The Auckland mayor wants a grand coalition. The idea neglects two major factors in politics: emotion and self-interest.

A couple of weeks ago, everyone’s favourite Grandpa-Simpson-on-Facebook Wayne Brown took his mayoral schtick to the Sunday Star-Times in an op-ed titled “Let’s fix Parliament with a Grand Coalition”. The bulk of Wayne’s 800-odd words consisted of the usual Brownian greatest hits: other people are dumb and useless; ideas other than mine are dumb and useless; central government is dumb and useless while “I relentlessly pursue savings and better value for money from the rates we all pay”.

However, buried in this general disparagement of everyone other than himself was a concrete suggestion that raises its head from time-to-time. Outside of weird pandemic times, when voters are so grateful not to have died that they reward the governing party with an absolute majority, our MMP voting system is always going to require more than one party to agree to govern together. But rather than these agreements involving one of the major (or legacy) parties and some minor (or new) parties, why don’t Labour and National form a “grand coalition”? A kind of NatLab collab, if you will.

The model for this proposal comes from the home of MMP, Germany, where that country’s political equivalents to the National and Labour parties have several times agreed to govern in tandem. Such “Große Koalition“ (or, Germany’s 2013 word of the year, “GroKo”) have repeatedly been used to avoid having to rely on specific minor parties for governing support. This “cordon sanitaire” approach is considered necessary to prevent parties with extremist pasts or dangerous ideologies from obtaining a foothold in government.

You can see why Germany might be particularly sensitive to such concerns. And, while I’m sure every reader has a view on which of our current parties is bad for the country, none have been publicly viewed as fundamentally system-threatening as Germany’s ex-communist Die Linke or far-right AfD have. So, the argument for adopting a grand coalition here in Aotearoa New Zealand must be different.

Wayne Brown, of course, thinks that because everyone else apart from him is dumb and useless, a NatLab collab is necessary to get 20 “sufficiently capable, intelligent people” running the country. Combining the top 10 MPs from National with the top 10 MPs from Labour would, he thinks, result in a Cabinet with “nearly three quarters who can do their job”.

An initial problem with this sort of individualised take on government is that it assumes that capable and intelligent people rise to the top of an organisation. I simply note that evidence does not necessarily back up this claim. More fundamentally, it reveals that Brown’s political experience is limited to the world of local government, where councils largely function as a collection of individuals only loosely grouped into tickets at election time. That very much is not the reality of central government with its much stricter forms of party discipline.

So, if coalitions are a matter of forming inter-party governing arrangements rather than selecting for individual talent, why might a NatLab collab be desirable? Brown does point to one benefit. We hear constant calls for “bipartisan agreement” on a whole host of long-term problems that we collectively face, including superannuation, infrastructure and climate change mediation and adaptation. Then, whisper it, on many of these policy issues (as well as a host of others), Labour and National actually are more closely aligned with each other than they are with their current potential governing partners on the left and right respectively. If they were to come together in government, they could craft some sort of consensus compromise that would be more likely to last for the long-term.

On its face, the logic is appealing. But it neglects two major factors in politics: emotion and self-interest. 

The emotional aspect relates to how those involved in Labour and National see themselves and, importantly, how much of that self-image is crafted through contrast with the other party. After all, for some 90 years our national politics has been a matter of (usually) National or (less often) Labour governing, with the other party’s prime aim in opposition to displace them. That history breeds culture, and culture is a strong determinant of action.

Forming a NatLab collab would involve a major reorientation within a group of people that all have cut their political teeth on stories of conflict with, and triumph over, the other. Within that political culture, it’s hard to gain traction for arguments that joining your enemy is for the best of the country.

The self-interest point depends on predictions regarding how a NatLab collab would be viewed. Brown paints a rosy picture of it having “majority voter support” that “would guarantee long terms for the MPs involved”. Possibly that is true, and given current polling such an arrangement after the 2026 election would include some 65% of MPs.

However, any NatLab collab would not create a truly equal union. Whichever party got their person into the role of prime minister would be seen as the “main” governing partner. To them would go the spoils of any success that the coalition achievedin terms of public support, while the “second fiddle” party would risk being overshadowed for the entire governing term.

Then there is the fact that those minor parties outside the NatLab collab would be free to critique the governing arrangement from both the left and the right, bleeding support from each of the parties in power and strengthening their own political positions at the next election.

So, do National and Labour risk a term of government in which they try to put aside past enmities and jointly seek fixes to the country’s problems, with one of them being seen as working “under” the other while each are attacked from their right and left flanks respectively for every policy compromise that they make? At the end of the term, do they find there is not enough support for them to form another NatLab collab, but instead they must try to make a new governing arrangement with invigorated minor parties eager to pull the country to the right or left?

Or, do they choose an arrangement with their existing governing partners that allows them to be the major partner in government, advance more of their preferred policy positions, and gives their MPs the majority of ministerial positions? If you were in charge of either the National or Labour parties, which option might you find the more compelling?