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TVNZ’s political editor Jessica Mutch with tonight’s poll results
TVNZ’s political editor Jessica Mutch with tonight’s poll results

PoliticsMarch 15, 2021

Live updates, March 15: National closes gap but Labour still well ahead in new poll

Staff writers
TVNZ’s political editor Jessica Mutch with tonight’s poll results
TVNZ’s political editor Jessica Mutch with tonight’s poll results

Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for March 15, brought to you by Stewart, Toby and Alice. Get in touch at info@thespinoff.co.nz 

6.00pm: National closes gap but Labour still well ahead; Ardern drops in preferred PM stakes

The first TVNZ/Colmar Brunton poll of the year shows a small rise in support for National and a drop for Labour, but the governing party is still well ahead.

Labour polled at 49%, down 4% on the last poll in December, with National up 2% but still lagging at 27%.

In the preferred prime minister stakes, Jacinda Ardern has dropped by 15 percentage points, but remains in a commanding position, with 43% support. Judith Collins drops, too, down four points to 8%. David Seymour is unchanged on 4%, as is the Air NZ CEO turned National MP  Christopher Luxon on 2%. Where did all that support for Ardern go? To “don’t know”, on an impressive 27%.

The Greens were up one to 9%, with Act on 8%, NZ First and The Māori Party on 2%, New Conservative and TOP both on 1%.

1 News has changed the way it polls, and no longer includes landlines as part of its survey. It now polls 50% mobile phones and 50% online panel. Political editor Jessica Mutch-McKay explains the methodology change here.

4.00pm: Ardern addresses trans-Tasman bubble risk; questioned on minor deported from Australia as ‘501’

Speaking at her post-cabinet press conference this afternoon, Ardern said the fact the risk of Covid-19 coming into the country would almost double if arrivals from Australia no longer had to quarantine was not a reason not to proceed with a trans-Tasman bubble.

Currently, 40-50% of managed isolation places are filled by arrivals from Australia, bringing with them very little risk of Covid-19. If they no longer had to go into quarantine, arrivals from more risky countries would take their places.

In response to a question from The Spinoff’s Justin Giovannetti, Ardern said she was “mindful that that may be one of the effects of opening up that space”, but it was “not a reason not to enter into an arrangement”.

“There has been some consideration into how we can minimise that risk,” she said. 

Pre-departure testing concerns

On whether the pre-departure test system was up to scratch, considering how many arrivals test positive for Covid-19 at the beginning of their stays in MIQ (see 2.15pm update), Ardern said the system was “for the most part” working.

“But I don’t think we can make an assumption that all pre-flight testing is the same. I don’t think all countries are necessarily as rigorous as us, which is why what’s really critical is day zero tests.”

Cook Islands PM to visit; PM queried on minor deported from Australia as ‘501’

Cook Islands prime minister Mark Brown is to visit New Zealand next week from March 25 to April 3, Ardern announced at this afternoon’s press conference. Brown’s trip will mark the first visit from an international leader since New Zealand closed its border due to Covid-19 last year.

Residents of the Cook Islands, which has never had a case of Covid-19, can travel to New Zealand without going into managed isolation.

Asked about reports that a minor was deported from Australia as a “501”, Ardern said: “I have asked for a briefing on that. I don’t have full details. But I would have an expectation that we treat minors in a particular way.” She said she would be looking further into the matter.

According to a report on Stuff, a deportation flight last week included a 15-year-old boy.

She said it had been “an issue raised before, and we have raised our objections before”.

2.15pm: Why are there so many cases at the border when pre-departure tests are required?

It’s now been two weeks since New Zealand had a positive Covid-19 case in the community, but cases at the border remain steady – we currently have 93 active cases. This is despite a rule having been in place since late January that requires anyone travelling to New Zealand – apart from those coming from Australia, most Pacific Islands and Antarctica – to present evidence of a negative Covid-19 test taken within 72 hours before departure.

In recent weeks, a significant number of the new cases appear to have travelled to New Zealand on the India via UAE route, many of whom test positive at day zero.

Last week, The Spinoff asked Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins if he still had confidence in the reliability of pre-departure tests.

“Pre-departure tests are one of a number of additional precautions in place and they continue to be reviewed along with other measures in our response. Pre-departure testing will not identify those that are incubating the virus but not infectious at the time of testing. We know that people can also be exposed to Covid-19 during their journey to get to New Zealand, both internally within their country of departure, and during international travel.

“There is also no way to verify the quality of pre-departure tests and test reports so an important additional step is day 0/1 testing once in New Zealand. Additionally a proportion of cases detected at the border and in managed isolation are subsequently found to be historical.”

1.00pm: NZ goes two weeks since last community Covid-19 case

The Ministry of Health sent out the following:

There are no new cases in the community.

There are seven new positive cases of COVID-19 in managed isolation to report today.

One previously reported case has now recovered. The total number of active cases in New Zealand is 93. Our total number of confirmed cases is 2,074.

Since January 1, there have been 39 historical cases, out of a total of 263 cases.

The total number of tests processed by laboratories to date is 1,821,426.

On Sunday, 2,440 tests were processed. The seven-day rolling average up to yesterday is 5,464 tests processed per day.

For up-to-date information on testing locations in Auckland, visit https://www.arphs.health.nz/

Information on all testing locations nationwide is available on the Healthpoint website https://www.healthpoint.co.nz/covid-19/

NZ COVID Tracer

NZ COVID Tracer now has 2,751,806 registered users, an increase of more than 47,000 users in the past fortnight.

Poster scans have reached 221,019,392 and users have created 8,504,040 manual diary entries. There have been 1,107,949 scans in the last 24 hours.

It’s great to see ongoing good use of the NZ COVID Tracer app and it’s vitally important that Kiwis continue to do so. Please scan QR codes wherever you go and turn on Bluetooth tracing in the app dashboard if you haven’t already done so.

11.50am: It’s poll day! Will there be good news for Ardern?

It’s almost time for the first televised political poll of 2021 – one of only a handful since Labour swept to victory in last October’s election.

TVNZ will reveal the results of its Colmar Brunton poll at 6pm tonight, according to the network’s political editor.

Despite being years out from another election, the poll could be a biggie for Labour. The government has faced increased criticism in recent weeks over its vaccine rollout, the lack of a trans-Tasman travel bubble, and the recent Auckland yo-yo lockdowns. Meanwhile, National received praise for its Covid-19 leave support proposal – but leader Judith Collins has also had to face scrutiny over the party’s election review.

Collins – before she was leader – said she’d quit the top job if National fell below 35%. Since becoming leader, the party hasn’t come close to crossing that threshold. If the party hasn’t made any gains in this poll, we could see another leadership challenge on our hands.

In a tweet, stats lover Michael Appleton shared how governments have fared in TVNZ polls released in March of their second term in power.

11.25am: On this day – marking Covid-19 anniversaries

Today we’re starting up a regular feature in the live updates: thinking back to where we were in the Covid-19 pandemic 12 months ago. As we approach the one year anniversary of New Zealand going into lockdown, we’ll be taking a daily look at Covid-19 milestones from 2020.

On March 15, 2020:

One year ago, New Zealand recorded its seventh and eighth cases of Covid-19. For reference, we’ve now exceeded 2000.

A day earlier, on March 14, we started announcing new cases daily. Anyone who arrived in the country was also required to self-isolate for 14 days (except arrivals from the Pacific)

At the time, finance minister Grant Robertson said the government was expecting a serious blow to the economy from the effects of the virus and the new travel ban. Internationally, France and Spain shifted into lockdown.

10.35am: Waititi wins Grammy for work on Jojo Rabbit

Taika Waititi has snared yet another award for his 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, taking out a Grammy (yes, Grammy) Award.

The director won the gong for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. He reacted to the win as anybody would expect him to:

“I guess they’re just giving Grammys to anyone now,” he told a reporter.

9.20am: Travel bubble still in the pipeline, says Ardern

The prime minister said she’s still trying to get a two-way travel bubble with Australia up and running – but, she admits circumstances have now changed.

The Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland are both grappling with possible new outbreaks of Covid-19 stemming from managed isolation facilities.

Speaking on TVNZ’s Breakfast, Jacinda Ardern admitted that incidents like this made establishing a travel bubble harder.

“You can see just this morning, cases — a case in New South Wales, Queensland, we’ve recently had our issues. It’s a balance to be struck, but we haven’t given up on making it a reality,” Ardern said.

“It’s a bit more complicated now we’re dealing with state-by-state rather than the starting point, which was country-by-country.”

There have reportedly also been discussions between the New Zealand and Singapore governments around establishing a travel bubble, or possibly a three-way bubble with Australia as well.

8.10am: Police figures show rise in gun crime since major law changes

The government’s major gun law upheaval in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings has had no impact on gun crime.

Police figures reported by RNZ show that gun crime peaked in 2020, with 2399 people were charged with 4542 firearm-related offences. That’s nearly double the number from a decade earlier.

Act’s Nicole McKee – a strong critic of the government’s law reforms – said she’s not surprised. “What we’re looking at is a piece of rushed legislation, or two pieces of rushed legislation, that went through so fast that the unintended consequences of doing that are starting to be realised, and of course the effects that we’re seeing are a less safer community.”

Hera Cook from Gun Control New Zealand said the laws had been a great success – and placed some blame for rising gun violence on Australian deportees. “I think what’s probable is that both things are happening. What we’re seeing is that the 501s are bringing more organised crime into New Zealand,” Cook said.

“Police are combatting that and police seem to be being pretty effective. I think we as New Zealanders should feel really good about the fact that police are picking up a lot more gun offences.”

Speaking on Morning Report, prime minister Jacinda Ardern said the increase in gun crime made her even more determined to continue reforming our gun laws.

7.30am: Top stories from The Bulletin

Today marks the two year anniversary of “one of New Zealand’s darkest days”. On March 15 in 2019, 51 people were killed while they worshipped in two Christchurch mosques. The terrorist, a white supremacist, injured 40 others. The perpetrator was last year sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Today, Christchurch’s Muslim community will hold private prayers. As RNZ reports, The imam of Masjid An-Nur Gamal Fouda said today’s prayers will be held at both the Linwood and Al-Noor mosques to remember those who lost their lives. “Families will remember their loved ones in different ways, many will pay their respects today by visiting the graves of those who died,” he said.

More Reading

A public commemoration was held on Saturday, attended by about 1000 people. Jacinda Ardern was among the long list of speakers. She told the crowd: “Much has been said, but words, despite their healing power, will never change what happened that day. Words will not bring back those men, women and children who gathered at their place of worship, quietly and peacefully when they were taken in an act of terror.”

To mark today’s anniversary, Newshub has spoken to a number of survivors from the attack. Temel Atacocugu – who was shot nine times by the terrorist – is back playing football; one of the things he loves the most. “Because this is the most thing I loved to do in my life and I don’t think, myself, I can be without football,” he told reporter Juliet Speedy. Siham Alsalfiti, whose husband Abdul Qasem was killed on March 15 while protecting his injured friends, found this weekend’s anniversary service healing. “I found it very helpful, it made me feel that we are not alone and I’m really proud [that] the government keeps acknowledging the loss of 51 innocent Shahids [martyrs],” she says. Read more extraordinary stories here.

Finally, Newsroom has followed a story from last week on the continuing calls for the government to amend ACC to allow it to provide support to uninjured witnesses of the March 15 attack. It comes after a fiery interview between Andrew Little and RNZ’s Susie Ferguson, that you can listen to here. Wellington lawyer Warren Forster told Newsroom that minister Little was right to say witnesses not physically injured but suffering mental injury aren’t covered by ACC. But: “there’s a separate question of, should they?” Read more on that, here.

Keep going!
Jacinda Ardern and the ghost of former prime minister Michael Joseph Savage (Image: Alice Webb-Liddall/supplied)
Jacinda Ardern and the ghost of former prime minister Michael Joseph Savage (Image: Alice Webb-Liddall/supplied)

OPINIONPoliticsMarch 14, 2021

Transformation and progressive ghosts

Guest writer
Jacinda Ardern and the ghost of former prime minister Michael Joseph Savage (Image: Alice Webb-Liddall/supplied)
Jacinda Ardern and the ghost of former prime minister Michael Joseph Savage (Image: Alice Webb-Liddall/supplied)

The promise of ‘transformation’ is all the more compelling when invoking the legacy of Michael Joseph Savage. But to wrap the idea of transformation in nostalgia is to avoid the real decisions it would demand.

Pointing out hypocrisy and broken promises is a noble goal, and few broken promises rank as highly as Labour’s 2017 promise to be “transformative.” According to her critics, rather than being the transformational leader she promised to be, Jacinda Ardern is timid, or a manager, a conservative, or transitional. Little wonder that the government has in recent weeks made an effort to ditch the transformational brand.

The subjective nature of the goal was one of its supposed strengths – “transformation” is a word people can project their own desires onto – and yet somehow almost everyone agreed on Labour’s failure.

As the first lockdown was announced, the government sought to revive its already struggling transformational brand. But instead of making promises about the future, they reached for comparisons with the first Labour government of Michael Joseph Savage of 1935-40. Ardern, Grant Robertson, and Winston Peters all grasped the moment to resurrect Savage’s “ghost”, as political commentator Richard Harman put it.

Despite this branding, the much-lauded Covid relief package spent less on increased healthcare capacity than it did on propping up Air New Zealand, and its stimulus component largely followed “trickle-down” logic, only benefiting workers via their employers’ subsidies and massive tax cuts. Still, many employers – somewhat predictably – didn’t “act in the spirit” of the subsidy scheme, with major employers like Fletcher Building laying off thousands of workers while pocketing their wage subsidies.

Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters at a press conference in March 2020 (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Only the current government could pull off a scheme with such a massive disconnect between branding hype and actual outcomes. But for some reason the message stuck, thanks in no small part to the new historical spin.

At this point it’s worth asking why we keep falling for “transformational” branding. In particular, why do we find the message all the more compelling when it evokes the history of New Zealand’s social democracy and the legacy of Savage?

To understand that, it’s worth asking why it is that ideas and people from the past keep on coming back to haunt us, shaping and distorting our vision of the future. It’s a story of the dead being used to take advantage of the living, and as such, it’s a story that deserves its own sort of spooky terminology.

Hauntology

The term “hauntology” was coined by Jacques Derrida and popularised by the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, who used it to talk about everything from electronic dance music to politics.

Culture, he said, is no longer capable of delivering anything “futuristic”, because the future has slowly been cancelled. The kinds of sounds, sights and ideas we associate with the future have stagnated since the dawn of more financialised, investor-driven forms of capitalism (neoliberalism). One electronic bleep bloop, or science fiction novel, sounds just as “futuristic” now as it did decades ago, because it no longer represents the future itself, just a set of aesthetics. The aesthetic of “the future” has been the same for so long that it’s shaped more by nostalgia than by the unknown. This reproduction of retro-futures is why even people born in the 90s can experience a profound nostalgia for the decades before their birth.

Over time, our yearning for what the “future” once signified made it hard to remember what the past was like. Slowly it eliminated our ability to think about the future altogether.

Instead sounds, sights and ideas get stuck in a sort of limbo, not entirely of the past, but not of the future either. We’re haunted by the lost futures they represent.

A very similar thing has happened in New Zealand’s progressive politics.

Our idea of what a “transformed” New Zealand would look like has been more or less the same for nearly a century. It would look like a massive social housing campaign, an expanded social safety net, higher taxes for the uber-wealthy, and nationalisation of key industries. More importantly than any specific, actionable policy though, “transformation” has come to mean recapturing the general feeling of optimism we think people experienced when New Zealand was a true social democracy. Interestingly, this nostalgia for social democracy is often stronger among people born after its end, and we struggle to imagine a progressive future that isn’t marked by the policies of a century ago.

This isn’t to say that any of those policies were bad – far from it – but rather we should also remember that appeals to “transformation” of this kind are more about eliciting a nostalgic response than anything else.

We’re haunted by the promise of a transformative, social-democratic government because it represents a lost future, something that neither belongs to the past, because we don’t remember it correctly, nor to the present, because it’s impossible to reclaim.

Michael Joseph Savage is greeted by an enthusiastic crowd during the 1938 election campaign, at the end of the Labour government’s first term in office. (Alexander Turnbull Library Reference: 1/2-051739; F)

Trying to reclaim a lost future

Michael Joseph Savage and Norman Kirk are the perfect representatives of this lost future. Their lives were cut short in office, and so we will never really know what they might have achieved. Savage in particular took on larger than life proportions, his body entombed in an enormous mausoleum, a rock-hewn, eternal national memory.

As such, the ghost of Savage, whether he is resurrected by the Labour Party faithful or by those to its left, isn’t a being that belongs to the past. But he doesn’t belong to the present either. He is stuck in a space between times.

New Zealand progressivism is similarly stuck in time. We can’t go forward, because it’s difficult to imagine “real” futures. We also can’t go back to the past, because the enormous returns on investment that allowed for Savage’s particular brand of social welfare don’t exist any more.

Savage’s vision was funded by a lucrative refrigerated goods trade, colonialism in the Pacific, and the belief that Māori didn’t need to be included in social spending because they could “live off the land”. None of this makes much sense to people in a modern Aotearoa.

Nonetheless, it’s this vision that defines what a “progressive” looks like in New Zealand. But this progressivism-as-reclaimed-past is a bit … well … conservative. With a small “c” of course.

Contrary to the more conspiratorial view of why “progressive” governments consistently fail to deliver, I don’t think it’s because Labour is consciously in bed with millionaires (although “cash for access” lobbying schemes may stretch that belief thin). Instead, many of the people who are ultimately responsible for sustaining our neoliberal present don’t actually believe in neoliberalism, they’re self-described progressives seeking a return to the pre-Rogernomics period.

What confronts them are the limitations of a backwards-facing progressivism. There is no simple button labelled “return to 1974” hidden in some backroom in the Beehive. Would-be social democrats instead find a governmental system which is increasingly ossified and resistant to change. The levers inside the political machine seem stuck on their current setting, and no one could possibly dislodge them without potentially breaking the fragile contraption.

From that point on, the best progressives in government can do is “transformative” branding. After all, branding is much less risky than actual reforms.

The problem seems to be that “transformation” without breaking anything is impossible. Real transformation is forward-looking, and most of all, incredibly risky.

David Lange and Roger Douglas at an ‘Opening the Books’ presentation, August 1984. (Photo: Merv Griffiths/Dominion Post Ref: EP/1984/4089/24A-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22428612)

Bringing the future back into transformation

What has been missing from all the talk of a “transformative” politics is the fact that transformation often requires demolishing the previous system. Take for example our last truly transformative government: that of David Lange.

Lange and his finance minister Roger Douglas transformed New Zealand. But they didn’t begin by building something, they started by gutting social spending and stimulus programmes, selling off state assets at a steal, and allowing all sorts of economic hitmen to go about their dirty business. Industry shrank rapidly, rural towns withered, and forms of financial capitalism which profit off of economic decay – like private equity groups and hedge funds – were empowered more than ever before.

They did so knowing that if you absolutely wreck all of the institutions and classes supporting a political system, there can be no return to that system. They knew that any anti-neoliberals of the future would be stymied by the power blocs they had created, and would appear outmoded in the face of rapid social change. Economic progressivism has been on the backfoot ever since, trying to resurrect – rather than invent – policies which often lack the economic and institutional base that would have once enabled them.

Pedestrians walk past a homeless person rough sleeping on High Street in central Auckland on October 17, 2020, the day of the general election. (Photo: Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images

Transformation, then, is more often than not defined by the things we lose. In this case New Zealand lost its independence from finance capital, and any standard of living not enabled by external debt.

With that in mind, what would we lose if a government was, once again, truly transformative? Perhaps we would choose to wreck profitability for the sake of ensuring people are safe and well supported at work. We might lose revenue streams in the Pacific as unjust trade deals with our neighbours are overturned. We might lose real-estate values, investors’ expectations be damned. We might lose out on international contracts for our refusal to collaborate on interventionism in the Middle East and Asia. Of course this would require a type of economy robust enough to shrug off lost profits, and therefore cope with risk.

Like the neoliberal revolution, it would mean losing things permanently, irreversibly. After all, is it really transformation if it can be reversed in three years’ time?

We might realise that all those losses were concentrated among very few people, and were ultimately worth it for a society that is truly different, and is no longer stuck in an endless loop of half-remembering lost futures.

But a “progressivism” which seeks to return to ghostly pasts will never do that. It is terrified of losing anything, not only because it’s trapped in a conservative mindset, but because even the social democracy of the past was terrified of losing its grip on the status quo.

Classical social democracy was a movement born of the belief that providing welfare and stimulating consumer spending would prevent economic crises born of a decline in profitability, saving capitalism from regular crashes and making transformation unnecessary. Indeed the most successful social-democratic experiments were conducted entirely to prevent anticapitalist parties from emerging. Instead, most social democracies saw temporary success and improved conditions, but only made profitability decline more than ever before.

As historian Malcolm McKinnon wrote in an excellent article last year, Savage’s government was very much the same. It was run by men who were utterly horrified at the prospect of societal transformation, and its achievements have been heavily mythologised.

The memory of historical social democracy continues to haunt us, because we are convinced it was a brief, beautiful attempt at kindness on a societal scale, rather than just a different form of economic cynicism, a necessary measure to protect the rich from transformation.

This yearning for a government to save us is a tragedy of wasted words and efforts. In recent years the state has rarely been the source of the “transformation” many people seem to need. Instead it has been external pressures placed upon the government by people across Aotearoa. One of the most striking features of the Ihumātao campaign was that it made people think about a decolonial future, a real future. Similarly, direct action against weapons companies showed people a way towards a disarmed Aotearoa by shutting down weapons expos. These were just a few times I heard people talk about the future in a truly different way, but I’m sure there are more every day.

Our enthusiasm for transformation is a good thing – we’ve just been hoping that the dead would rise and lead us there, when really, we have to walk there ourselves.

Politics