Winston Peters has already said he has no interest in working with a ‘separatist’ Labour government. Now the prime minister says the feeling is mutual, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.
Hipkins makes it official
It’s the political equivalent of “You can’t fire me, I quit!” Prime minister Chris Hipkins has ruled out working with NZ First – which is just as well, as Winston Peters has already said the same thing regarding Labour. It was last November that Peters first claimed that Labour’s “lying” over its “separatist” agenda meant there’d be no repeat of the 2017 post-election negotiations, a position he’s restated regularly since. Yesterday a noticeably more combative Hipkins said the feeling was mutual: “Winston Peters and New Zealand First are a force for instability and chaos, and that’s the last thing the country needs right now,” he said. Pointing to NZ First’s increasing flirtation with hot-button social issues like trans rights and the “freedom” movement, Hipkins said it had become “a party more interested in toilets than the issues that really matter”. In response, Peters said Labour had become a “cabal that pandered to the woke”.
Luxon plays the ‘hypothetical’ card, again
With a Labour-NZ First relationship a no-go, the ball is now firmly in National’s court. Leader Christopher Luxon has refused to discuss whether he’d work with Winston, dismissing the possibility as a “hypothetical” not worth examining. That’s clearly a dodge. As many have pointed out, election campaigns are all about hypothesising that your party will win, and that you’ll be in a strong enough position to turn your policy pledges into law. To get even more metaphysical, “everything that hasn’t happened yet is a hypothetical; that’s where we live most of our lives”, as Morning Report’s Guyon Espiner said to Luxon earlier this month, challenging him on his reluctance to discuss potential coalitions.
How the NZ First issue could lead to a hung parliament
So what happens if Luxon does bite the bullet and rules out working with NZ First after the election? If, as the polls suggest, National and Act are able to form a governing majority – absolutely nothing. But should NZ First hold the balance of power on election night, having already been ruled out by both possible coalitions, then things will get very interesting indeed, writes Interest.co.nz’s Dan Brunskill. “Hung parliaments are rare in multi-party systems but are still possible,” he notes. “In that scenario, the party leaders would have to reckon with the political fallout of sending voters back to the polls for a fresh election — or breaking a campaign promise.”
Does Luxon have a discipline problem?
The Winston question is not the only thing Luxon needs to worry about, writes Andrea Vance for the Sunday Star-Times (paywalled). The careers of Sam Uffindell, Barbara Kuriger and Tim van de Molen are “dead” yet all three have failed to smell “the distinct whiff of their rotting political corpses”. They should have been sidelined, Vance says, but instead Luxon has allowed them to take up space in safe National seats. Luxon’s unwillingness to “sideline the duds” is a worrying sign, indicating a lack of discipline that will come back to bite him if (as seems likely) his government includes a sizable contingent of “zealots championing Christian identity politics”, Vance believes. Luxon may get lucky and avoid having to deal with Winston Peters, but a bunch of almost as troublesome MPs could be waiting in the wings.