General, in charge of his old foes the Serious Fraud Office.

Such dilemmas would tax even the best negotiators. And in Luxon’s case, it might well defeat him.

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Dr Bryce Edwards is the Political Analyst in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the director of the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

There may be some surprises when the final election count comes out today.

One particular point to note refers back to the United States presidential election of 2020, when the late votes in most states – those votes not counted on election night – very heavily favoured Biden over Trump. The context was that Trump had the election night ‘victory’.

It is possible that something similar could happen here. This election has some characteristics which means the ‘late votes’ – for want of a better name – could strongly reflect the frustrated voters who only decided to vote at all towards the end of the campaign; many being first-time voters or voters whose registration had elapsed on account of them being renters who have insecure housing, or young people living ‘at home’, or recent immigrants.

So, I am suggesting that there is a 10% chance that ‘The Left’ will have 60 or more seats this afternoon. And I think there is another 25% chance that ‘The Left’ will have more seats than ‘The Right’, where ‘Left’ means Labour/Green/TPM and ‘Right’ means National/Act. If this happens, National/Act will require NZ First to vote with them in Parliament, whereas, under the more likely scenario, National/Act will be able to get legislation through if NZ First abstains.

What I think is most likely to happen is that the Specials, mainly later votes rather than advance votes, will reflect the already known differences between election day voting and advance voting. This means that Labour, Green and New Zealand First should gain with the specials, with National being the biggest loser from these ‘late’ votes. We also should note that Green and Te Pati Māori traditionally improve with the specials, and are likely to do so again. This should mean that TPM is entitled to an extra party-list seat, eliminating the present overhang.

We should also note that preliminary vote tallies for Auckland (except the very outer electorates) are low. This reflects a significant diaspora of population from Auckland since around 2015; although we also note that Auckland has also received many immigrants in that time, and that Auckland’s population is probably on (or just past) the cusp of an accelerated replacement. (Such a replacement magnifies what is happening in New Zealand more generally, with the process amplified in Auckland.)

The low Auckland count on election night also probably means that the special votes will be weighted towards Auckland. There may be an effect from the specials this time that is similar to the late election-night wave in 2005, which swung the election to Labour when it first looked that National would prevail.

My best estimate is that this afternoon’s result will be:

• National 47 seats (up to 48 after Port Waikato)
• Labour 35 seats
• Green 15 seats
• Act 11 seats
• New Zealand First 8 seats
• Te Pati Māori 4 seats

Re the electorates, which the media overemphasise, I am picking that Labour will regain four seats which went to National on election night: Te Atatu, New Lynn, Nelson, Banks Peninsula. (So National should pick up one more list seat; though Green may get to 16 seats, meaning that National/Act may be four down from election night.) And I think that Carlos Cheung, looking safe in Mt Roskill on election night, will win that seat by less than 500.

My best guess is that Kelvin Davis and Pene Henare will hold on in their Māori seats. But, if not, these could flip, generating a TPM overhang, and thereby freeing up one or two list seats.

Re the process of counting, I think that the Electoral Commission could give running counts of late votes, and then do the final audit. This would make the counting process much faster. Perhaps more importantly, they could give much more precise information about where the special votes are from, and about the breakdown of their categories (eg overseas, absent from the electorate, first time registrations, and re-registrations). Each of these sub-categories, considered regionally, could make it much easier for statisticians to make reliable projections of the final count. (We note that well-conducted polls certainly mean we get quite reliable projections of our election outcome before election day. Major problems with pre-election polling mainly happen in jurisdictions with First-Past-the-Post voting, and their vagaries of marginal electorates and swing states.)

The mainstream media, and many officials and pundits, continue to overemphasise the role of ‘marginal electorates’; a role which is close to zero in determining the balance of party representation. An example of this is the presentation in Wikipedia of the electorate votes (by party) ahead of the actual party votes.

Another example of this is the obsession with electorate boundaries. I live in New Lynn which now has quite a strange ox-bow shape, giving parts of Titirangi to Kelston while including much of Avondale. The reality is that electorate size makes not a jot of difference to the final result. I think it would be far better to maintain stable electorate boundaries, drawn with reference to existing local authority boundaries. And it would be better for cities to have more populous electorates than rural areas. This ensures better rural representation through smaller rural electorates, while also noting that most of the list MPs have offices in the cities. Certainly, Auckland has had too many electorates in recent years, while many of the places with the highest vote counts have been hinterland electorates. (And I note that Dunedin could be a single urban seat, with Taieri a hinterland seat.)

Finally, I would like to congratulate the Electoral Commission for its information pamphlet for voters. They make it clear that the electorate votes are for people, not for parties. (Like mayoral votes, if you will.) I only wish that the commentariat would take note.

Wishing the new government the best, and noting that it needs to govern according to the actual concerns of the people, focussing on issues such as infrastructure, education, health, housing, inequality, sustainability and world peace. New Zealand’s most popular governments preserved and extended our traditions of universality; a tradition which promotes cohesion rather than division. Non-elite New Zealanders don’t like the targeting of morsels of welfare, and all the moral hazard problems that come with that approach.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

In recent decades the New Zealand Parliament has become more representative of some of the historically neglected demographics in our society. As I told TVNZ’s Q+A programme in the weekend, it’s become browner, younger, more female and more gay, and this is good progress – see: New MP intake heavy on farmers, light on unionists.

But at the same time as Parliament has become more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality, it has become significantly narrower in terms of socioeconomics, occupation, or social class. Ordinary working-class people have been squeezed out of politics.

The trend reflects the professionalisation of politics that has occurred since about the 1980s, when all political parties increasingly became staffed and represented by people from the professional managerial class. Gone were the manual workers, the wage-earners, and in came the managers and higher socio-economic professions. Candidates and MPs were much more likely to be lawyers, public servants, accountants, and businesspeople than even teachers or nurses.

In the 2023 intake of 40 new MPs, ten are business owners, nine are former local government politicians, eight are lawyers, four are from media backgrounds, three are accountants, and another three are former parliamentary staffers. There are no union workers, classroom teachers, clerical workers, and certainly no blue-collar workers among them. Such occupations are seemingly unwelcome in today’s professionalised political parties.

At the same time, we have seen the rise of career politicians, with much younger candidates coming into Parliament after rising through the ranks of student associations, working as Parliamentary staffers, or even as local government politicians.

Labour’s professionalisation

A big part of Parliament’s changing demographics is due to the transformation of the Labour Party. Although the party was expressly established as a vehicle to get working class people into Parliament and Government, Labour has long since ceased with this aim and has become similar to National in terms of the backgrounds of the MPs and people at the top of the party.

The original Labour Party was based in the trade union movement, but by the 1980s it was a middle-class party – which is why the Fourth Labour Government was so easily captured by the neoliberal economic reform programme.

According to leftwing political commentator Josie Pagani, the middle-class bias of modern leftwing parties means that more liberal or social issues are prioritised instead of fixing the problems that most materially impact working class citizens. She argued earlier this year that parties of the left still promise a lot to the working class, but once in power “they reflect the priorities of the college-educated middle classes – who now run these parties. Ban plastic bags. Subsidies for EVs. Cycleways, ban hate speech” etc. Pagani argues that although Labour is inclined to sneer at the working class, what the party really now needs to do is “recruit more candidates who are comfortable in the smoko room, not just the university common room.”

Labour currently has a contradiction whereby the party’s caucus is mostly made up of middle class or wealthy individuals, yet they are seeking to win office on the votes of largely working-class people, with whom the party doesn’t have much organic connection. Increasingly Labour is seen as a creature of the Wellington central bureaucracy rather than ordinary people in provincial or working New Zealand. This isn’t helped by the fact that a quarter of the new Labour caucus live in the capital.

Conservatives reorientate back to farmers

The National Party has also been professionalising in recent decades, bringing in more of the professional managerial class as MPs and moving away from some of its original base in areas like farming. Whereas Federated Farmers was once known as “the National Party in gumboots” this connection dwindled after the 1980s, and farmer representation in Parliament declined too.

However, after National’s shock 2020 defeat the party has been rebuilding, which has involved bringing farmers back into the party, including as candidates. Hence the new National caucus has an influx of MPs from a farming background.

What’s more, Act and NZ First have also brought more farmers into Parliament. In the new intake there are, on current votes, going to be seven new farmers in Parliament. In fact, amongst the conservative parties there will now be a total 18 MPs with a farming or horticultural background.

This shift is in line with a global public mood that is against technocrats, insiders, and cosmopolitan elites. National, Act, and NZ First have grasped, to some degree, the populist Zeitgeist away from the professional managerial class, and have been electorally successful because of it.

Parliament’s working-class democratic deficit

Working class voices were largely absent from the recent election campaign. Instead, the contest was mostly just a debate between different elements of the educated classes and the wealthy.

Democracy suffers when politics is so narrow. It means our representatives simply don’t have the lived experience of ordinary people. They don’t have to worry about paying the bills, they don’t have to worry about the housing crisis.

Josie Pagani has recently pointed out that although only about nine per cent of the general public own more than one house, nearly two-thirds of Parliamentarians do. And while only one in four New Zealanders have a tertiary education degree, in Parliament it’s nine out of ten.

This means that our political system excludes most of the population – those who don’t have capital, great wealth, or aren’t highly educated. So, this large part of society is increasingly feeling disenfranchised. Pagani says: “If a group of people don’t see themselves – or their concerns – represented in their parliament, trust in government declines. Our country gets more divided.”

Furthermore, the fact that our Parliament is made up of the wealthy property-owning professional managerial class helps explain why governments do so little for working people. As Pagani points out, under the new professionalised model of politics the “share of the nation’s income going to wage earners, which had sat at around 70% in the 1970s, fell to under 60% by the late 2010s. If it had stayed at 70%, the average wage today would be $12,000 higher.”

The dominance of middle-class professionals also means that politicians do little to fix the many crises that disproportionately impacts those at the bottom – from the housing crisis through to the cost-of-living crisis, poor public transport or public health services.

For example, the current Prime Minister and Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, who was previously the Minister of Health, pays for personal private health insurance which means that unlike most citizens, he’s not so reliant on the underfunded and crisis-plagued public health system. It’s the same for most politicians, regardless of which party they are from – they’ve used their wealth and professional abilities to separate themselves from the travails and difficulties that most voters face.

Can the left bring working people into Parliament?

Perhaps, therefore, it’s time for the New Zealand Parliament to get an injection of working-class politics. National and the other conservative parties will always bring businesspeople into Parliament, and now we are seeing them return to their traditional constituency with more farmers too.

Looking at the left, it’s unlikely that the Green Party can foster any sort of working-class politics, as their voting constituency is very much the professional managerial class. It’s no coincidence that the Greens now win electorates like Auckland Central, Rongotai, and Wellington Central.

Perhaps it’s only the Labour Party that can bring working people into Parliament. And just because Labour has been failing on this doesn’t mean that the party can’t change. Certainly, after the party’s big defeat at the ballot box, and arguably its failed record in government, Labour is going to need to do some soul searching. This should involve questions about why the party exists, and who exactly it represents.

Although it might not be a popular proposal amongst the current Labour caucus, the answer to the party’s current woes could well lie in ditching the middle-class approach. Of course, all of this is more easily said than done. And ultimately, even if Labour decided to put more working people into Parliament, there’s a big question about whether such people would be ready to embrace a party that long ago abandoned the working class.

Dr Bryce Edwards is the Political Analyst in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the director of the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards.

The Labour Government was elected with 50 per cent of the vote three years ago, but current opinion polls show their vote could halve in this year’s election, which would be one of the biggest plunges in political history.

Most polls have Labour on about 26 per cent. And the downward trajectory is clear – 1News has reported Labour dropping seven times in a row in their poll. And it’s not just the polls showing Labour is in serious trouble. The Australian TAB takes bets on the New Zealand election, and for each $1 dollar bet they are currently paying out $4.50 for a Labour win, and only $1.18 for a National win.

Newshub political editor Jenna Lynch has predicted “absolute carnage and political armageddon” for Labour – pointing out the party risks losing senior MPs like David Parker, Willie Jackson, Adrian Rurawhe, and Ayesha Verrall. And if things go really badly, even Finance Minister Grant Robertson could be chucked out.

Labour could be headed for an even bigger defeat than in 1931 when Gordon Coates’ governing Reform Party plunged to just 26.6 per cent.

So why has Labour gone from such highs to such lows so quickly? The answer to this question will be discussed for a long time after 14 October, but we are already seeing some early explanations for why Labour has become so unpopular.

1) Labour’s handling of Covid

Labour won its 50 per cent vote in 2020 in response to its successful handling of the first wave of Covid. The public was extremely grateful that Jacinda Ardern’s government prioritised protecting public health until vaccines became widely available, and ensured workers and businesses were supported. But subsequent Covid waves made it into the country, and various aspects of Labour’s management of Covid were found wanting.

Last week former Cabinet Minister Peter Dunne said the main damage to Labour’s re-election prospects can be traced back to the middle of 2021 when Covid hit the country: “the government’s perceived slowness in winding back pandemic restrictions, alongside the mounting cost-of-living crisis brought about rising levels of public discontent. Compounding that was the second Auckland lockdown, which Ardern promised would be ‘short and sharp’, but which went on for over four months.”

Labour’s Covid story is now seen by many as negative rather than positive, and the Government is barely mentioning it in their re-election campaign. As Stuff political editor Luke Malpass has reported, “Voters just don’t seem to want to hear about it any more. They don’t want the Government crowing about how good it was – because it doesn’t feel that way now. And all the privations and disruption seem best forgotten.”

2) Failure to deliver the promised transformation, or even the basics

Labour came to power in 2017 promising transformational reform. They were largely judged to have failed to deliver on their promises after their first term, and it was only their handling of Covid in 2020 that saved Labour from being turfed out that year. Since then, the narrative that Labour hasn’t delivered has only grown stronger.

Labour’s flagship KiwiBuild programme, with its promise of 100,000 affordable new houses, still exists but has become something of a joke. Auckland’s Light Rail project was supposed to be complete by 2021, but hasn’t even begun, typifying Labour’s general weakness on infrastructure.

In the Listener last week, Duncan Garner argued Labour over-promised and leaned on slogans and gimmicks such as KiwiBuild and, as a result, the Government’s record of achievement is very slight.

Unsurprisingly, Labour is not running its election campaign based on what it has achieved. Malpass notes: “It’s remarkable that a Government of six years doesn’t appear to be running much on its record.”

Crucially, it also means the public are far less inclined to believe Labour’s latest promises. As TVNZ’s Jack Tame says: “what good are new promises if a government didn’t deliver on its previous ones?”

He has pointed to all the areas Labour has failed to deliver on – especially housing, mental health, and child poverty. In all these areas, Labour can point to progress, but there’s too much evidence of things going backwards. Even on climate change, some progress has been made, but ultimately “the most difficult emission reductions decisions have been deferred to future governments”, including how to deal with New Zealand’s largest gas-emitting industry.

Billions have been poured into the mental health system, but there’s a lack of clarity on where it’s all gone and why it hasn’t fixed the crisis. As the Mental Health Foundation says, the promised transformation hasn’t occurred, and “Things are overall getting worse, not better.”

Tame says, “there is no escaping the transformational void” under Labour, and its current campaign is a pale version of what got them into government in 2017.

In September, the research company Ipsos asked the public to rate the Government’s performance out of ten – with the result being 4.5/10, down from 7.2/10 three years ago. On all the issues voters consider most important at the moment, survey respondents rate Labour as inferior to National in terms of competence. This includes Health, Education and Housing – areas which Labour have traditionally dominated.

3) It’s the economy, stupid

Many voters will essentially ask themselves whether life has materially improved or worsened since Labour took power in 2017. Unfortunately for the Government, on many measures it seems to have worsened, particularly with record high inflation and interests rates. The housing crisis, in particular, has worsened significantly since Labour came to power, meaning people are struggling more than ever to pay skyrocketing rent or buy their first home.

Political journalist Henry Cooke sums it up like this: “New Zealanders are rightly upset about their falling real incomes, with high food costs in our uncompetitive grocery sector, high rents in major cities, and high interest rates for those who bought houses while they were severely overvalued… In New Zealand the government is not so squarely seen as the source of everyone’s economic pain, but it is hardly seen as the solution either”.

A common complaint is Labour has spent too much money, and has too little to show for it. Duncan Garner writes in last week’s Listener that “$48b more is spent annually than in 2017. What do we have to show for it? New motorways, trains, light rail and hospitals? No chance.”

Even on the left there is a feeling that the $48b extra spend per year under Labour – and especially the extra $60bn that was spent due to Covid – could have been targeted at transformational change, but has been frittered away on pet projects and more bureaucracy.

Some of this money has been put into expensive structural changes – centralising healthcare (Te Whatu Ora) and polytechnics (Te Pūkenga), but these have become lightning rods for discontent.

4) Broken New Zealand

For the last fourteen years polling companies have asked the public about whether New Zealand is headed in the right or wrong direction, and until recently the majority have always given a positive response. According to polling in 2020 over two-thirds of the population thought the country was headed in the right direction, with few dissenting. By 2023 this has entirely reversed – the vast majority of those polled believe New Zealand is on the wrong track.

A big part of this discontent is with key public services, which are increasingly criticised as dysfunctional, overly-bureaucratic, and under-performing. Stuff’s Luke Malpass reported that dissatisfaction with government services appears to be skyrocketing. According to a Curia survey, voters say public services have got worse since 2020 in the following key areas: Health (70 per cent say it’s worse), Criminal Justice (64 per cent), Education (57 per cent), Transport (47 per cent), and Welfare (37 per cent).

The term “polycrisis” is being used to describe the inter-connected nature of the various crises in the country. It all adds to a sense of anger and frustration with the status quo, creating a mood for change that Chris Hipkins’ government is struggling to turn around.

According to the Listener’s Danyl McLauchlan, Hipkins hasn’t been able to connect with voter dissatisfaction: “he never spoke to the very sour mood of the nation after three years of post-covid disappointment, high prices and political failure.” McLauchlan says that when this year’s Budget came out, voters could see that Labour had no plan or vision for how to fix all the problems in New Zealand: “I suspect they wanted Hipkins to signal that he had a plan to send it in the right direction. A diagnosis of our problems and a plan to solve them. The budget and now the campaign have revealed that there’s no such scheme.”

5) Failure on tax reform

New Zealanders are particularly dissatisfied with the tax system. Experts and the wider public are in agreement about the need for change – it’s only the Labour Government that seems wedded to the status quo, ruling out change. Survey after survey shows the public is open to significant reform of taxes, including introducing capital gains and particularly wealth taxes.

The Labour Government came to power promising tax reform and especially to investigate a capital gains tax. However, Jacinda Ardern went on to rule out a capital gains tax from being implemented under her watch. Under Chris Hipkins, Labour once again ruled out any new progressive taxes.

Some in the Labour Party wanted a wealth tax brought in, and Revenue Minister David Parker worked on a tax that could’ve been implemented this year, only to be overruled by the more conservative Hipkins. A Newshub Reid-Research poll recently asked voters whether he was right to rule this out – with 47 per cent disagreeing with Hipkins’ decision, and only 39 per cent agreeing.

6) Perception that Labour is arrogant and out-of-touch

Winning 50 per cent of the vote in 2020 was both a blessing and a curse for Labour. It meant that Labour had the largest number of MPs any party has ever had, and the ability to push through reform. Labour has been judged to have squandered that historic opportunity, falling into complacency and arrogance.

Labour ministers felt they could implement unsignalled projects – from Three Waters to a social insurance scheme – without the pressure to take the public along with them. As Duncan Garner said last week, “The majority vote meant no one was acting as a gatekeeper.”

Labour is perceived as out of touch with the public, which always leads to electoral death. Recently, Newshub’s Reid-Research poll asked voters whether they thought the Government was concerned with the issues that matter to Kiwis, and only 29.8 per cent thought they were, with the majority – 62.1 per cent – saying the Government isn’t.

7) Lack of clarity about what Labour believe in

Labour’s popularity declined significantly while Ardern was leader, which led her to hand over to Hipkins. Hipkins was initially able to restore a strong degree of public support, mostly through jettisoning many of the pet projects of the Ardern era. He took the party back up to about 38 per cent support after his “policy bonfire”, which signalled to the public that Labour was re-orientating to more traditional concerns.

The problem was Hipkins wasn’t willing or able to replace the jettisoned policies with anything, and it made it look like the party had no vision or plan for fixing the big problems in New Zealand. Instead, it started to look opportunistic. Leftwing political commentator Chris Trotter reflected: “My view is that Hipkins ‘policy bonfire’ was a mistake for Labour as it’s looking now like the Party has burnt down its own house by abandoning its principles. Hipkins has deserted the party’s core support base in his lust for power.”

Peter Dunne explained last week that: “when it became clear that the bonfire was simply about getting unpopular policies off the table, without replacing them with more popular alternatives, the freefall in Labour’s support resumed. The various policy announcements Hipkins has made during the election campaign have simply raised the retort that why is Labour only promoting these policies now, when it has had the best part of six years in office to have implemented them.”

Policies like GST off fresh fruit and vegetables looked cynical, which was reflected in opinion polls showing the public was largely unmoved by the new policy. As Herald political editor Claire Trevett explained, “the GST policy was seen as an attempt to offer something that looked more generous than it was, purely for the sake of votes.”

Labour’s justice policy announcements show how the party has swung between two radically different approaches in a way that lacks authenticity. In the campaign Labour has been banging the law and order drum – something political commentator Janet Wilson describes as “hypocritical” because they are shedding “what they stand for in a hasty grab for the centre vote.” By promising a crackdown on youth offenders and ram-raiders, Labour has simply appeared to be “National-lite” – and failing to convince liberals or conservatives.

In emulating National on many policies, Labour has allowed its opponents to set the agenda. Financial journalist Bernard Hickey has characterised Chris Hipkins’ pitch to voters as: “Labour’s version of tweaking the status quo in Aotearoa’s political economy is better than National’s.”

8) Labour’s focus on woke politics instead of working class politics

Under Jacinda Ardern’s leadership, Labour morphed more into a more middle-class-orientated party than ever before. Instead of focusing on the issues that working class voters care most about – such as living standards and public services, Labour became more associated with social issues, gender, ethnicity, and what some call “woke” politics. Social justice rather than economic justice became the characteristic of this Labour Government.

On taking over, Hipkins promised to ditch the more liberal focus and go with a “bread and butter” agenda. But despite the rhetoric, Hipkins was never able to deliver on this.

Josie Pagani argued this week that Labour has continued to pander to higher socio-economic voters with many of its policies. The example she uses is Labour’s environmental policies: “You see the symptoms in Labour’s priorities designed to please wealthier, urban, middle classes more than their working-class supporters, from subsidising heat pumps and EVs to planetary-scale ‘light rail’.”

This shift away from policies that might help Labour’s traditional working class constituency went hand in hand with enabling the “professional managerial class”, especially within the state sector. A big part of Labour’s approach has been to grow the bureaucracy and give more power to consultants. As Duncan Garner has explained, “The recession was biting, cost of living had already increased and yet still Labour insisted on setting up the hugely costly Health NZ and Māori Health Authority. We employed consultants not nurses.”

Others in the professional managerial class, from lobbyists to law firms, have been looked after well by Labour. Transport projects were entrusted to consultants to carry out. For example, Michael Wood sunk $50m into an Auckland Harbour cycle bridge that was never built. Likewise, $140m was spent on consultants for the Auckland Light Rail project, which still isn’t anywhere near getting off the ground.

A number of controversial government department scandals also created a perception of extravagance and profligacy. Most recently, spending by the Ministry for Pacific Peoples hit the headlines with its $40,000 farewell for its outgoing chief executive who was shifting to another government department.

9) Labour’s radical reinterpretation of the Treaty

Labour’s most radical and unpopular agenda during the last three years has been its adoption of co-governance in public services and especially the Three Waters reforms. The Treaty of Waitangi has been radically reinterpreted, and new bi-cultural governance policies have been advanced as a result, which have been perceived as separatist.

This approach was very different to that taken in Labour’s first term. Back in 2018 both Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson stated an intention to work with a traditional social democratic orientation that would deliver to Māori as part of a universalistic strategy to lift the fortunes of everyone in need, rather than specifically targeting Māori. Ardern strongly emphasised the need to deal with the long list of social ills that have disproportionately impacted Māori, but said that race-based methods were not the best way of doing so.

However this universal approach was out of favour with Labour’s Māori caucus. After the 2020 election when it came to the much-needed reform of water infrastructure, an attempt was made to do so in a way that would empower iwi leaders.

Chris Trotter has recently explained how Three Waters prevailed within the Government: “The Māori Caucus wanted it because Iwi leaders wanted it, and if they didn’t get it, they might start knocking on Te Pāti Māori’s door. No one else in the Labour caucus proper felt strongly enough about the issue to organise any kind of serious resistance. So, Hipkins allowed Three Waters to be tweaked and re-named, and hoped that the public would be satisfied with a ludicrous name change. They weren’t.”

Very little of this approach has been debated or communicated with the public, leading to suspicions that it’s being implemented by fiat in an elitist and undemocratic way because the public won’t agree with it. And ultimately the public hasn’t felt convinced by it all.

Public surveys show unhappiness with co-governance. Stuff reports that the recent Freshwater poll has 48 per cent of people agreeing with the statement that there “should be a referendum on Māori co-governance, to end the confusion and let every New Zealander have a say”. Only 17 per cent disagreed with the referendum.

Similarly, when asked if there should be more co-governance with Māori in government decision-making, 45 per cent disagreed, and only 28 per cent agreed. And in terms of the state’s use of te reo Māori, 49 per cent said that government departments should be known by their English, not their Māori name (and only 26 per cent disagreed).

10) Integrity scandals

When the history of Labour’s 2023 poll dive is written in the future, much is likely to be made of the fact that four Cabinet ministers were lost in controversial circumstances in quick succession after Hipkins took over as PM. The loss of Stuart Nash, Michael Wood, Meka Whaitiri and Kiri Allan will be seen as the final nail in the coffin of the Sixth Labour Government.

Three out of the four ministers left due to integrity failures. Nash went after he committed a string of integrity violations, the last being breaking Cabinet Responsibility rules by passing on confidential information to political donors. Wood left after his continued inability to deal with conflicts of interest over his share portfolio ownership. And Allan spectacularly resigned when she was charged after crashing her ministerial car into a parked ute. Being the first Cabinet minister to be arrested in New Zealand history, was a damning indictment, especially for a Minister of Justice during a period of heightened concern about law and order.

After these scandals Labour’s popularity fell decisively, pushing the party below 30 per cent in the polls. Earlier scandals didn’t cause too much damage, but according to Danyl McLauchlan, once Wood and Allen left in spectacular disgrace, it was “a slow decline that turned into a dramatic loss of public support.”

Taken together, the departure of five ministers in the same number of months, gave the impression of a government in crisis. Nothing in the election campaign has turned around that reputation.

Labour needs honest soul-searching about its defeat

The Labour government of 2017 to 2023 have achieved plenty of good things, and during this election campaign they’ve had a chance to highlight their achievements. There will still be at least a quarter of the electorate who will vote for them. But half of Labour’s 2020 supporters are obviously less than impressed. For too many, Labour’s achievements are overshadowed by the factors raised above.

After 14 October there must be some honest soul-searching about what went wrong. There will be some temptation to put the blame on Covid or ill economic winds. Those factors are part of the story of Labour’s decline, but if Labour doesn’t look at some of the more difficult factors in their fall from favour, they could face a very long road back to power.

As the National Party gets closer to government, lobbyists and business interests will be lining up for influence and to get policies adopted. It’s therefore in the public interest to have much more scrutiny and transparency about potential conflicts of interests that might arise.

One of the key individuals of influence in National is former Cabinet Minister and now businessman, Steven Joyce. His continued sway with National and various business interests is a useful case study in how New Zealand politics works.

Steven Joyce – Minister of Everything, and now Adviser on Everything?

Steven Joyce is a figure who continually comes up as key to much of National’s policy development. He has fingers in many pies, and is close to decision-makers in National. So, if you want to know what the new government is going to do, it’s instructive to keep an eye on Joyce’s business activities and lobbying.

Joyce, of course, has been a major figure in National for the last two decades. He led the restructuring of the party in the Don Brash years, and then ran National’s election campaigns from 2005 to 2017. Upon entering Parliament in 2008 he was instantly appointed as a Cabinet Minister, and eventually became Minister of Finance (as well as becoming known as The Minister of Everything and Mr Fixit).

His time in politics was not uncontroversial. Joyce was criticised for an approach that many saw amounted to cronyism – especially because of his deal with SkyCity to build Auckland’s convention centre – and was sometimes compared to Robert Muldoon in his pragmatism and style. Once John Key and Bill English departed, Joyce ran for the leadership but lost out to Simon Bridges, which led to his resignation from Parliament in 2018.

Joyce had been a businessman before entering politics, and returned to this in 2018, setting up Joyce Advisory, a company specialising in business strategy, consultancy, brand management and reputation. In addition to this, Joyce has been appointed to and employed by an array of businesses, from property development through to engineering. Some of these clients have developed close relationships with the National Party under leader Christopher Luxon.

Joyce has also stayed extremely close to his old party, and has obviously remained influential – especially in terms of policy development. According to some party insiders, National’s lack of policy development has made Joyce’s advice invaluable in helping fill the void.

Winton property developers

The most politically controversial business Joyce has joined is the major property developer Winton, a company that is currently locked in a legal battle with the Government. Winton claims Kāinga Ora is stymying its “Sunfield” development plans in South Auckland by not giving the company a fast-tracked development under the new Urban Development Act. In appointing Joyce, the company put out a press release to say that Joyce “has not been appointed for government relations or political lobbying.”

The company is associated with some big donations to the National Party. Back in May 2022 the party received $52,000 from a holding company called Speargrass, which is owned by Winton’s CEO Chris Meehan. This year Meehan has donated $103,260 to National and $50,000 to Act.

National and Act have both come out publicly this year in favour of Winton in their fight with Kāinga Ora, with the parties’ respective housing spokespeople Chris Bishop and Brooke van Velden issuing press releases pushing Winton’s case.

National had already received the first donation when Bishop went public with his support for Winton, but he failed to declare this. In fact, Bishop later told Newsroom that he wasn’t aware of the big donations and could not give further comments due to Winton’s court case. He also told Newsroom that there was no conflict of interest, and any question of whether the property developer would get a meeting with an incoming National prime minister was an issue for after the election campaign.

National’s foreign buyer tax policy

When National announced that its new tax policy would involve a partial abolition of Labour’s ban on house sales to foreign buyers, political commentator Matthew Hooton suggested in the Herald that, “incredibly”, the policy had been created “with the help of lobbyists” for “the property-development industries”.

Certainly, property companies would stand to benefit from National’s new policy as, if implemented, all properties worth over $2m could be sold to foreign buyers, increasing the market and demand for the houses being sold by property developers.

This week Hooton has expanded on his claim that National designed the policy with the help of property developers, pointing to Winton and its close relationship with National, and suggesting that property developers have been able to help shape National’s housing-tax policies. Hooton says, “It may well be that National has thought through its tax policy much more carefully than it has been given credit for.”

He points out that the new policy could raise a lot of tax revenue and profit: “If Winton, say, sold 5000 residences for $2m+ over four years to foreign buyers, that alone would raise half the $20b of houses and apartments National needs to make its books balance. And, of course, some would be worth more than $2m. Some of the properties Winton has in its pipeline are planned to be sold for $10m+.”

Hooton therefore suggests that with a change of government, and a new minister in charge of Kāinga Ora and housing, there might well be a law change and the green light given to property developers to proceed with high-end developments.

Waikato University’s work with National

National has also released its tertiary education policy, including the promise to create a new $300m medical training school at Waikato University. The party worked closely with the University, and particularly its vice-chancellor Neil Quigley, to come up with the policy. The University even helped pay for National’s announcement, and Quigley emailed Health Spokesperson Shane Reti to say the policy could be “a present” to a future National government.

RNZ’s Guyon Espiner has uncovered how closely the University and National Party worked together on the policy development, and how Steven Joyce’s consultancy company Joyce Advisory was paid nearly a million dollars for helping with “lobbying advice” on such issues. On top of this, one of Joyce’s former Beehive political advisors, Anna Lillis, was contracted to sell the policy.

Espiner notes that Labour-aligned lobbyist Neale Jones has previously been employed by Waikato University to try to get the Labour Government to pay for a new medical school. But Joyce essentially took over this work from Jones, helping get the policy adopted by National instead.

SkyCity’s deals with National

National’s latest tax policy included trying to squeeze tax out of the foreign gambling websites that sell their services to New Zealanders. National has been upfront in stating that the SkyCity Casino advised on this policy. A confidential report from SkyCity was used by National to pull together the figures suggesting that $176m per year could be raised in tax.

National’s tax policy would also benefit SkyCity, because a tax on foreign gambling sites would reduce the competitiveness of their opponents and, in some cases, it might mean those offshore websites will be blocked from operating in this country.

Of course, the National Party has a long-running association with SkyCity. The last National Government negotiated a deal with the casino operators to build a convention centre for Auckland in exchange for concessions on the tight regulations on the number of SkyCity casino tables and pokie machines. The deal was partly brokered by Steven Joyce when he was Minister of Economic Development.

Joyce’s influence in National and business

Steven Joyce has become a useful nexus between National and the business community, which means he is able to help advise on policy for the party that bolsters their credibility with captains of industry.

It helps that Joyce is still very close to many in National. Chris Bishop, for example, has always been a close ally of Joyce, starting as an adviser for Joyce when he was a Cabinet Minister. Now a senior member of the National caucus, Bishop is chairing National’s election campaign.

Joyce used to run National’s campaigns, and his right-hand person was another former Beehive adviser Jo de Joux, who was his campaign manager. She is now a lobbyist, but has come back to run the party’s campaign in 2023, and is said to still be very close to Joyce.

As well as giving “lobbying advice” to Waikato University, Joyce is now on the University’s Management School Business Advisory Board. Of course, this is also useful and unsurprising given he’s a former Minister for tertiary education. He also writes regularly for the media about tertiary education policy, adding to his influence in this area.

As well as becoming a director of the Winton property company, Joyce has joined other company boards – Icehouse Ventures (a venture capital fund manager), Hammerforce (a technology and IP company), and RCP (a property and construction project management consultancy).

Time for more scrutiny of National-Business relationships

The roles played by these businesses or individuals advising National are to be expected in a liberal capitalist democracy. And individuals such as Steven Joyce or National’s business donors should be allowed to pursue the agendas of their companies and political parties.

However, it is imperative that these relationships are heavily scrutinised. At the moment much of the election campaign is lightweight and hollowed out. More focus on the influences behind the policies and those who are set to benefit from them would be beneficial to public debate and an informed electorate.

This is especially the case for National, which looks almost certain to lead the next government. Matthew Hooton is well-placed to comment on some of this, having experience as a lobbyist as well as a National Party spin-doctor and insider. He wrote yesterday in his regular email newsletter on politics that “National promises a ‘full economic plan’ in the next day or so. It will likely consist of another set of random bullet points gathered together from lobbyists and industry associations, similar to the ‘business growth agenda’ brochures of the Key years.”

If National’s policies are being created by or with the help of vested interests, then the public would be advantaged by knowing about these details. Leaving this until after the election might be too late.

The 2023 general election campaign must be the most hollow in living memory. There really isn’t much that is positive or attractive about the electoral options on offer. This is an election without inspiration.

An angry mood for change

There is a definite gloominess amongst the public right now – with a perception that not only is the country broken in many ways, but the political system is too. We see this most strongly in surveys that ask if the country is on the right track or not. Generally, New Zealand has flipped in a few short years from having about two-thirds of the public saying the country is headed in the right direction, to now having two-thirds saying we’re going the wrong way.

Journalists and politicians report that out on the campaign trail they are discovering that the public is angrier than ever. Mark Blackham reported this week that “MPs are encountering angry people – a general anger about the state of affairs and paucity of political choices.”

Stuff journalist Julie Jacobson summed up the political mood in the weekend as “Disillusioned, demoralised, disenchanted, disgruntled”. And she argues this has only increased during the campaign: “what was a low hum has become a sustained grumble.” Jacobson reports that across the political spectrum people are “out of love with what’s currently on offer.”

Certainly, much of what the politicians are offering is extremely grim. For example, both Labour and National are promising to slash billions of dollars from public services.

This promised austerity drive reflects a reality that the government’s books are empty, with no room for additional new spending. Hence Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has openly said that this election can’t be one for big spending policies.

Hipkins has gone from promising “bread and butter” reforms to, as leftwing political commentator Chris Trotter points out, being committed “to less butter and thinner bread for at least the next three years.” Trotter says, in general, there’s not much for the public to positively vote for, and instead people will vote negatively – choosing whoever they regard as the best of a bad bunch. Hence, “This is not going to be a happy election.”

For traditional leftwing voters Labour’s austerity programme is a major disappointment, as it goes hand in hand with opposition to any real tax reform that might collect more revenue for public services and infrastructure.

Likewise, on the right, there is a strong suspicion that National’s tax cuts are simply unaffordable. The policy is being called out by the likes of rightwing political commentator Matthew Hooton as being unprincipled and incompetent, and by the Taxpayers Union as foolhardy.

There is also growing scepticism that some of the bigger policy promises are electoral bribes that can’t be delivered. Hooton says that a “cynical electorate” sees many of these policies as empty promises – especially because voters have got used to being lied to or misled by politicians who don’t deliver their promises once in power. He suggests that voters are right to be cynical because New Zealand has had “15 years of people hearing promises from politicians which are platitudes on the face of it and they haven’t even been delivered to that extent”.

Similarly, Stuff journalist Andrea Vance argued in the weekend that “Voters know when they are being used”, suggesting that the “bribes” being offered don’t compute for voters. Vance says politicians are promising to slash “public services and spending – in the name of savings and efficiencies – when they are already stretched and degraded.”

Voters shouldn’t have confidence, she suggests, that the next government will be able to meet the existing needs of public services, let alone start fixing the severe deficits in infrastructure and services. Fundamentally there is a credibility gap between politician promises to cut spending but to properly maintain all “front-line” services.

The Politicians aren’t up to the challenge

Voters are aware that we’re in something of a “polycrisis”, and the status quo is unsustainable. Political pollster Peter Stahel wrote last week that there is “an unmistakable mood for change” based on a “strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction, driven by personal financial hardships and an uncertain economic outlook”. His company’s polling show “only 29% of voters say the current options for prime minister appeal, with nearly half (46%) saying they don’t.”

There’s a cost of living crisis, failing public health and education systems, a housing crisis, a climate crisis – the list goes on. As Newstalk’s Mike Hosking says, “There is no shortage of serious, worryingly serious, issues to discuss this campaign”, but the politicians are largely missing in action.

Because the politicians haven’t risen to the challenge, the contrast between what is desperately needed and what is on offer has never been so great. The public is right to be disenchanted – parties are mostly just offering sniping and petty criticisms of their opponents. As political commentator Josie Pagani has put it, “This is an election of parties wrestling on the ground, when we crave a new Jerusalem.”

Pagani says “We have gone from ‘Hope and Change’ to ‘Perhaps Just a Biscuit’.” Whereas in previous elections, parties ran on a programme of grand causes, this time around, issues like child poverty and the housing crisis are being ignored by politicians.

Former Labour leader David Cunliffe appears to agree – he went on Breakfast TV on Thursday to say that “voters are grumpy. They don’t think that either party is really hitting the nail on the head in terms of what’s worrying them.”

Similarly, business commentator Bruce Cotterill wrote in the Herald last week that the campaign has been highly disappointing so far because it’s more about attack ads and petty sniping than about illuminating the big issues and the policies that the parties have for fixing them. He laments the lack of debate about the crises in the health and education systems, and says problems like housing waiting lists and child poverty have been virtually ignored.

Hooton also says this avoidance of the big issues is a tragedy, especially since we are now in what he argues is the worst economic crisis in decades.

An Uninspiring election campaign

In lieu of being focused on the things that matter, the politicians are becoming more aggressive, threatening to turn this year’s campaign into the most negative in living memory. Press gallery journalist Glenn McConnell reports that as we go into the last month of the campaign its “becoming more feral”. He says the politicians are largely to blame: “nobody is running a wholesome forward-looking, solutions focused campaign. They are frothing to attack, attack, attack.”

The lacklustre nature of the parties is reflected in their campaign slogans according to Jacinda Ardern’s former chief of staff Mike Munro. He says none of them are original, because “every variation of wording around concepts like change, hope, aspiration, unity and the future have been previously used on party billboards”. And he argues that the parties are incredibly risk-adverse this election, being determined to stage-manage every element of the campaign and the candidates, reducing any chance of life in the election.

Is this therefore the most uninspiring election ever? Writing on Sunday, journalist Andrea Vance asks: “Has there been a duller election campaign in recent memory?” She labels it “the election of The Great Uninterested” because people seem to be turning away in boredom or disgust. Vance says: “It’s not just that voters are bored. They’ve stopped listening.”

Political commentator and former Cabinet Minister Peter Dunne is also amazed at the lacklustre performances of the politicians so far – especially Hipkins and Luxon who are in the fight for their political careers. He says, given the big issues at stake, “Neither Hipkins nor Luxon has so far shown sufficient passion or boldness to convince New Zealanders they have what it takes to be an effective prime minister in the difficult years ahead.”

Election fatigue and low voter turnout

Do you wish the election was over already? You are probably in good company. This year there is no apparent enthusiasm for the campaign. You’ll notice that there aren’t many pictures or videos of politicians being swamped on the campaign trail, signing autographs or having mass selfies with fans – as occurred in recent elections.

Young people, in particular, seem unimpressed this time around. According to political scientist Richard Shaw, the students he teaches are losing faith in the New Zealand political system. He says that they are part of a growing cohort who are now “over” politics. Shaw is also picking that voter turnout is going to be low this election.

So, could the most popular choice at the coming election be “none of the above”? Certainly, the number of eligible voters who choose not to vote in the upcoming election could surpass a million, effectively making it the most popular option in 2023.

Voter turnout has generally been trending down in recent decades, and it hit a low of only 69.6 per cent at the 2011 election. That low turnout was generally because none of the parties were offering much that was inspiring, and no one expected the result to be close. Hence, one third of the electorate turned away in that election in disgust, apathy, or whatever.

The fact that the politicians and debate have become more aggressive and divisive puts people off. Other commentators are also now picking a decline too. David Cunliffe says: “Expect a record low turnout, and expect a record low vote share for Labour and National combined, and the highest ever share for the [minor] parties on both sides of politics.”

Leftwing columnist Verity Johnson has also written recently about the political despair amongst the public, predicting an extremely low voter turnout: “I’ve lost count of the people I’ve spoken to this week (smart, articulate and historically politically engaged people) who aren’t planning on voting in October. What’s the point, they shrug, there’s no one to vote for.”

Johnson says that the rising fury in New Zealand society is very tangible: “if you go into the suburbs and listen closely, you can hear an ominous hiss of fury rising up like a gas leak.” She suggests that this disenchantment is rational, and that there’s now little hope that politics can fix the problems of New Zealand: “Whatever happens on October 14, it feels like there’s just gonna be another 3 years of muddling, myopic, middle management politics where we have our head up our ass and our ecosystem on fire.”

Is politics in New Zealand broken?

Given the declining trust and participation in politics and the electoral process, this might signal that something is wrong in New Zealand’s democracy. Of course, this is a problem all over the world at the moment, with rising dissatisfaction and a sense that elites and vested interests dominate. There is a huge mood of change everywhere.

Writing this week, Chris Trotter says that most politicians haven’t caught up with the new Zeitgeist. He reports on a new book exploring the decline of politics, written by former British Tory Cabinet Minister Rory Stewart, which reflects on how the political system has hollowed out. Here’s the key quote that Trotter cites from the book, suggesting it could well come from a minister in the current New Zealand Government: “I had discovered how grotesquely unqualified so many of us, including myself, were for the offices we were given… It was a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation.”

Similarly, writing about how dire the current election campaign is, Matthew Hooton says New Zealand’s political system is effectively broken because the parties simply aren’t serious vehicles for political change anymore. He argues that they have been captured by careerists, consultants and lobbyists seeking power: “That is, they are not concerned with achieving power to make anything better. They are focussed merely on achieving office, to enjoy the status and perks. This is why they feel no need to do real work between elections, before which they release pseudo-policies, written the night before, often by external lobbyists or consultants, that they can’t and won’t deliver – and which they don’t care whether or not are delivered anyway.”

Empty election debates

Could tonight’s leaders’ debate on TVNZ1 be as dire as the campaign so far? Expectations aren’t very high for an illuminating contest of ideas. Expert more hollow and negative posturing.

Sure, there is a fair deal of anticipation on whether Hipkins can easily beat Luxon, or whether Luxon can rise above the low expectations about his debating skills or charisma. This question of who will “win” will be of some interest, but of little real consequence in a campaign in which everyone is surely getting election fatigue.

Therefore, even if 1.2 million New Zealanders tune in at 7pm (as they did for the first leaders debates in 2017 and 2020), they’re unlikely to last the full 90 minutes. As with the overall election campaign, viewers will probably turn off fairly quickly. So, although it is likely to be the single biggest TV event of the campaign, don’t be surprised if the real winner of the debate is actually Shortland Street on TV2 at the same time.

National is not only winning the race towards the general election finish line, but is also miles ahead in raising money to campaign with. So far, the National Party has picked up $8.2m in big donations since the start of 2021. As RNZ reported this week, that’s seven times more money than the Labour Party.

To alleviate any suspicions of quid pro quo deals, close scrutiny must be applied to these donors, along with any policy and law changes a National government might make that benefit them.

Scrutiny of political donations is always important, of course, regardless of who’s in government. But given the sheer quantum of the donations that are currently going to National, extra vigilance about the influence of this big money is required. Potential conflicts of interest need to be identified and highlighted in order to avoid some of these large donations resulting in private gains for the already-wealthy.

The huge donations going to National

National had a particularly profitable fundraising year in 2022 – taking in $5m in large donations. In 2023, National has already declared $2 million in large donations – four times that of Labour. In this month alone, National has already declared $217,000 in large donations.

National is trumpeting the huge amount of money coming its way. The party’s pollster David Farrar was quoted by RNZ on Wednesday, saying “The amount rolling in is unprecedented”, and “almost exponentially larger than you’ve had in the past”.

Farrar points out that it used to be rare for any party to get anything like donations of $100,000 from a single individual, but now National is regularly getting such amounts. In fact, in June this year building systems and materials supplier, Warren Lewis, gave National $500,000 – the largest donation the party has ever received.

Lewis, who owns FMI Building Innovations, says he’s given the donation with only one condition – a meeting with National leader Christopher Luxon. He says he’s not a National Party member, and has voted for a variety of parties before, including on the left.

Donations from the super-wealthy

New Zealand’s richest man, billionaire Graeme Hart – one of the 200 richest people in the world, worth about $17bn – gave National $250,000 last year. He’s also recently donated to Act ($100,000), and was the biggest financial donor to Wayne Brown’s Auckland mayoralty campaign.

Toy entrepreneur Nick Mowbray also chipped in $250,000 last year. He can afford it – the Mowbray family fortune is about $2.5b.

Former Brierleys chief executive Murray Bolton is worth an estimated $400m. He’s now the CEO of US-based company, Xplor Technologies. He also gave National $250,000 last year. This year he’s given Act $150,000. Bolton hit the news in 2021 because he took MBIE to court over its refusal to allow him to fly his private jet into the country – he claimed it breached the Bill of Rights, and he won.

National’s second-biggest donation in 2023, of $200,000, has come from Buen Holdings, which is owned by Guemsoon Shim and Lian Seng Buen. In previous years, the couple have donated a total of $100,000 through another of their companies, Alpha Laboratories.

This week the couple have been in the news regarding an investigation of allegations of migrant abuse. Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne has outlined how investigations are ongoing by Auckland Council and MBIE Tenancy Services into the couple’s use of their former Auckland home in Shamrock Park to house up to 30 migrant workers.

Jeffrey Douglas, son of the late Sir Graeme Douglas, has given National nearly $104,000 over the last two years. Although he is associated with the family’s Douglas Pharmaceuticals company, Douglas also owns New Zealand’s largest private healthcare and research company. His company has previously been the recipient of government research and development funding.

One transport company has given $100,000 to National. Velocity Freight is owned by Mainstream Group. Recently the company was warned by the Commerce Commission for engaging in “cartel behaviour”. Velocity is a major competitor to Mainfreight, whose owner Bruce Plested has previously given big donations to National, but in recent elections been a major donor to the Māori Party (totalling $360,000).

Maritime businessman James Francis Speedy gave National a $101,000 donation last year. The Aucklander has owned various transport and harbour businesses.

Aviation businessman Hugh Ross Jones has donated $150,000 to National over the last year and a half. Jones made his money in the helicopter business and, according to the NBR, now has “a sizeable residential, commercial and industrial property portfolio”.

Low-profile businessman Gary Lane gave National $100,000 last year. He’s made his money in health and food products – specifically through his company, Antipodean Pharmaceuticals, which is registered in the US.

Business executive Graeme Harrison gave $103,000 to the National Party last year. Harrison is most well-known for his leading role in establishing the ANZCO Foods empire, the country’s fifth-largest exporter. He’s now on the board of the National Party.

Housing industry donors

Former National Cabinet Minister Paula Bennett is the party’s chief fundraiser, and is widely acknowledged as playing a key role in building up the millions in her party’s war chest. Since leaving Parliament Bennett has worked for Bayley’s Real Estate, and that firm has become a major benefactor for the party – giving about $165,000 to National last year.

Rival real estate agency Barfoot and Thompson – the biggest privately owned agency in the country – is owned by the Barfoot family. Patriarch Garth Barfoot is a long-time donor to National. Most recently, he gave $35,000 in 2021

Property developers also feature prominently in National’s donor list. Last month Culum Manson gave $70,000 to the party. His family business, Manson TCLM, is one of the largest private developers in New Zealand.

John and Michael Chow (“The Chow Brothers”) have become big property players, too – including in partnership with John and Max Key in recent years. They have built up a property empire of a billion dollars in assets, and last year alone they built 1,145 properties, valued at $408m. In 2022 their family company Stonewood Group donated $44,000 to National.

National also has a history with property developer the Winton company, partly owned by its CEO Chris Meehan, who has been in the news recently. Through his holding company, Speargrass, Meehan donated $52,000 to National in May 2022. One of Winton’s directors is also former National Cabinet Minister, and now business consultant, Steven Joyce.

Eyebrows were raised when, a few months after Meehan’s donation, National put out a press release supporting Winton in a battle against state housing agency Kāinga Ora. The press release made no mention of National’s financial connection to the property developer it was lobbying in favour of.

The Winton company is now taking legal action against Kāinga Ora, claiming compensation of more than $138 million over alleged anti-competitive behaviour. The state housing agency had rejected a request by Winton to help fast-track one of their projects using special powers under the Urban Development Act.

Racing industry donations

Previously there have been some close connections between racing industry donors and political parties – with large donations made in the past to National and NZ First in particular.

The owners of the famous Cambridge Horse Stud, Brendan and Jocelyn Lindsay, have given National $230,000 over the last two years (and one donation to Act this year of $50,000). The Lindsay family formerly owned the plastic container company Sistema, which they sold in 2016 for $660m.

Another thoroughbred breeder and owner, Sir Peter Vela, has given generously to National – $62,500 last year. Vela owns Pencarrow Stud. He was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the horse bloodstock industry. The Vela family wealth was estimated at $245m in the 2019 NBR Rich List. The family business has previously given large donations to both Labour and NZ First, as well as holding fundraising functions for Winston Peters at the Pencarrow Stud farm.

Farmer interests

Property developer Trevor Farmer has given National $200,000 over the last year and a half. He also donated $100,000 to Act last year. His business partner Mark Wyborn has given National $100,000 over the last couple of years, as well as $50,000 to Act in 2021.

Together Farmer and Wyborn are part owners of a 26,000ha dairy farm near Taupō which has had problems getting enough water for their operations – unsuccessfully applying in 2019 for resource consent to take 71 million litres of water a day out of the Waikato River.

Another giant landowner has given $62,000 to National this month. The Oregon Group is owned by the Tiong Family, who normally reside in Malaysia, but are said to be the second largest private land owners in NZ.

The company is also notable for its agricultural and forestry subsidiary, Ernslaw One, which was fined $225,000 for causing forestry slash problems in Tairāwhiti. The group is currently creating a salmon farm in the Cook Strait, working with the ministries for the Environment and Primary Industries.

Another corporate farmer, Chris Reeves, gave National a $100,000 donation, via his Tawata Farms company in 2021. He has previously given more to Act, with known donations totalling $430,000.

Smaller but interesting donations

Some of the smaller donations to National are interesting too. Andrew Kelly donated $25,000 to the party in June. He was one of the three men who had previously donated to Labour politician Stuart Nash and then received confidential Cabinet information, which cost the MP his job. (Another one of Nash’s donor/confidants, Troy Bowker, has given $35,000 to Act).

Auckland commercial landlord Andrew Krukziener donated $22,000 to National in June. This follows on from him being the biggest backer of Auckland mayoral candidate Viv Beck – Krukziener’s company donated $107,000 to the centre-right politician’s failed campaign before falling in behind the successful campaign of Wayne Brown.

The owner of the Scenic Hotel chain, Lani Hagaman, gave National $50,000 last year. She has an estimated worth of about $210m and is the widow of multi-millionaire Earl Hagaman, who was also a large National donor.

One of the wealthiest men in New Zealand, Craig Heatley, gave $100,000 last year. He’s normally more of an Act Party donor (he also gave them $50,000 this year).

Other traditional Act donors shifting more money to National include the private equity firm Christopher & Banks Ltd, run by rich-lister Christopher Huljich. They have given National $200,000 over the last year and a half. But they’ve also given another $100,000 to Act this year.

One of National’s traditional big donors is merchant banker David Richwhite, who extravagantly donated about $350,000 to the party back in 1996. Since then, however, Richwhite has been relatively absent from the donations records. Last month he’s suddenly returned, donating $50,000 to National.

Why we should care about National’s huge donations

Why are wealthy individuals and businesses giving such large amounts of money to National? The most obvious answer is that the party looks like it’s on course to form the next government.

The history of donations shows the wealthy tend to give to parties that are doing well in the polls. Businesspeople back parties who are likely to be in government. In 2020, the big money went to Labour rather than National, with National only declaring $285,000 of big donations. Therefore, it makes more sense to think of the big money following National’s success, rather than causing it.

Business donors are also inclined to reward parties that have policies they like or feel are “good for the economy”. Like most voters, business donors support parties they feel will govern in their interests. Unlike most voters, however, they make this support known with very large sums of money.

It’s always hard to ascribe exact motivations for donors giving to political parties, but influence over politicians who will likely soon have a lot of power would have to be one of them. In the case of a potential incoming National government, thousands of decisions will soon need to be made, and these will have all sorts of impact on businesses. Donations of this magnitude will certainly ensure National sits up and takes notice of the individuals who have made them.

There is increasing public awareness about the impact of political donations and lobbying on the political process. The ball is therefore now in the court of the donors and the parties to assuage public suspicion that it’s not all about undue influence. It is naïve to assume that big money does not wield big influence in New Zealand. So, as National steams towards power, a lot of light will need to be shone on these relationships, so we can be assured that in 2023 the mega-wealthy haven’t been able to buy a big chunk of our democracy.

Labour appears to be in something of an electoral death spiral. The four-point drop in last night’s 1News Verian poll to just 29 per cent – together with National’s bump up to 37 per cent – suggests that the gulf between the left and right blocs is now opening up, and will be difficult to reverse.

Perception is going to be a big part of Labour’s problem. When a party in government drops into the 20s just weeks out from voting, the psychological effect can be huge. It will affect both voters and politicians. Increasingly, the public will not believe that Labour can win this election. Such a mood will risk becoming a self-fulfilling factor in the campaign.

Just as “success begets success”, for Labour a poll result like this will threaten to fuel a further deterioration in support below 29 per cent. It shapes the whole mood of the campaign, sapping momentum and motivation for those on the Government side. What’s more, when a party is losing, the despair can cause infighting and panic, which just makes everything much worse.

In this regard, Herald political editor Claire Trevett says today: “Hipkins’ trouble is that once the polling starts to slide, it is very difficult to reverse it. It is also very difficult to hold on to the discipline, unity and enthusiasm that are needed to reverse it.”

A devastating blow to Labour’s chances

The 1News poll isn’t the first to put the Labour Government into the 20s during the election campaign. In the last month, the Roy Morgan poll put Labour on 26 per cent, the Guardian-Essential poll said Labour was on 29 per cent, and Curia put Labour on 27 per cent.

Labour was able to dismiss these poor polls as being less robust, and they could point to their own poll company, Talbot-Mills, putting Labour on 32 per cent support.

But the 1News poll is the big one that gets taken most seriously – mostly because it’s seen by more of the public than any other. And unfortunately for Labour its result can’t be painted as an aberration – this is the fifth 1News poll in row showing Labour going downwards. There’s no mistaking that the pattern in this poll, together with most of the others, is to show an overall and steep downward slope.

The race had been looking close for much of the year. When Hipkins took over as PM in January his party was at 38 per cent, and ahead of National. But since then, he’s haemorrhaged about a third of that support, making the race look lost.

This latest poll, like other recent ones, shows National being able to easily form a government with Act. NZ First is also rising in the polls – at four per cent last night – providing National with potential other options for forming a government. Winston Peters has ruled out helping Labour form a government, and so if his party is returned to power, it’s going to be extremely unlikely that Labour will be able to govern.

Should Labour replace Hipkins?

Much of the commentary on the 1News poll points out that Labour has dropped to the point where leaders are normally replaced. Attention has been drawn to the fact the 1News poll puts Labour at the lowest level since 2017 when the leader Andrew Little stepped down, leading to massive recovery of support under new leader Jacinda Ardern. Others point to Simon Bridges being rolled as National leader in 2020 when support dropped this low.

But Chris Hipkins is not in the same situation – commentators generally acknowledge that he’s still the best option for Labour in 2023. Toby Manhire says that even if Labour wanted to replace Hipkins, there is no one capable of doing so, as the only two real candidates for doing better, Michael Wood and Kiritapu Allan, have been removed from Cabinet. Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson is probably the only option, and he also looks increasingly tired and uninspiring.

It is a problem, however, that the latest 1News poll puts Hipkins’ support as preferred PM at only 21 per cent, having dropped 3 points. This is neck-and-neck with Christopher Luxon on 20 per cent. Previously, Labour campaign strategists had been relying on Hipkins’ significantly greater popularity over Luxon. That lost advantage means that Labour can only really rely on policy to try to win the election.

Is policy to blame for Labour’s decline?

The latest poor poll for Labour is being widely viewed as negative verdict from voters on the party’s GST-off fresh food policy. Claire Trevett argues the poll “indicates the GST policy was seen as an attempt to offer something that looked more generous than it was, purely for the sake of votes.”

The 29 per cent result might also be seen as a verdict on Labour’s lack of inspiring policy in general. In the last week or so, the party has suddenly put out a flood of policies – most of which have either been underwhelming, or appeared to be an attempt to shift into National-lite territory: an end to Covid restrictions, financial literacy education, standardised teaching of the basics in schools, transport spending, increased parental leave, and vaping regulation.

Stuff political editor Luke Malpass says today, “A flurry of policies to hug the centre and try to convince voters to back the centre-left party again appear to not be working.” Trying to outflank National on key issues is always dangerous, risking losing Labour’s differentiation. The polls also suggest that jettisoning traditional progressive policies like capital gains and wealth taxes is also not working for the party. If anything, this approach has just enraged traditional supporters.

Of course, some on the left will just move over the Greens. At the moment, the Greens are indeed picking up some of the disillusioned Labour vote, but much of it seems to be shifting elsewhere. One analysis of poll respondents preferences shows that for every voter lost to the Greens, one is going to National as well. Nearly as many are shifting to be “undecided”.

So what does Labour do now? The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire asks today why Labour won’t announce anything bold and big. His own suggestion – free dental care for all.

However, even if Labour manages to fight back with bolder and more inspiring policies over the next few weeks, it might just be too late. After six years of being in government, Labour has developed a reputation for not being able to deliver, even to its own supporters. Hence, more promises on the campaign trail aren’t exactly going to be fully believed and embraced, even by those on the progressive side of politics.

Voters are gloomy

There is no doubt that the economic recession and the rising cost of living have played a significant part in Labour’s declining popularity. The 1News poll asked voters which issues were most likely to influence their voting choice, and 48 per cent pointed to the cost of living. The next biggest issues were a long way off – Crime at 14 per cent, and Healthcare at 13 per cent.

If you take one of the cost of living issues – rising mortgage rates – there is some sign that voters blame the government for this. A poll undertaken this month by Curia Research for corporate clients – they also poll for the National Party – asked whether or not voters blamed the Government for higher mortgage rates.

About two-thirds (64 per cent) said the Government had either contributed “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to the problem, compared to only 22 per cent who thought the Government’s contribution to increasing mortgage rates was either “Not very much” or “Not at all”. The poll showed that the public also blamed other factors such as the global economy and the Reserve Bank.

Curia, who also polls for the Taxpayers Union, also surveyed recently on levels of satisfaction with public services. As reported by Stuff’s Luke Malpass, dissatisfaction with government services appears to be skyrocketing. According to the survey, voters say public services have got worse since 2020 in the following key areas: Health (70 per cent say it’s worse), Criminal Justice (64 per cent), Education (57 per cent), Transport (47 per cent), and Welfare (37 per cent). Notably, most Labour voters also say things have got worse.

It is in this context that we can better understand Labour’s current electoral doldrums. Regardless of whether it is fair or not, there is a perception that things are getting worse, and that the current government is at least partly to blame.

Could Labour’s support collapse?

Chris Hipkins is talking today about turning the tide around over the next few weeks and beating National. Few will be convinced that he can do this. In fact, there’s every chance it will only get worse. Labour might well struggle to mobilise and motivate its activists and voters.

A low voter turnout at the election is therefore Labour’s nightmare. Supporters are probably starting to tune out. Therefore, it’s vital that the party brings forward anything it’s holding back to give their chances a boost. They desperately need to show the public that they are still competitive, and that the election result is not now a foregone conclusion.

We’ve seen in other elections what happens when parties start tanking, and a death spiral occurs. In 2002 the Bill English-led National Party dropped below 21 per cent in the final vote. And last election Judith Collins crashed National to only 25 per cent.

Of course, the big differences is that those failing parties were in opposition, up against extremely popular prime ministers. That isn’t the case at the moment – Hipkins is taking Labour into a campaign defending a 50 per cent win at the last election, up against a National leader that is relatively inexperienced, unpopular and uninspiring.

Despite having the biggest caucus in political history, there is every sign that a big defeat is coming for Labour. Labour’s support from 2020 could even halve in this election – which would be something for the record books. It would also be a bloodbath for the Labour caucus, with senior MPs on the party list out of Parliament.

You can even bet on this. Although in New Zealand gambling on politics is illegal, the Australian TAB is offering bets on our election outcome, and the odds they are offering are quite instructive about what might happen.

At the last election, the bookies gave National very long odds – paying about $5 for every $1 bet on National winning, whereas they were only offering Labour bets $1.16. This time around, bets on National winning the election and forming a government are paying out $1.25 for a $1 bet, while the TAB is offering $3.75 for a Labour win.

It’s hard to disagree with those odds. Although the Australian TAB is promising a big payout to anyone successfully backing a Labour win, it’s unlikely that you’d find many in Labour willing to take that gambling bet.