They say they’ll release more policy once the budget is out. But is Labour’s lack of ideas already becoming a problem, asks Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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How to disappear completely
When RNZ’s John Campbell spent the evening before his Morning Report interview looking up Labour’s policy page, the research didn’t take him long. As The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell wrote this week, only five policies are listed on the party’s website, two of them interlinked. When Hipkins told Campbell that Labour had a plan, Campbell replied with a note of incredulity: “Does it?” The strategy behind the blank page is deliberate, Donnell says: stay “extremely quiet and still while their opponents bicker amongst themselves” and be “a cloud of infinite possibility” rather than a target. On a purely electoral basis, it has so far worked.
At the same time, the Greens have “served up a host of ambitious ideas for fixing our smorgasbord of societal crises” and been “rewarded with a slow poll decline”. Labour’s near-absence of policy has left its opponents grasping. In the middle of a fuel crisis – when voters are “weeping in a BP forecourt” – a pitch that amounts to “something different to this” looks like a winner. But for how long?
What’s actually in the box
The depth of the policy void comes into focus in Henry Cooke’s analysis in The Post (paywalled). At this point in the 2023 cycle, National had announced its income tax policy, FamilyBoost, electricity generation plans, interest deductibility, the brightline test, boot camp and gang patch policies and more. At the equivalent stage in 2017, Labour had KiwiBuild, healthy homes and the Reserve Bank mandate expansion. Labour under Hipkins in 2026? “The CGT, three free doctors visits paid for from the CGT, a technical change to GP funding to make visits policy work, a small rebate for the video game sector, and a detail-free ‘Future Fund’.”
The Iran war has highlighted Labour’s apparent lack of ideas. When the NZ Herald’s Jamie Ensor asked Hipkins repeatedly in March what Labour would do to help motorists facing high fuel costs, the answer was a variant of the same line: “the emphasis right now should be on the current Government”. Meanwhile the Greens had already written to the prime minister with specific proposals. Cooke’s verdict is blunt: “the Government and the Greens are the ones generating ideas, not the party that used to be seen as great policy innovators.”
The risks of the blank canvas
This week’s Fitch episode illustrated the risks of Labour’s approach. The party’s policies are so brief that “one wonders what exactly finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds discussed with credit rating agency Fitch before it decided to downgrade its outlook”, Cooke writes. In its March report on NZ’s economic outlook, Fitch said that a future Labour government’s “revenue measures” – plural – would assist in debt reduction, but Labour’s only revenue-gathering measure, a capital gains tax, has its revenue ring-fenced entirely for health. Either something more was implied, or the ring-fencing simply never came up and the Fitch representatives drew the wrong conclusions.
Cooke warns that “such a narrow policy platform makes it easy for opponents to intimate that there must be something far scarier hidden up your sleeve” – just as Nicola Willis did on Tuesday, accusing Labour of “telling Fitch one story to make out that they’re fiscally prudent, [while] telling New Zealanders another. There’s more tax coming under Labour.”
Full blocs ahead
Into this landscape came Winston Peters, whose latest coalition pronouncement appears unusually definitive. In a social media post this week, the NZ First leader declared: “No, we won’t do a deal with Labour or their Marxist and separatist mates.” As The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire writes this morning, “even the hardest, most cynical Winstonologist must surely accept” this is “pretty darn clear” – pointing toward “a straight-up bloc versus bloc election”.
The bloc numbers in the most recent Curia poll, as Manhire sets out, put National, Act and NZ First at a combined 52.4% versus 43.8% for Labour, the Greens and TPM. For Labour, that left-leaning bloc carries its own complication: as the NZ Herald’s Jamie Ensor reports, TPM co-leader Rawiri Waititi has said a wealth tax “is absolutely one of those things that we will be taking into any coalition agreement”, while Hipkins has ruled a wealth tax out. It’s not hard to see why a Labour-NZ First deal is something he won’t rule out – whatever Peters is saying six months before the election.
