Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 16, 2023

Voters don’t need to wait for a right-leaning government. Hipkins is already running one

Founder

Image: Tina Tiller

The polls are unambiguous: New Zealand wants a National party led by Chris Hipkins this election. A scan of his time as prime minister suggests it has already happened.

It’s close, but also clear: for over a year, the most popular party in New Zealand has almost always been National. Likewise, since his unexpected elevation in January, Chris Hipkins has consistently led in any long-term rolling average as preferred prime minister. When asked about levels of trust, the gap yawns wider – Hipkins comes in at 51.5%, over 15% ahead of Luxon on 35%. The people have spoken, and what they manifestly want is Chris Hipkins as the next prime minister, heading up a National government.

Sure, there are some minor issues, like the fact National already has a leader. Yet the country has known Christopher Luxon as leader longer than it has known Chris Hipkins as PM, and has indicated that it does not particularly care for him. More pertinently, Chris Hipkins has been a Labour MP for 15 years, and a Labour staffer prior to that, which is surely disqualifying.

But look at his record as prime minister and it starts to become somewhat moot. Much of his actions as PM would be entirely plausible as the first six months of a new right-leaning soft-populist government, dismantling the work of its predecessor. This goes for policy abandoned and announced – a full political programme. It’s as if, in trying to tack to the centre, Hipkins has in fact taken care of what would have been the meat of National’s first 100 days.

Chris Hipkins is a known fire risk to policy documents. Image: Jason Stretch

Just strip out the brands, and look at the big decisions, all abandoned for a focus on hip pockets. The RNZ-TVNZ merger, which would have created a muscular and well-funded new state media entity. Gone! The social insurance scheme, which would have step-changed the reality of unemployment for those laid off. Going, likely gone! The Three Waters reforms, in name and largely in structure. Gone! Hate speech legislation. The clean car rebate. A container recycling scheme. Going, gone, gone!

There have been other policies, sure, including a major announcement around light rail to the North Shore, along with public transport subsidies. That has been counterbalanced by light rail to Auckland’s airport, which remains a costly series of PDFs, and Let’s Get Wellington Moving, which has been subject to the kind of exasperated critiques typical of an incoming government, not one nearing six years in power.

Even much of the spending from Budget 2023 – extended ECE, scrapping prescription co-payments, subsidies for the gaming sector – is plausible as emanating from a Bill English-style centrist National party, not the leader of the largest-ever MMP Labour party. Indeed, one major part of it, a subsidy for home heating, was near-identical to one of the first announcements made by John Key’s incoming government in 2009.

The trend has continued as the election has drawn nearer. New tunnels to the North Shore form part of an 11-figure roading spend, heading decades into the future. A new law with imposing sentences targeting ram raiding. A plan for the economy headlined by “keeping debt down”, followed by “backing business to drive the recovery”. All easily imagined as a vision for the Chris Hipkins National party.

a background of cash with monopoly houses scattered on top, overlaid with a big red cross and a black and white image of Chris Hipkins — ‘Most damning is Hipkins’ momentous decision on tax’ (Image: Archi Banal)

Most damning is Hipkins’ momentous decision on tax. This is the platform which dictates all other policy, the venue where a left-leaning government can truly differentiate itself from its opposition. Shift the burden from one group to another, and spend that money on arresting the deprivation you campaigned on ending. He had the ammunition, in a landmark report from the IRD, showing miserably small effective tax rates for the wealthiest New Zealanders, which gave a moral foundation to fundamentally redraw the tax system. Yet PM Hipkins made a solemn vow to never impose a capital gains or wealth tax.

It was enough to make his own revenue minister resign in protest, and make you wonder whether National had already won the election. In place of a wealth tax came the populist removal of GST on fruit and vegetables. Fruit and vegetables are “luxury items”, according to South Auckland anti-poverty advocate Dave Letele, and the plan has been derided by almost all economists. Stats NZ data parsed by the NZ Herald suggests it is staggeringly regressive, in that it will deliver savings of around $2 a week to the poorest New Zealanders, while the wealthy enjoy more than $11 in discounts.

What has been the political result of this hard tack to the centre? A steady decline in party polling, balanced against consistent support for Hipkins as prime minister. On some level, Hipkins’ decisions seem to only burnish his own personal brand as a pragmatic centrist, while Labour’s own brand is too strongly associated with its previous project (and its failures) to see any impact.

The Hipkins-era Labour government’s agenda is thus essentially indistinguishable from the goals of any recent National party. In that way the country might already have the government it seems to want: centre-left rhetoric leading a centre-right government. The net effect of Hipkins’ bread-and-butter politics project is that the National party’s term effectively started in January of 2023.

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Image: Archi Banal

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 16, 2023

This is already the fatigue election

Haimona Gray

Guest writer

Image: Archi Banal

Has there ever been a more exhausting, less inspiring election season?

Between Covid, the cost of living crisis, multiple natural disasters, and a steady stream of government scandals – which themselves have led to worsening partisanship hackery and increasingly toxic discourse – even writing about politics right now feels exhausting.

Other exhausting activities have health benefits, like living longer or breathing easier, but engaging with this election has often felt medically indefensible. Side effects have varied between us, but no one seems to feel better.

Part of the blame for this fatigue sits with Labour, which seems determined to lose the election. It might seem surprising to lodge that accusation at a party that’s had such a difficult year, but it’s clear the public is tired of Labour’s genre of dramatic self-destruction.

‘The sausage roll of policy’: Chris Hipkins, Grant Robertson and some sausage-filled cheese rolls on Budget Day 2023.

Sunday’s re-announcement of a GST exemption for fruit and vegetables, already announced by National deputy leader Nicola Willis, hasn’t helped.

As Newsroom’s Marc Daalder put it, removing GST from fresh produce is “the sausage roll of policy – popular, sure, but uninspiring. It’s a sugar hit and when the voters come down, they’ll see how un-nourishing it all is.” The government’s own finance minister has called the policy a “boondoggle”, which is Wellington technocrat for “pretty dumb, eh”.

It’s a populist play that isn’t internally popular within Labour itself, and brings with it a whiff of desperation during a time when the party desperately needs a cohesive narrative around what kind of leader Chris Hipkins will be in a second term.

It’s also basically already te Pāti Māori policy, which adds an element of futility to the whole announcement. A policy poached from one party, then leaked by another, doesn’t exactly shout “visionary thinking”.

Green co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson arrive at a 2017 election night event. (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images; additional design by Tina Tiller)

Two announcements on the same day last week represented two very different strategies to winning an election as a left wing political party.

The Green Party announced a “Dental For All” policy that would cost around $1.7b a year. At the same time, Labour announced it would spend $45b on a series of crossings, in one city, across one harbour, for the benefit of the Far North and a little less than a quarter of Auckland.

The Greens can campaign across the country on bold, if potentially unachievable, policies like its dental plan. They won’t swing voters away from Act or National, but they will attract a chunk of disaffected left-wing voters tired of their ambitions for the country being ritualistically sacrificed on policy bonfires.

The Greens and Te Pāti Māori have slowed the momentum on the left, which will achieve little in terms of a change of government but will give each party far greater power around any unlikely negotiating tables to form the next government.

Labour’s response to this was a return to “bread and butter” politics, meant to refocus and re-energise the party towards a “more of what you like, less of what you don’t” sort of populism. But instead it seems to have sucked the energy out of their campaign.

This kind of failure in the battle for the middle should have National riding higher in the polls than it is. But the opposition party faces its own challengers.

To the right, Act is promising large-scale changes to the public sector, including mass job cuts, disestablishing several government agencies and a hard line against the man who in their eyes is responsible for the current situation: Winston Peters.

‘The most appealing thing National can campaign on to a fatigued electorate is stability.’ (Photo: Hagen Hopkins / Getty)

National is not offering fundamental change – its announcement of more roads made that pretty clear – but it can campaign on providing a stable government with a united caucus.

It may lack the sort of big statement policy that commentators like to build narratives around, but maybe that’s OK. The most appealing thing National can campaign on to a fatigued electorate is stability. Luxon’s caucus has been relatively leak-free, disciplined even.

The working relationship between Luxon and Seymour also seems relatively drama-free so far, but all this stability and discipline will be out the window if Luxon courts the true “coalition of chaos” that is present-day New Zealand First.

As Stuff’s Charlie Mitchell reported over the weekend, NZ First’s current pool of candidates includes numerous disaffected ex-supporters of various “freedom” parties, whose only uniting force seems to be that Labour is bad – and that the man who made Labour’s successive governments possible is the solution. It’s confusing logic, but excess fatigue and mainlining YouTube rants about the World Economic Forum will do that to you.

A New Zealand first coalition should have been ruled out by Luxon already, but it hasn’t (maybe he’s been too tired?). This dithering has left some wind in Peters’ sails, that he’ll almost certainly use to take votes off Act and, to a far lesser degree, National itself.

The sense that no one particularly wants to win this election is also partly down to National. If National wants to turn an ascendant Act on its right while also appealing to the middle voters yearning for a return to quiet competence, it needs to promise a respite. That means permanently switching off the endless dirge that is Peters’ political career by ruling out ever working with him. If not, it’s more of the same with a different uniform.

The old adage is that a change is as good as a holiday. In the depths of winter, after a caustic year where politics has felt unsettling and unhelpful, it’s not yet clear when that change will arrive.

A holiday feels an exhaustingly long way away.