LABOUR PARTY SUPPORTERS & JACINDA ARDERN (image: Joel Thomas)

PoliticsSeptember 29, 2017

How did Labour’s immigration stance impact its immigrant vote?

Contributing writer

LABOUR PARTY SUPPORTERS & JACINDA ARDERN (image: Joel Thomas)

Did Labour’s anti-immigration stance prevent it winning the 2017 election? Branko Marcetic crunches the numbers.

Immigration was perhaps the issue of 2017. Apparently inspired by the renewed popularity of New Zealand First and by events overseas – if you’re unsure what I’m referring to, quickly Google either “Brexit,” “Trump” or Le “Pen,” and then make your way back here – Labour and the Greens both adopted new anti-immigration policies to keep up. As a result of internal dissent, the Greens dropped theirs.

Labour didn’t.

Over the course of the year, Labour promised to slash immigration by 20,000-30,000 people per year, mostly by clamping down on international student visas. The policy may not have been particularly radical, but by focusing on immigrants as the cause of New Zealand’s ills (instead of, say, general underinvestment and a lack of a capital gains tax), the party opened itself up to accusations of xenophobia and other criticisms, particularly from Winston Peters, who gleefully pointed out he and his party had been “dumped on by all and sundry” for saying the same thing for years.

It didn’t help that Labour could be its own worst enemy on the issue. The party tried to seem reasonable and insisted the policy was about practicalities rather than race. But its Facebook page appeared to blame immigration for youth suicide, while Labour’s squeaky clean new leader, who maintained the policy when she took over, was compared to Donald Trump on the issue in the Wall Street Journal. This followed earlier “gaffes” of years gone by, such as David Parker’s poorly chosen description of “low-value immigration”, and housing spokesman Phil Twyford’s use of a combination of shoddy math and racial profiling to warn of offshore Chinese investors driving up Auckland’s house prices, for which he was roundly criticised, and over which staffer Phil Quin, who had been with the party for three decades, quit.

The question is, how much did this all factor into this year’s election result? We can say with some confidence that if Labour’s adoption of an anti-immigration plank was meant to be a vote-winning strategy, it had a negligible impact on its electoral fortunes, given Labour was polling at historically dreadful levels before the ascension of Jacinda Ardern turned things around for the party two months ago.

But could its anti-immigration stance have hurt the party, or even cost it the election? To help answer the question, I analysed electoral statistics from the last two elections, along with the proportion of an electorate’s residents who were born overseas and the origin of their birthplace, as outlined on the Parliament website’s electoral profiles.

A caveat: these figures have their limitations, as special votes are yet to be counted. Because the preliminary results of the 2014 election (before the special votes were tallied) are not available anymore, the amount by which Labour increased its vote from 2014 could well be higher or lower come October 7 – though history suggests higher is the more likely outcome.

Nonetheless, even with this caveat, we can see some clear trends. Here are some key takeaways:

1. Labour tended to lose the party vote in high-immigrant electorates

Some have already speculated that Labour’s poor performance in Auckland – at least compared to its gains in other parts of the country – were the cause of its ultimately underwhelming, albeit much improved, election result this year. If the numbers are anything to go by, immigrant numbers were a large reason for this.

All but one (looking at you, Helensville) of Auckland’s electorates have a proportion of residents who were born overseas that’s higher than the New Zealand average of 23.6% – often much higher. And many of them went National’s way. East Coast Bays, where 47.4% of residents were born overseas, gave 63% of its vote to National. New Lynn, where 42.7% were born overseas, put National over Labour by eight points. Pakuranga, with a 44.1% foreign-born population, went 62.9% for National. Te Atatū, where 34.3% of residents were born overseas – and where Phil Twyford was a candidate – went narrowly for National, 43.3% to 41.9%.

And this isn’t to mention other National strongholds with high foreign-born numbers, such as Botany, Epsom, North Shore, or Upper Harbour.

There were outliers, of course. Labour surged and very nearly won in Auckland Central, where 46% were born overseas. It also won Mt. Albert and very nearly took Mt. Roskill both, high-foreign-born electorates. Meanwhile, Helensville and Papakura, electorates whose foreign-born populations were roughly on par with the country as a whole, also went handily to National.

All of this is also not to suggest that foreign-born voters are single-issue voters, who vote purely on the subject of immigration. Nor is it to dismiss other factors. After all, many of the electorates National handily won, such as those in East Auckland and the North Shore, are not only National strongholds, but tend to be higher-income areas, natural constituencies for National. Former National staffer Ben Thomas also speculated in this week’s ‘Gone by Lunchtime’ podcast that recent immigrants might have a bias toward the ruling party.

Nonetheless there is a clear trend: if an electorate had a higher proportion of residents born overseas, they tended to go for National.

abour Party Spokesperson for Auckland Issues, Phil Twyford (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

2. Labour made most of its gains where there were less immigrants

The opposite is true as well: Labour’s best gains were in electorates where a lower proportion of voters were born overseas than the national average. Greg Presland crunched the numbers over at The Standard and found Labour made its biggest gains in places like the rural South Island, Northland, Christchurch and, particularly, Dunedin. These are all areas with relatively low immigrant numbers.

Dunedin North and especially Dunedin South are both below the national average in terms of residents born overseas. Labour won them by 19 and 11 points, respectively. It surged in places like Kaikōura, Port Hills and Waitaki, and won – albeit just barely – low-immigrant, urban electorates like Mana, Rimutaka, Rongotai, and Christchurch Central (though the latter may have been a referendum on the frustration over the Christchurch rebuild).

Of course, Labour also won Wellington Central by a little under five points, an electorate where 30.3% of residents are born overseas, complicating the picture. In fact, this wasn’t the only high-immigrant area Labour won, which brings up the next point…

3. Labour’s vote depended on the type of immigrant community

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Labour won Wellington Central: by far the largest share of its foreign-born residents are from the UK and Ireland.

A clear pattern among Labour’s results is that the specific type of immigrant community in an electorate tended to influence its result in predictable ways. Although the Parliament electorate profiles only document three different birthplace categories – UK & Ireland, Pacific Islands and North East Asia – these are enough to draw out a clear trend: namely, that Labour did better among immigrant communities that were predominantly from the first two categories, and worse among those from the latter.

Thus, Labour overwhelmingly won the Auckland electorates of Kelston, Māngere, Manukau East and Manurewa, all of which have high proportions of foreign-born residents, the majority of whom were born in the Pacific Islands (Kelston is the only exception, with 33.2% of its foreign-born residents born in the Pacific Islands – not a majority, but still dwarfing the other categories). The Wellington electorates in which Labour eked out wins – Mana, Rimutaka, Rongotai – while not high-immigrant areas, do have residents born in the Pacific Islands and the UK and Ireland as the majority of their overseas-born populations.

Meanwhile, look at the electorates National dominated in in Auckland: Botany, East Coast Bays, Epsom, North Shore, Northcote and Pakuranga, to name a few. All of these are places where those born in North East Asia make up either the highest or a very high percentage of foreign-born residents. Only 27% of Rodney’s residents were born overseas, but just over half of them came from North East Asia, while the other two major categories were negligible – and 60% of that electorate ended up voting for National.

So why might these immigrant communities vote such starkly different ways? It’s not a stretch to assume incidents like the Twyford “Chinese names” debacle may have turned voters hailing from the broad category of “North East Asia” off Labour.

But don’t rhetoric and policies around immigration affect all immigrants, regardless of national origin? True. But it could well be that they sting particular groups more.

After all, when politicians talk about the issue of “immigration” in the New Zealand contest, they typically aren’t assumed to be referring to European immigrants – they, after all, aren’t considered immigrants, but rather expats (a classier term solely reserved for white people) and have not typically been the target of anti-immigration fervour in our history.

Meanwhile, Labour has historic ties with the Pasifika community, and many of the heavily Pasifika electorates in Auckland that Labour won are also on the lower end of the income spectrum. This may have gone some way toward balancing out the negative effect of Labour’s anti-immigration stance.

None of this should make us ignore the outliers, such as Auckland Central, in which Labour surged this year despite nearly 30% of its foreign-born population being from North East Asia. Nor should it obscure the fact that Labour made gains even in areas with higher numbers of Asian immigrants. Speaking of which…

4. Labour made gains in electorates with higher numbers of Asian immigrants

It’s important to note that despite its anti-immigration policies and “gaffes,” Labour still increased its share of the vote in areas with higher proportions of foreign-born residents from North East Asia.

It shot up 10.6 points in East Coast Bays since 2014. It jumped 9.5 in Epsom. It surged 11 points in North Shore, 11.7 in Northcote, and 8.2 in Upper Harbour. Labour’s vote percentage didn’t decrease in any of these electorates since 2014.

In fact, while every party in these and other electorates saw their number of total votes decrease since 2014, owing to the fact that special votes haven’t been added to the totals yet, Labour saw its total number of votes increase, suggesting it will do much better come October 7. In the North Shore and East Coast Bays, Labour’s total number of votes increased by more than half the number of special votes cast last year. In fact, in Rodney, the amount of votes it’s already gained is only 152 fewer than the 4090 special votes cast there in 2014, while National’s vote total is 400 votes fewer than its final 2014 result.

Of course, it won’t become clear what exactly this means until the special votes are counted. Perhaps most of them will go to the Greens, for instance. It’s also hard to know exactly how these communities voted. It could be the entirety of the Asian vote in these electorates went to National and the Greens, and it was Pākehā and other voters who were solely responsible for Labour’s increases. More likely, some Asian voters may have been caught up in Jacindamania, decided all was forgiven and went for the party anyway.

What does all this mean? Labour hasn’t been outright punished for its anti-immigrant stand, at least not since Ardern took over. However, the path of the campaign coupled with these figures suggest it certainly didn’t do the party any favours this year.

Its anti-immigration stance failed to give the party the boost it was looking for while Andrew Little was in charge, sending the party to the polling doldrums. Meanwhile, even with Ardern clawing back numbers for the party, the electoral figures show that the party continues to struggle in immigrant-heavy electorates in Auckland, particularly those with a larger proportion of residents born in North East Asia.

It’s doubtful these voters voted purely on the basis of immigration. But if Labour wants to win them over, its anti-immigration plank may well make it harder to do so, particularly when National vows to keep immigration numbers the same and for the most part avoids vocally flogging the issue.

Unless Winston Peters has his way, immigration from this part of the world will only become a more and more important voting bloc. Labour will have to be careful it doesn’t alienate them for an entire generation.

Keep going!

PoliticsSeptember 28, 2017

Inside the campaigns: how National took the migrant and rural vote

Jenna Raeburn

Guest writer

We’ve asked people who worked on the major parties’ campaigns to write about their experiences and observations after election 2017. First up: Jenna Raeburn, a PR consultant who worked on the National campaign, detailing life on the big blue bus.

If you live in the centre of a big city you could be forgiven for thinking the Jacinda effect was real.

In the universities, the rallies, the huge crowds, and your Facebook feed, the mood for change was palpable. Something Very Big was going on and we all knew it.

But in the rest of the country an entirely different election was playing out. The Jacinda effect did not reach South and West Auckland, and it certainly never showed up in regional New Zealand.

I was on the National Party campaign bus from 27 August to 22 September. We travelled more than 8000 kilometres and worked dawn til dusk in every corner of the country. We visited 52 electorates. There would hardly be a stretch of SH1 or SH2 north of Christchurch that we didn’t touch.

From the front seat of the bus, and on the street in every small town, it was obvious two parallel games were being played: one in the cities and one in the regions.

Meanwhile, Labour was also failing its traditional voter base of migrants and workers. As it turned out, they couldn’t win the election with young people, women, urban liberals and students alone. They needed middle New Zealand and middle New Zealand did not turn up for them.

What went wrong?

The first thing that struck me within a few hours of the bus setting off was the enormous swathes of the countryside where Labour is nowhere to be found.

The rural urban divide is real. You could drive for hours across the South Island without seeing any sign of the Labour Party, while every farmer in Canterbury had big, defiant National signs beaming down from their pivot irrigation towers.

In the North Island, the Labour campaign was non-existent in entire regions. Labour’s highest ranked candidate across the Waikato, Rangitikei and Taranaki is number 36, and that’s in Hamilton, a provincial city, not a rural area. The others are ranked 42, 55, 57, 60, 63, 64, 69, 70 and 75. This says all you need to know about how seriously they were taking that part of the world.

Some sheep next to the National coach. (Image: supplied)

Rural people everywhere were completely baffled by the Jacinda effect, the apparent “mood for change”, the big crowds. What they saw on the television did not compute at all with their experience of the Labour Party.

“I don’t get it,” was the most common refrain from the farmers, the kiwifruit growers, the workers. “I’m terrified,” was the next.

A young, tattooed Māori guy called Scott flagged the bus down in Hokitika to tell us he was voting for National because he has big plans for his own dairy farm. A horde of farmers’ kids chased the bus across their school field in Piopio until we stopped to chat. I was the next best thing to Santa’s elf since I came from the National Party. They followed me around like the Pied Piper until it was time to go.

Make no mistake about it, Labour gave up on regional New Zealand during this campaign, with the exception of one or two standout candidates (Kiri Allen and Jo Luxton come to mind, along with Labour’s only regional stalwarts, Damien O’Connor and Stuart Nash). Their talk of water taxes, bringing farming into the ETS, and unclear positions on capital gains and land taxes went down like a bucket of warm sick in rural communities. It was only a matter of time before the provinces began to rebel.

Labour either didn’t have enough people on the ground to pick up on this before it was too late, or (worse) they deliberately cast rural New Zealand aside in the hope they could win enough votes in the big cities to make up for it.

But their disdain for the provinces affected them in the cities too. New Zealanders know where their food comes from. They also know what keeps the economy ticking along. The rural disquiet, while dismissed by Labour’s base, got swing voters questioning whether Labour really knew what they were doing with the economy at all. That’s before anyone even mentioned the infamous $11.7 billion or ads about tax.

Todd McLay fans at play (image: supplied)

Before you cry “But of course Labour is weak in the bluest seats!” allow me a comparison. The National campaign was most vibrant in South and West Auckland, Labour’s traditional strongholds. Our candidates turned out hordes of supporters from diverse ethnic communities, thanks to awesome and underrated campaigners like Kanwal Bakshi and Agnes Loheni. If you used “number of active volunteers” as a proxy for National’s popularity, you’d think these were the bluest areas, along with Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Hutt South [ed’s disclosure: the author’s partner, Chris Bishop, won Hutt South].

National dominated in rural communities but stemmed the tide in Auckland as well. We campaigned for everyone, everywhere, all the time. We worked hard in rural seats but hardest in marginal and red seats. The rural-urban divide existed for Labour, but it didn’t for us.

Along with the regions, South and West Auckland saved the National Party. If you don’t believe me, look at Gwynn Compton’s very good analysis of the seats where National increased its share of the party vote: Māngere, Te Atatu, Manurewa, New Lynn, Manukau East… There is no escaping it. The Labour Party, despite its resurgence, despite the Jacinda Effect, lost votes in its core territory.

The one thing these electorates have in common is their very large migrant populations.

In the regions as well, the biggest crowds who turned up to campaign were groups of new migrants and first-generation New Zealanders. I challenge anyone to go back in time 10 years and find a crowd of 100+ Sikh migrants waving signs for the National Party in Te Puke. It just wouldn’t happen. But it’s happening today.

National has painstakingly built relationships with ethnic communities. The Party is a broad church and anyone who still stereotypes National as a group of white septuagenarians hasn’t been paying attention.

It’s reached the point now where Labour isn’t even invited to cultural events Helen Clark used to attend every year.

When did they lose touch with migrants so badly? I suspect the defection of Sonny Kaushal from Labour to National had something to do with it, though this seems more like a symptom than a cause. And in Chinese communities, the “Chinese sounding surnames” debacle has no doubt had a long and lasting impact.

I’ll remember this lesson forever: you can’t be the largest political party unless you appeal to a broad cross-section of New Zealanders. You can’t govern for one part of the country and ignore the rest. This goes for ethnic groups but for the regions as well. Labour didn’t resonate outside of very limited demographic groups and urban areas.

The biggest problem with the Jacinda effect was that it never made it past the doors.

By this I mean Labour held fewer, larger, planned events surrounded by crowds of adoring supporters. These were advertised in advance, which means it’s the people who already like you that are most likely to show up.

These events made great TV and certainly created the impression of a resurgent and popular Labour Party. But their reach into communities of undecided voters was low.

Bill’s approach was the complete opposite. His days were full of business visits, where he’d always make sure to talk to workers individually; interspersed with café visits and street walks. These weren’t publicly advertised so he would literally just bowl up to a café full of unsuspecting customers and go around getting everyone’s life story.

Bill English’s strength is in personal interactions. He listens, cares, takes the time and wins people over. While Jacinda was speaking to crowds of four or five hundred, Bill was picking them off one by one in provincial cafes.

Neither style of campaigning is wrong. Both were suited to their respective leaders and the goals of their parties. But ultimately I’m sure it meant Bill had more authentic interactions with individual, undecided voters than Jacinda did.

I’m sure he also spent more time in the regions. On the way in to Rotorua one morning I was watching the New Zealand First bus interrupt Jacinda Ardern’s live Facebook feed at a Rotorua café. Great, I thought. Three parties in town at once, big day for Rotorua! But ten minutes later, a Labour car zipped past us on its way out of town, Jacinda was gone, and we never crossed paths.

This pattern of flying visits to regional centres continued for Labour. Meanwhile, we were breaking our backs every day to squeeze in as many visits as we possibly could in each electorate. Bill was going non-stop.

On the campaign bus. The author, Jenna Raeburn, pictured to Bill English’s right (image: instagram)

There is no doubt National won this campaign because of Bill. He gave his all every day and his personality shone through. He debated his heart out in the leaders’ debates and grew in energy and confidence day by day. He singlehandedly turned National’s fortunes around in the face of the Labour resurgence, staring down poor poll results and returning a decisive victory few people would have predicted at the beginning of September.

Those polls never seemed quite right to me. Around 7 September, when the Colmar Brunton poll had Labour on 43 and National on 39, I was somewhere in the North Island between Taupō and New Plymouth. I noticed our driver, Gary, was giving a little wave to truckies and bus drivers on their way past.

“It’s a common courtesy thing for drivers, you give each other a wave,” he said.

“Usually it’s just half a hand off the wheel. But pretty much every driver who comes past is giving a huge wave and a thumbs up to the blue bus.”

Interesting, I thought. Truckies and bus drivers must be a pretty good proxy for Labour’s working, male, traditional voter base. If we have them on side, can we really be behind?

This carried on throughout the country. Gary reported positive feedback from the bus depots, the post office, the gas stations. The rest of us got the same in the cafés, supermarkets, on the street talking to voters. We started to think we were nuts. Where was the vaunted Jacinda effect? Why had we not experienced it yet?

I worried we were operating in a provincial bubble, that we hadn’t spent enough time in Auckland and Wellington to be fully aware of the Labour campaign. I also worried we were getting “false positive” reactions. People like Bill, I reasoned. There isn’t any strong negativity toward National, we haven’t alienated too many people. Maybe they like Jacinda better and will vote for her. But they’re still polite to us, which is why it feels like we’re ahead.

But by September 15, I was standing on the side of the road in Lower Hutt waving National Party signs with a group of volunteers. We must have seen 300 guys in high vis driving vans or trucks – truckies, tradies, migrants, workers. Fully 295 of them were honking and waving and calling out in support.

After that I was confident National would win. Labour still hasn’t figured out a way to win back the Waitakere Man. In fact, they have gone backwards. In addition to losing migrants, this is the reason they have lost party votes in South and West Auckland. Even in the liberal central city suburbs, I strongly suspect Labour has picked up votes from women but not from men.

This is a real dilemma for them. How do they grow their support among urban liberal women and conservative working men at the same time?

They face a similar problem in the regions. How can Labour retain the green, urban liberal vote in the big cities but woo back those truckies and tradies in rural New Zealand?

New caucus members like Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson, along with their new intake of regional MPs, may have the answer. Labour sure as hell won’t be the largest party in Parliament until they figure it out.