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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

OPINIONPoliticsDecember 8, 2022

Campaigning on economic security sounds dull, but it might be Labour’s best option

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

‘Security’ looks likely to be a big theme of Labour’s re-election campaign in 2023, writes Max Rashbrooke.

I was once told, by someone who would know, that there are only two political campaigns: “time for change” and “don’t put it all at risk”. Every opposition campaign boils down to the former; every incumbent campaign, the latter.

Labour, as it looks towards a general election next year, has struggled to tell voters a convincing story about what they would be putting “at risk” if they switch to Christopher Luxon’s National. In recent months, though, a clear theme has begun to emerge: economic security. Delivering her party conference speech last month, Jacinda Ardern claimed that “the question” next year would be, “Who is best to help New Zealand navigate these tough times? Who can provide the security and certainty New Zealanders need?” In a recent newsletter to constituents, finance minister Grant Robertson wrote: “Our economic plan can be summed up in one sentence: to grow a high wage, low emissions economy that provides security in good and bad times.”

Compared to such rallying cries as “freedom” and “equal rights”, this appeal to economic stability can sound like dull stuff. But it has a strong pedigree in the Labour movement – and among reforming governments more generally.

For well over a century, New Zealanders have been acutely aware of the threat that economic instability poses to their well-being. Living in such a small country, buffeted by global economic winds like a rowboat in a thunderstorm, and possessing few organisations of any scale, we have often looked to the state to cushion economic shocks.

While the left tends to frame its past victories, including the world-leading introduction of tax-funded pensions in 1898, as triumphs of rights or equality, those achievements make just as much sense viewed through the lens of security. The first Labour government could hardly have made its intentions clearer when naming its landmark 1938 legislation the Social Security Act. Turning a patchwork of benefits into the foundations of a recognisably modern welfare state, and offering state support “from the cradle to the grave”, it was a direct response to the devastating economic precarity of the Great Depression.

Tapping a similar source of inspiration, one of the era’s leading intellectuals, the nation-building public servant Bill Sutch, titled his 1942 history The Quest for Security in New Zealand. Through an active state, the country had, Sutch argued, “do[ne] more in providing social and employment security than any other Western parliamentary democracy”. The historian W. H. Oliver, writing some decades later, described the growth of “a national social security consciousness … at two critical periods shortly prior to 1898 and 1938 when the country was recovering from, and still had memories of, very severe economic crises”.

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Because the state is now far better at managing such crises, Covid has wreaked nothing like the havoc of the Great Depression or the little-remembered Long Depression of the 1880s and 90s. Nonetheless, Ardern and her team clearly spy a chance to tell a similar story: Labour brought you, the voter, safely through Covid, and can do so again; Luxon, with nothing similar on his resumé, represents a risk.

As an overarching theme, economic security has intuitive appeal. In a world wracked by war and menaced by climate change, it is clearly something voters crave. Rhetorically, it would unite otherwise disparate Labour achievements and plans – notably, Fair Pay Agreements and Social Insurance – into a coherent story about the state being there for families in tough times, preserving wages and guaranteeing peace of mind. It could also serve as an organising theme for other initiatives Labour might launch as it targets swing voters: policies to mitigate climate change, for instance, or boosts to early childhood education – a crucial element of parents’ return to the paid workforce and thus their economic security.

Potential pitfalls await, however. One Labour activist canvassing voters in the Hamilton West by-election says the mood is not one of gratitude for the government’s Covid stewardship but anger at still having to deal with the virus, despite all the sacrifices made. Much of the public felt secure during the pandemic, but that sensation may be a little like one’s virginity, irrecoverable once lost. The cost-of-living crisis, whoever is to blame, adds to a sense of instability.

To ensure the security theme resonated, Labour would have to stop committing political own goals and ruthlessly divest itself of off-message policies. Only then could it turn the spotlight onto National. Luxon has already demonstrated toughness by ditching his deeply unpopular policy of abolishing the 39% top tax rate. But for as long as he equivocates on his other policies – including tax breaks for landlords and property speculators – he will remain vulnerable to a “don’t put it all at risk” message. If his tax cuts, which would cost billions of dollars each year, remain on the table, Labour will argue that he can’t square things off just by cutting the examples of government “waste” National has identified: he’ll have to carve deeply into core services like health, education and welfare, or borrow more.

It’s open to Luxon, of course, to prove otherwise; but until he publishes a set of fully costed policies, Robertson will happily repeat the “Bermuda Triangle” attack that resonated at the last election: National can’t simultaneously maintain services, cut taxes and pay down debt, so its economic plans are fundamentally suspect.

Labour’s base would undoubtedly prefer a more activist and inspiring campaign than an appeal to security. But Robertson has signalled that budgets will be tight; meanwhile, public stimulus becomes harder to justify in times of high inflation, and – crucially – some of the government’s poorly targeted spending has left voters cynical about big-ticket, high-cost packages. Economic security isn’t sexy, but it might, to a Labour strategist, seem like the best option left.


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TVNZ and RNZ
ANZPM is not about banks and afternoons.

OPINIONPoliticsDecember 7, 2022

Is Labour going to kill the public media merger?

TVNZ and RNZ
ANZPM is not about banks and afternoons.

Jacinda Ardern may have just offered a clue.

Like an Air New Zealand jet eyeing up the big trip from New York to Auckland, the Labour government knows that you sometimes have to take drastic and unusual measures to make it home. When the fuel is limited and the headwinds are unfriendly, it’s time to start offloading luggage. 

Jacinda Ardern acknowledged as much in an interview this week with Jo Moir of Newsroom. Asked about the opportunities afforded by the summer break, the prime minister said: “To just pause, stand back and say, in the next 12 months what are the things we really need to prioritise, and by prioritising does it mean there are things that you then just say we don’t have the capacity within government to pursue those issues, and they’re just not the most important things for us.”

What then are those less important things that lose out in that trade-off? What baggage might get left on the tarmac? 

The three waters reforms have become a pain in just about every part of the government body. An embarrassing volte-face on entrenchment has exposed, at minimum, a lack of attention to detail. Ardern’s efforts to wear it as a team mistake, rather than that of any individual, has at times this week looked at risk of snapping as her MPs played pass the buck

But whatever the shortcomings of the legislation, and the woeful communication of its importance from the start, it springs from a principled and important effort to deal with a crumby water infrastructure. And it’s now become inextricably bound to this government’s programme. To throw it out now would send the plane into a spiral. 

What else? Some concessions have been made on the plan to bring agriculture into the emissions trading scheme. It will remain unpopular but to scrap the project would be to surrender on the issue the prime minister has described as generation-defining. 

The government has signalled that the wider He Puapua co-governance project, which stems from commitments under the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people, to which New Zealand signed up 12 years ago, will be put on the back burner until after the election. 

It’s easy to imagine the income insurance scheme being similarly punted. Paradoxically, with unemployment projected to rear back into the foreground in 2023, the arguments will become easier to make. But is there the appetite after the fair pay agreement legislation for another scrap with New Zealand’s business lobby? Both Grant Robertson and Michael Wood feel strongly about it, but they equally have their pragmatic streaks. 

And then there’s the media merger – the scooping up of RNZ and TVNZ within ANZPM – which is not the afternoon hours of a large bank but Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media. Speaking on those reforms in the interview with Newsroom – that same interview in which she’d talked about sacrificing those things which are “not the most important” – Ardern said: “We’ve still got work to do on the merger, it’s not completed. It is not, however, number one on the government agenda.”

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Now, it could be I’m getting a bit Pepe Silvia in joining dots, but if I were Willie Jackson reading that, fresh from a dressing down (by Ardern’s standard) over a full-grimace interview on the merger for which I’d had to apologise, it would all look very real. 

The truth is that neither Jackson, nor Kris Faafoi, his ministerial predecessor who set the merger in motion, nor Ardern herself, has managed to compellingly explain in clear, pithy and crisp terms why ANZPM is necessary. What might have felt necessary, even urgent, when the ball got rolling in early 2020, with the future of so many media outlets looking so precarious, doesn’t so much today.

For all its warts, there is a strong rationale for the change, and it centres on a media world less about radio stations or TV channels but a digital mode, and equipping that to reach neglected audiences the existing set-up has failed to serve. That can quickly start sounding esoteric, but the repeated call for “future-proofing” sounds all too waffly, or something you do to your deck. 

National, for its part, seized on the issue. It was being pressed to provide examples of the profligate spending it was promising to cut. Its own research (born out in polling published this week) showed people didn’t want RNZ and TVNZ meddled with. They are, after all, the country’s most trusted news brands. Across the last three months or so, the merger has accordingly been the top of the chopping board list for Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis.

To abandon the merger would, no doubt about it, be an embarrassment for Labour. It would play as a giant U-turn, even as an admission that it does not expect to be re-elected. But the temptation will be to take the L, knowing it at least spikes one of National’s rhetorical guns. As National itself showed the other day, scrapping a tax cut under the cover of a storm, sometimes you have to drown your darlings. 

The line would go something like: we have heard the expressions of disquiet, we are looking to save every penny we can, and we accept the time is not right to pursue this reform. Then, looking as earnest as possible, they’d say: given the critical importance of editorial independence and certainty for public audiences, and in light of the confirmation today that National would unwind the whole initiative, that they’d hit control-Z irrespective of how successful it might be proving, well, it is difficult to proceed when the opposition is doing everything to undermine this work. 

There is nothing to suggest any such decision has been taken – Jackson and the government as a whole continue to insist that the reforms are going ahead. The official answer to the question in the headline is, as of this moment, absolutely, unequivocally, no. But in light of Ardern’s comments about priorities and the election year payload, it looks vulnerable. And given the risk of sunk costs – both in money and the energy of all those involved – if it is to be killed, per the Scottish play, better to do it quickly. 

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