NZ’s best candidate for the ‘worst job’ could pull off an upset

Jacinda Ardern on the campaign trail.

So, Jacinda, how is the worst job in politics going? New Zealand’s 37-year-old alternative prime minister chuckles and says something about being humbled by the support she’s received since taking over as Labour Party leader five weeks ago.

She exudes confidence and why not? Against all expectation this election campaign in the Shaky Isles has turned into a genuine contest between an opposition that seemed out for the count and a well-performing ­National Party government that was supposed to romp home under PM Bill English.

An opinion poll on Thursday showed the Nationals had slipped to a vote of 39 per cent, the lowest in 12 years, four points adrift of Labour and trending down. Jacinda Ardern continues to lead English as preferred prime minister, pointing to an upset of epic proportions at the September 23 election.

Malcolm Turnbull with Bill English. Picture: Kym Smith

No one would have called this when Ardern’s predecessor, ­Andrew Little, saw the writing on the wall and surrendered the ­Labour leadership on August 1. Ardern herself seemed to have no illusions about her chances. “Everyone knows that I have just accepted, with short notice, the worst job in politics,” she said then.

Now, she tells Inquirer: “It’s going to be a tight race.

“I think it will be right down to the wire, but we’ve got every chance of taking it.”

If the scenario sounds familiar, it’s because there are clear parallels between what’s happening across the ditch and the 2007 election campaign in Australia where Labor’s Kevin Rudd tap-danced to victory at the expense of four-time election winner John Howard.

The Coalition was thrown out when the Australian economy was powering, just as New Zealand’s is today, with boom-level growth of 4 per cent year on year. Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, had paid down government debt and put the federal budget into healthy surplus. English ticked that box while he was understudy to John Key, who retired last December after eight years as prime minister.

But Howard overreached with the unpopular WorkChoices reforms and overstayed when he should have handed over to Costello, and there are signs that the Key-English government is pushing up against a perceived use-by date. The Nationals are going for a fourth term and no New Zealand government in nearly a half century has achieved that, not even Helen Clark’s ­Labour outfit, where Ardern cut her teeth as a political adviser before entering parliament in 2008.

The big question is whether trans-Tasman history will be repeated in New Zealand, and to what extent. This is not to suggest Ardern has the election wrapped up. Far from it.

The momentum may be coursing Labour’s way but most pundits share her view that there’s not a lot between the frontrunners. The New Zealand Herald’s election model predicts 54 seats for Labour against 48 for the Nationals, elevating Winston Peters’ populist New Zealand First party into the role of kingmaker.

Ardern says: “For us, it’s about using this last two weeks to really maximise our vote so we are in a position to ­govern.’’ She learned from the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd leadership imbroglio and if she gets the voters’ nod she won’t make the same mistakes. She has been careful not to fall into the Kevin 07 trap of over-promising.

Her big-ticket spending vow so far has been to abolish university, polytechnic and vocational training fees. But she stresses the introduction would involve spreading the $NZ6 billion cost ($5.4bn) over a number of budget cycles.

“I’m a pragmatic idealist,” she says. “There are aspirations we should have as a nation that we should hold on to, whilst acknowledging that it will take some time to reach them and be honest and up-front about that. I believe in free education but I know we can’t afford that right now. Instead, we have set out a path where we want to bring in three years’ free post-secondary education.”

By most rights, Labour shouldn’t have a look-in at this election. At the time Ardern became leader, the party’s vote was languishing in the mid-20s. New Zealand’s idiosyncratic mixed-member proportional representation electoral system makes it tough for any one party to win outright, but Key went achingly close in 2014, taking 60 of the 120 seats in the one-chamber parliament. Labour was left with just 32.

Ardern cheerfully does what Bill Shorten wouldn’t dream of doing: she credits English for doing a good job with the economy (before becoming PM, he was Key’s finance minister, the equivalent of treasurer).

Former PM Helen Clark greets Ardern at the NZ Labour campaign launch.

As The Australian’s economic correspondent, Adam Creighton, noted this week, Labour’s popularity belies the country’s economic success. In addition to engendering strong growth, the Nationals reformed the tax system, lifting New Zealand’s GST rate to 15 per cent to ­finance income tax cuts.

Red tape was slashed to propel NZ into first place on the World Bank’s Doing Business index. Welfare spending is both proportionately less and more targeted than in Australia, impressing British Prime Minister Theresa May so much that after meeting English she had her officials run a ruler over the Kiwi model.

Pledging to continue “prudent” economic management, Ardern says: “I acknowledge the competent financial management that Bill English has displayed. But there are other markers of New Zealand’s success that New Zealanders look to that have been ­declining.”

She points to runaway housing costs, especially in Auckland, where the average home price tops $NZ1m, and homelessness as downsides of the prosperity. ­Labour’s answer is KiwiBuild, a program to make 100,000 new homes for social housing and also for general sale over a decade.

Arden wants to ease pressure on infrastructure and services by cutting the annual immigration intake by up to 30,000. At the same time she will double the refugee quota, albeit to a modest 1500 places (Australia took in 17,555 people under humanitarian programs in 2015-16).

She says the offer by Key and English to resettle in New Zealand 150 of the stranded Manus Island camp dwellers will stand if Labour is elected, and she’s open to increasing that number on review.

But there’s a limit. Ardern bristled this week when The Wall Street Journal, a News Corp stablemate of this paper, compared Labour’s immigration policy to Donald Trump’s crackdown in the US. During a live TV debate with English on Monday night, she agreed that the US President had made the world a more dangerous place, a rare slip.

Pushed on this, she says: “Oh, look, we have very different political bents, very different values. That would be obvious to anyone. But I have to make sure I put the interests of New Zealand first and that means maintaining those important diplomatic ties, and ties with the United States.”

Ardern says she is as worried as the rest of us about the nuclear brinkmanship by North Korea. If there is a military strike, either pre-emptively by the US or against the US or an ally by the hermit kingdom, she won’t rule out New Zealand involvement in any subsequent white-knuckle conflict. “But when it comes to North Korea and our vehement opposition to the existence of ­nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, our position will be that it is never too late to talk,” she says. “We should use every means possible to de-escalate the situation … but after that, then it’s always a multilateral approach.”

Ardern says ANZUS is a “dead issue” and the New Zealand end of the tripartite defence treaty with Australia and the US will remain suspended, as it has been since Labour’s David Lange turned its territorial waters into a nuclear-free zone three decades ago.

She chooses her words carefully when asked about a scenario in which Australia invoked ANZUS. Howard did this after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US in 2001 and Turnbull says he would follow suit if Kim Jong-un ever pulled the trigger. Saying this was not an issue to which she had “given deep consideration”, Ard­ern says she would be guided by “New Zealand values and New Zealand’s perspective”.

She says: “If the question is, is our relationship with Australia … relevant to that area, well of course. So whether … we hark back to those original frameworks or not, that will remain unchanged and that’s probably the part that feels relevant.”

Ardern says trans-Tasman ties are too important to be affected by the occasional disagreement or misunderstanding. Yes, there’s niggle over the disparity in welfare entitlements between Australians living in New Zealand and the 600,000-odd eligible Kiwi voters residing on this side of the ditch: they don’t qualify for the dole here, while Australians in New Zealand do, and those who have been resident there for longer than 12 months will be entitled to vote next Saturday week.

Bill English hears out a voter in Auckland.

As for the recent spat over the involvement of NZ Labour MP Chris Hipkins in bringing to light Barnaby Joyce’s dual citizenship, and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s over-the-top warning that she would have trouble trusting a Labour government as a result, Ardern says, sunnily: “It’s politics … I don’t think there is any better way to describe it, really.”

She was speaking after launching Labour’s forestry policy in the North Island town of Rotorua and flying to Christchurch for a third one-on-one encounter with ­English. There’s no charter plane, no campaign bus. Ardern makes her way on commercial flights with a single adviser in tow.

She says the revolving door in Canberra of Rudd to Julia Gillard and back again, then from Tony Abbott to Turnbull demonstrates the importance of stability. New Zealand Labour has absorbed the lesson, notwithstanding the election eve leadership shuffle that put her in the hot seat, the result of what was an “extraordinary” sacrifice by Little, Ardern says.

“In the last three years, we have been very stable,” she says. “There’s been a sense that … ­Labour has its own house in order, and that was a very important foundation for us to work from, because if people sense you have internal instability it makes it very, very hard to convince them that you are ready to govern.”

This campaign has a long way to go, but credit goes to Ardern for making her side so competitive in such short order and to English, it must be said, for keeping the contest relatively clean.

When the childless Ardern was questioned on radio about the possibility of becoming pregnant while prime minister, he jumped in and shut down the debate, saying the level of personal intrusion was unacceptable.

Could you imagine that happening in Australia? Ardern’s take on our politics is sobering: “We are robust. we expect to be critiqued. But it certainly seems to be a different level again in Australia.”