Comparing our current prime minister’s net favourability to the first terms of Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern shows the extent to which new depths are being plumbed.
Everyone knows Christopher Luxon is unpopular. National’s polling is poor, and his preferred prime minister rating is now below that of his opposite number, Chris Hipkins, despite the latter’s deliberate strategy of being largely invisible for the last 18 months. There is even talk – although no more than that – of a challenge to Luxon’s leadership.
The extent of the PM’s unpopularity, however, has never been more clearly revealed than in the graph below, supplied to The Spinoff by polling firm Talbot Mills Research. It charts the net favourability – the percentage of voters who have a favourable impression of the prime minister, minus the percentage who have an unfavourable one – of our last four leaders during their initial term in government, from Talbot Mills/UMR polling over the years. While Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern were mountaineers scaling the peaks, Luxon is plumbing new depths.
Every leader has their challenges, of course. Clark’s popularity dropped away in her first year, owing perhaps to the business revolt sometimes dubbed the “winter of discontent”, before recovering strongly. Ardern’s rating fell spectacularly amidst the failure to deliver the much-touted “year of delivery”, her status rescued only by a successful response to the pandemic’s initial onslaught. Even Key, largely serene, had a mid-term dip. Still, the paths of those three leaders could not be further from the one Luxon is treading: he started out unpopular, and has only become more so over time.
Everyone has their own theory as to why this is, but one common thread in the criticism is Luxon’s inability to articulate clearly what he stands for or what, at its best, this country could be. This leaves voters unmoved, their emotions detached from the prime minister and his prospects. As Duncan Garner recently pointed out, in a column predicting Luxon would be rolled before the next election, previous leaders have always had at least one group of hardcore fans. “Luxon can point to no such base of support,” Garner wrote, “even among the business community who must surely be wondering when [he] is actually going to do something.”
The point is borne out by new data from the Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer, which shows high-income Kiwis dramatically losing faith in the coalition. (Their low-income counterparts remain stubbornly distrustful of all governments.) This decline in trust appears to be evenly split between left-wing and right-wing elites, suggesting the latter are indeed disappointed with Luxon’s performance. While one can only speculate as to their reasons, they may include a distaste for the culture wars that the prime minister is allowing his coalition partners to pursue, a sense that his government has few real solutions to New Zealand’s long-term productivity problems, and the above-mentioned absence of vision.
All leaders, of course, eventually lose their shine. Some commentators perpetuated the myth of Key’s “incredible” popularity, but by the time of his resignation he had ended where Luxon began, at net zero, his detractors just as numerous as his supporters. The flag referendum debacle, the bizarre ponytail-pulling incident, the fact that leadership strengths inevitably turn to weaknesses: all these factors, and more, eroded his public favourability. Only the perceived unpalatability of his opponents, Phil Goff and David Shearer among them, propped up his preferred prime minister rankings.
Clark, supposedly less charismatic than Key, in fact stayed popular for longer than her successor did. But even she was near net zero by the end of her prime ministership.
Luxon’s defence, if there is one, is that the process of popularity decline is being hastened worldwide by an increasingly disgruntled, restive and febrile electorate. Britain’s Keir Starmer has barely got his feet under the table but already suffers catastrophically bad ratings. Across the ditch, Anthony Albanese could be about to lead the first one-term Australian government in a century.
Closer to home, and further back in time, Ardern’s popularity in her second term was – as has been extensively canvassed – in freefall. Like Clark and Key, she reached net zero, but within two terms rather than three. In democracies, public unhappiness now operates at something close to warp speed.
Arriving onto this increasingly chaotic stage, Luxon has, in one sense, been dealt a tough hand. Nonetheless he has not played it well, at least in the public’s opinion. Can he recover? In politics nothing should ever be ruled out: a recovery in the economy and improvements in public services – assuming either materialises – would certainly help, as would a bit more of what the first George Bush called “the vision thing”.
Trust, though, is famously hard to establish and easy to lose. What prospects, then, for a man who never had it in the first place?
