People exercise along Tamaki Drive on Auckland’s waterfront on August 24, 2021. (Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
The strain of the 2021 lockdown left Auckland seething while the rest of the country went about its business. The city never forgave Labour.
When a party loses almost half its vote share, it’s inevitable a raft of shattering statistics will undergird that. But even setting aside the historic and entirely unrepeatable aberration of 2020, the punishment inflicted on Labour in Auckland is stunning in its brutality. The city’s west has been an iron Labour stronghold for decades – Chris Hipkins was the party’s first leader of the 21st century not to hold an electorate in those suburbs. That loyalty held even through prior wipeout elections, like David Cunliffe’s doomed 2014 campaign.
Labour’s party vote share then was 27.5%, near-identical to this year’s result. Yet still its electorates remained rock solid, and it held Mt Albert, Mt Roskill, New Lynn and Te Atatū by a combined 26,117 votes. Based on preliminary results, it has lost three of those electorates, with National’s candidates gaining a combined 1,806 more votes than Labour’s could collectively manage.
The map is strewn with similarly shocking statistics. In Auckland Central, previously a tightly-contested electorate, Labour’s Oscar Sims gathered just 1689 votes. Some of this is down to the Greens’ Chlöe Swarbrick hoovering up the left vote – but it’s still a shockingly low number for a major party candidate. By way of comparison, National’s Paul Goldsmith gained over 6,000 votes in David Seymour’s republic of Epsom. In Takanini, which includes some of Auckland’s most impoverished streets, National took nearly double Labour’s party vote.
Prime minister Chris Hipkins with the South Auckland Labour group visiting the weekly Ōtara markets, August 2023. (Image: Tina Tiller)
Losing such vast chunks of support in what were considered an impregnable wall of working class suburbs across the west will be a core part of the party’s prolonged soul-searching in the months and years to come. What is so striking about the result for Labour is that the rightward swing was not a nationwide phenomenon in our cities. In terms of predominantly urban electorates, of the 11 it lost to National in 2023, seven were in Auckland. In Wellington, by contrast, where it lost traditional Labour seats, it did so due to a leftward swing toward the Greens’ candidates.
The particular agonies of Auckland
The campaign was largely litigated on issues through the prism of how they affected the nation as a whole. The cost of living, a sense of escalating crime, falling attendance and achievement at school, a health system under severe strain. All were felt across New Zealand, but within Auckland, rightly or wrongly, there is a sense that each impacted this city more powerfully than the nation as a whole.
Tāmaki Makaurau has the country’s highest house prices and rents, along with a regional fuel tax pushing up the cost of commuting. The inner west has seen a number of high profile crimes, with the murders of dairy worker Janak Patel in Sandringham and Lena Zhang Harrap in Mt Albert, and the terrorist incident in New Lynn, all occurring this term. Auckland’s school attendance has often lagged behind the nation, and its hospitals have regularly made the news for wait times in emergency rooms and violence against staff.
That all sits in the air, infecting the general mood of the city. But along with these issues, the 2021 lockdown played a role as well. It generated an underappreciated amount of resentment towards Labour which came home to roost in this election. For those in the city, no reminder will be necessary, but here’s a refresher for those who didn’t live through it:
The city went into a level four lockdown on August 17, relaxing slightly to level three a month later, on September 22. While level three allowed some limited movement, it was still highly restrictive – there was the infamous clarification that while friends and family could gather outside, they could not go inside to use the bathroom. It was not until November 10 – just shy of three months later – that restrictions were finally relaxed. This was almost twice the length of the major 2020 lockdown.
Te Komititanga square, Britomart, on November 22, 2021 as the Auckland lockdown continued. (Photo: Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Two New Zealands in the spring of 2021
During that time, it felt like the city collectively lost its mind a little, particularly among parents with children. Those once-reliably Labour voting suburbs are a belt of families, with a clutch of enormous high schools the size of small towns. In the spring of 2021, parents there watched despairingly as their kids idled on phones just as the exams that would define their futures began. The New Lynn stabbing and Zhang’s murder both happened during the early stages of the lockdown, sitting heavily on an already sombre populace. And house prices reached their runaway apex, leaving many of those voters feeling locked out of whatever aspirations they had for life within the city.
All the while, we Aucklanders watched 1pm briefings and the 6pm news in extraordinary numbers, lacking for anything better to do. And there, each day, the glaring contrast between our lives and those in the rest of the country was unmissable. Around the motu, b-roll of kids at school, people playing sport, eating in restaurants, drinking in bars. All the ordinary pleasures and routines of life that we were denied.
This would have been a difficult scenario for any governing party, but Labour made it worse by seeming oblivious to the city’s plight. For a party which earned justified plaudits for its mastery of communication during the first national lockdown, its instincts deserted it during this one. It frequently teased major announcements, only to extend the agony further. While many of its citizens were double-vaccinated, that conferred no special privileges on them – only a faintly sanctimonious suggestion that we would be released when enough people (over whom we had no power or influence) joined us in that state.
Perhaps most mystifying and infuriating was the way its core leadership group – including prime minister Ardern, who represented an electorate here – either stayed away or made only fleeting visits to the city. Certainly not long enough to truly get its pulse. The workaday 6pm news footage of politicians looking at things took on a very different feel when those activities were indefinitely denied of your city. At times it felt like Auckland’s only value was as an economic engine, its residents working, often from home, so the rest of the country could happily live on as if nothing was happening.
This isn’t to issue a judgement on whether our furies and resentments were well-founded. The business of government needed to go on, and while you could quibble with the duration, it made sense to lock the city down while vaccinating at a pace. Visiting the city at all contravened rules being enforced by land borders. Still, having no senior MP based here, enduring it with us and transmitting that back to Wellington, made you wonder if the city had just been forgotten entirely.
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Even when it ended, the moment felt like it just passed unremarked. There was no grand statement of gratitude to the city for its national service when the lockdown ceased. It just stopped. In conversations that summer with people from out of town, you would frequently hear surprise expressed at the length of the lockdown. Which is natural – if you didn’t go through it, you wouldn’t really recall it.
Those who lived through won’t ever forget it, though. Many people are still carrying some level of scar tissue from the myriad downstream impacts. Ultimately, while casting about for specific blame for electoral defeats is invariably inexact, the cause of the wipeout in Auckland feels traceable to those anguished months two years ago. When the city ached, and felt like Wellington barely knew. At least, until Saturday.
Hayden Donnell singles out the people who did well and the ones who got massively owned in this weekend’s general election.
WINNERS
The National Party
The National Party won the largest share of the vote in the 2023 New Zealand General Election.
Winston Peters
Winston Peters won the Winston share of the Winston in the How Is This Still Happening.
Three thousand families with both parents or caregivers earning between $53,500 and $66,000 a year who have at least one child under 5 and spend $300 per week or more on childcare
If you’re part of the 0.18% of New Zealand who fits the description above, congratulations, it’s time to collect your $252-a-fortnight tax cut*.
*Full tax cuts only available from July 2024, terms and conditions apply.
Everyone involved in real estate
Beneficiaries (old)
People receiving the universal superannuation benefit will continue to have their income adjusted in line with wages. They’re also in line for a boost of around $13-a-fortnight under National’s tax plan. However, their fellow beneficiaries who are yet to turn 65 aren’t so lucky.
Chris Bishop
It’s taken three years, but Chris Bishop has finally recovered after experiencing the vision of hell from Event Horizon on the night of the 2020 election.
Chris Luxon
Chris Luxon’s election win contains echoes of the Australian ice skater Steven Bradbury, who claimed a Winter Olympics gold medal after all his opponents fell over just before the finish line.
The CTU kept its in-house economist chained to an iron abacus in a basement stats cave, churning out critiques of what were euphemistically described as National’s “heroic” numbers.
Renney alleged that National’s spending plans were underfunded by $3 to $5 billion. He found the party’s much-touted $252-a-fortnight tax cut would only benefit 3,000 families. He worked out how much raising the retirement age will cost younger and middle-aged people. He forlornly tugged at the binds holding him to the abacus until the loud speaker above his stretcher crackled to life to broadcast a stern reprimand from CTU president Richard Wagstaff.
At times during the campaign, it felt like Renney was the only person in Aotearoa allowed to do maths. He did more journalism than most journalists and more economic analysis than the entire Labour research unit combined. National MPs wrote tweet threads slagging him off. They put out PR releases accusing him of “gutter politics”. One thing they never did: prove him wrong.
Three people who collectively became known as “economists from across the political spectrum” gave Craig Renney a brief break from his confinement in the CTU maths cave in September, taking it upon themselves to run the numbers on the revenue National projected it would take in from its foreign homebuyers tax. They found that rather than being – in Castalia’s words – “possible and plausible”, those projections were instead “fantastical and quite bullshit”. In their analysis, National’s tax plan went from “fully funded” to “about $530 million short”.
Our likely next government will make the recording sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours look like a wellness retreat. Winston Peters is about to go down in history as our first government minister who has publicly threatened to beat one of his colleagues to the point of hospitalisation.
In one night, Newshub’s augmented reality bird gave birth to Andrew Hoggard, Efeso Collins, and in a particularly harrowing delivery, both Winston Peters and Shane Jones at once. As I understand it, giving birth is hard at the best of times. Having to do it on live TV seems cruel.
Newshub’s panellists watch as an egg passes through Linda the Laser Kiwi’s cloaca.The egg hatches to reveal Winston Peters and Shane Jones.
Linda the Laser Kiwi’s victims
When Linda the Laser Kiwi wasn’t laying eggs, she was banishing politicians to the shadow realm to be tortured for eternity.
Labour’s former Ilam MP Sarah Pallett tumbles into the everlasting dark.
The Green Party
The Green Party will likely win its highest ever share of the party vote. In the first 27 years of MMP, it won two electorate races. It won three just last night. The Party has reason to party.
But those achievements can feel a little bit hollow when the Greens’ largest, most talented caucus is set to spend the foreseeable future watching Chris Luxon trying to stop Winston Peters and David Seymour from disembowelling each other for long enough to pass some legislation.
The Greens arriving at their election party to usher in three to nine years in opposition.
Public servants
If foreign house buyers aren’t going to pay for our tax cuts, someone else is going to have to sacrifice to balance the books. Time for public sector workers like *checks notes* part-time RNZ producer Hayden Donnell to brush off their CVs.
Labour’s research team
Labour’s entire research strategy this election seemed to be to sit very quietly until Craig Renney dinged the bell next to his abacus to indicate he’s ready to release a new calculation.
The election may be out-of-reach, but Chris Hipkins’ secret partner Toni is winning the only race that matters in Stuff’s ‘most popular stories’ rankings.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, bus drivers, cleaners, and hospitality workers were hailed as heroes for making sure society kept running while the rest of us stayed home to save lives. They proved the people making the least money are often those who actually keep the lights on.
As a thank you present for those efforts, the government plans to cancel Fair Pay Agreement negotiations which would have lifted their collective salaries. Let the race to the bottom resume.
In the original Space Jam, aliens steal the skills of the then-NBA stars Larry Johnson, Mugsy Bogues and Charles Barkley in an effort to win a basketball game against the Looney Tunes. The theft renders the players useless, devoid of the talents that propelled them to success.
In losing all trace of the abilities they relied on to make their living, Johnson, Bogues and Barkley have a lot in common with Act leader David Seymour. For three years the Epsom MP was fêted by the media for shepherding his party from 1% in the polls to, at one point, just shy of 20%. He was praised for his political calculus, tenacity, quick-turnaround media strategy, and most of all, the way he controlled what everyone imagined would be kooks in his caucus.
Then the campaign began, and he didn’t do any of that stuff. Act failed to properly vet its candidates, and later found its list had been infiltrated at several levels by conspiracists, anti-vaxxers, and generally unpleasant people. Seymour followed those distractions by announcing “now isn’t the time for significant tax cuts”. Significant tax cuts are literally the point of Act. Somberly telling people things aren’t possible because of the fiscals and whatnot is the role of a major party. The minors are meant to live on the edge, free from the shackles of having to implement most of their agenda. Without his big tax cuts, Seymour was left touting a $1 billion imprisonment drive.
David Seymour endures a walkabout in Christchurch.
Act spent nearly $5 million on its campaign. It was gifted a plane by a foreign billionaire. For all that, it grew its support by roughly 1%, The party that once dreamed of 20% ended up with nine.
As things stand, Paul has a winning majority of more than 3,000 votes.
Being catastrophically wrong is almost mandatory for electorate polls. A survey of the Te Tai Hauāuru electorate on September 19 showed Labour’s Soraya Peke-Mason with a slim lead. She currently trails Te Pāti Māori’s Debbie Ngarewa-Packer by more than 6,000 votes. Another looking into the Te Tai Tonga electorate on September 26 had Rino Tirikatene leading the race to be local MP by 11%. He trails Tākuta Ferris by 1,400 votes. Back in 2020, polling ranked Chlöe Swarbrick a distant third in the Auckland Central race. She just secured her second term.
Recent history would suggest that you can better predict electorate races by taking the results of their polling and reversing them. In a tightening media market, news organisations might want to consider not wasting their money on any more of these unedifying mathematical spectacles.
GIGANTIC LOSERS
Chris Hipkins
Chris Hipkins ran a solid campaign. He was articulate in promoting Labour and ruthless in prosecuting the economic ineptitude of his opponents. While Chris Luxon was so wedded to his talking points that it often felt like he wasn’t speaking the same language, or sometimes even living in the same dimension as his interviewer, Hipkins stayed relentlessly on message without seeming like he’d departed from the topic at hand. Besides the first leaders debate on TVNZ 1, where he appeared to go into a fugue state for half-an-hour, he didn’t really put a foot wrong.
Unfortunately for Labour, those efforts were undermined by his decision to shoot himself in the electoral nuts twice before the campaign even began.
The first bullet struck on June 27, when Labour put an end to its petrol excise tax cut. For New Zealanders, a dollar on petrol is worth $42 on any other product. We regularly spend $5 on petrol queuing to save $2 on petrol. Spending three years so terrified of losing votes you’re reduced to a state of near legislative paralysis, then putting up petrol prices 30 cents three months before a general election defined by the rising cost of living is the political equivalent of breaking a juice fast by downing an entire barrel of lard. It would be inexplicable if it wasn’t for the fact that Labour’s only more defining quality than caution is its penchant for screwing up.
The next shot struck home on July 12, when Hipkins ruled out implementing a wealth or a capital gains tax at any point as prime minister. “With many Kiwi households struggling, now is simply not the time for a big shake-up of our tax system,” he said, adding: “New Zealanders I talk to want certainty and continuity right now, and that’s what I’m delivering with this policy.”
Without real tax relief to offer people on lower incomes, Hipkins became a salesman with nothing to sell. He spent the whole campaign rightfully pointing out his rival’s product was shoddy, poorly designed, inadequate for the task at hand, and likely to hinder more than it helped. But at least the tax plan National strung together out of chicken wire and PVA glue was an attempt to blunt the impact of the spiralling costs that all people, in all demographics, had ranked as their number one concern. When it came time to present his alternative, Hipkins could only offer 45c off parsnips and some free dental for some people in three years’ time.
The objections are obvious: Labour has lost elections before with a capital gains tax as its headline policy; the Greens proposed a wealth tax and only won 40% of Labour’s vote. But the Greens used to poll less than a sixth of Labour’s vote, and the only thing harder than convincing the electorate to accept a wealth tax over the objections of money and capital is convincing them to accept a discount on yams as their sole relief from a crushing cost of surviving crisis.
If Labour went with what it saw as the safe route on tax, it took the opposite tack on co-governance. Race was shaping up as an election-defining issue in the early days of the campaign, with New Zealand First, Act, and National objecting to our half-hearted attempts to honour Te Tiriti. Hipkins opted to go on the attack, accusing his opponents of drumming up division for votes, and harassing Luxon on the issue in leaders’ debates. By the end of the campaign, co-governance was at most a neutral issue for Labour. As it turns out, you can win an inflammatory debate against vested interests if you have a righteous cause and a good case.
It makes you wonder what might have been if Hipkins had taken a similarly bold stand on tax justice. If he’s rueing the fact that he never got that opportunity, he only has himself to blame.
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The New Zealand Labour party
Newshub political editor Jenna Lynch put it best when she asked: “What is the point of Labour?”.
Good question. That’s probably something the party should figure out as soon as possible if it wants the answer to be more than “losing general elections in the most pathetic way possible”.
The laws of time and space
Winston Peters has cheated political gravity, death, and a host of immutable laws on his way to (likely) holding the balance of power for a 472nd time. In his speech to supporters on Saturday night, he admitted he’s now entering his 60th decade. It’s time to rewrite the laws of physics to replace ‘entropy’ with ‘Winston Peters casting the deciding vote in the New Zealand election’.
