Labour’s prime-ministerial switch, back-to-basics rebranding and election-year Budget have all failed. Four months from polling day, Kiwi voters face the same choice as before Christmas – a smug yet incompetent Labour-led government, and a vacuous and complacent National-led opposition.
There’s nothing good about New Zealand’s MMP electoral system except that, compared with Australia’s, it better punishes the establishment parties when voters want to give them the finger.
That’s around a third of Kiwis today.
According to Saturday’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, the combined National-Labour or “purple” vote is just 69 per cent, equal to Australia’s record-low Coalition-Labor vote last May. Since August, Roy Morgan New Zealand has reported a purple vote in the low 60s.
Five years of profile-raising through CNN, Vogue and the ABC has won Jacinda Ardern a mega-million-dollar book deal, a damehood and a climate-change gig for Prince William, and good for her.
But her comically incompetent ministers started believing there really was something special about her response to the Christchurch terrorist attack and Covid, while failing to deliver her promises.
The gap between perception and reality widened.
Through 2020 and 2021, Labour ran an unimaginably cruel lottery to ration which Kiwis could fly home, banned families from comforting their dying relatives or attending their funerals, and oversaw New Zealand’s biggest-ever transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
By late 2022, enough Kiwis were so repulsed by the Ardern government’s global showboating and insufferable self-regard that Labour’s re-election required she go.
Despite being Ardern’s Covid Minister, complicit in her most heartless decisions, Chris Hipkins becoming Prime Minister in January gave Labour an immediate boost.
Relief Ardern had gone was the main factor. But Hipkins successfully invented a story he was throwing her legacy onto a policy bonfire, and launching a more practical, less glamorous and, above all, more modest Labour regime.
Four months later, Hipkins is certainly modest, but with much to be modest about.
Like Ardern, he cannot extract even basic competence from his mediocre cabinet. The centrepiece of his re-election budget, 20 hours a week of free early-childhood education for two-year-olds, is instead forcing centres to close.
After five years of Ardern, Kiwis are used to incompetence, but not Labour’s viciousness and lack of integrity now apparent without her veneer.
So far, Hipkins has had to fire his Economic Development Minister for leaking cabinet secrets to his donors, reprimand his Justice Minister for attacking state-broadcaster RNZ for not making her fiancée a presenter of the equivalent of ABC’s RN Breakfast, and lost his Customs Minister to the Māori Party.
His Education Minister is the first MP to be referred to the Privileges Committee for contempt of parliament since 2008, and his Transport Minister is suspended for ignoring or misleading the Cabinet Office at least 12 times over two and a half years about owning shares in Auckland International Airport Ltd, which he regulates.
Exceeding even Ardern-era arrogance, both disgraced ministers claimed their busy jobs meant they hadn’t had time to comply with cabinet and parliament’s rules.
Poor Hipkins became tongue-tied on national television when asked to express confidence in them.
Combined with the worst inflation since it was beaten in the early 1990s, it’s a miracle Labour remains tied in the polls with National, even as votes keep flowing to the free-market Act Party, and to the Greens, Māori Party, NZ First, and Opportunities Party, a vehicle for the liberal elite.
There’s roughly a 33 per cent probability for each of a one-seat majority National-Act Government, a one-seat majority Labour-Green-Māori Government, and a hung parliament requiring another election before Christmas.
National’s humdrum polling is caused by leader Christopher Luxon’s net negative favourability, which is worse among women. Having described abortion as murder, wanting to restore a $5-a-month prescription charge including for oral contraceptives and jokingly urging Kiwis to have more babies, the conservative Christian’s advisers want him to stop talking about fertility.
They really don’t want him talking about much at all, arguing National’s best strategy is just letting Labour fail. A former chief executive of the 51 per cent state-owned Air New Zealand, his economics are corporatist, being a fan of centralised planning and Ardern’s top business adviser before entering parliament for National in 2020.
The more ideologically robust Act is already warning it will sit on the crossbenches and negotiate with Luxon issue-by-issue rather than join yet another mediocre government with no agenda except holding office. Either way, Act has no real leverage, and nor do small parties to the left of Labour.
It’s dangerous betting on the actual election result, but much safer to assume New Zealand will continue its quarter-century decline under another blancmange MMP government, no matter how Kiwis vote on October 14.
Matthew Hooton is a centre-right political commentator in New Zealand who has previously worked for the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland. He is currently completing his PhD at the University of Auckland on “Conservatism & Change”.
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