Labour Leader Chris Hipkins joins Ryan Bridge on Herald NOW to discuss Stuart Nash's leap to New Zealand First, the party's Tāmaki by-election loss and compulsory KiwiSaver.
THE FACTS
Te Pāti Māori’s Oriini Kaipara’s victory in the Tāmaki Makaurau byelection dashed Labour’s hopes of reclaiming the seat.
Labour’s voter turnout was significantly lower, with only 21% of voters participating.
Labour’s candidate was MP Peeni Henare, who previously held the seat from 2014 to 2023 before losing it to Kemp.
The Tāmaki Makaurau byelection was an unmitigated disaster for the Labour Party.
As Prime Minister Christopher Luxon flew out of Wellington this week for his son’s graduation and the Pacific Islands Forum, he could be forgiven if he felt smug that, whatever his political tribulations, Labour leader ChrisHipkins faces similar trials.
Labour needed to win the byelection decisively to demonstrate its electoral power over the increasingly extremist Te Pāti Māori (TPM) and eliminate National’s strongest case for re-election: that a second Hipkins Government would be beholden to TPM co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi and party president and strategist John Tamihere.
“We’ve taken one Māori seat back,” Hipkins could have told cheering supporters. “Now let’s take back the other five!”
As it happened, the scale of Labour’s debacle makes it reasonable to assume TPM could sweep all seven.
In 2023, Labour won 43% of the Tāmaki Makaurau party vote, decisively beating TPM on just 30%. The candidates were tied on 39%, with Labour’s Peeni Henare controversially losing by just 42 votes to TPM’s Takutai Tarsh Kemp.
The real revelation is that Labour and the unions’ much-vaunted voting machine could turn out fewer than a third of the voters it did two years ago.
This in an electorate that includes South Auckland, which Labour must mobilise to win any general election, and West Auckland, whose swing voters so often decide them.
Talk of Henare challenging Hipkins for the leadership has proven absurd and the now twice-failed candidate can’t expect Labour to take him seriously again.
The credibility of campaign manager Shanan Halbert and Labour’s Māori caucus boss Willie Jackson have also taken a hit.
Their defenders might argue that byelections suffer from low turnouts, but few were ever as bad as this, especially in a competitive race. According to the preliminary result, only 21% of voters showed up, which the Electoral Commission thinks will rise to just 27% after special votes.
In contrast, even when byelection results seemed preordained, as in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti in 2013 and Te Tai Tokerau in 2011, turnout was 33% and 38% respectively. When Dame Tariana Turia was the only serious candidate in Te Tai Hauauru in 2004, turnout was still higher than last weekend.
It’s no good saying Labour did so badly because turnout was poor. It was Henare, Halbert and Jackson’s job to get voters out and they failed.
Labour MPs (from left) Carmel Sepuloni, Peeni Henare and Willie Jackson paying tribute to Te Pāti Māori MP Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp in June. Her death sparked the Tāmaki Makaurau byelection. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Hipkins has thus lost the option of responding to National’s attacks by saying Labour plans to get TPM out of Parliament altogether, but it is not yet credible for him to claim Labour and the Greens aim to win a majority without TPM.
In recent polls, Labour and the Greens have averaged just 45% between them, which would give them only 56 seats in Parliament. With TPM now likely to secure a two-seat overhang, and National heading the same way, it will more likely take 63 seats to take power next year.
Labour and the Greens must win about 5% more from TPM, National and NZ First for Hipkins to start talking credibly about governing with the Greens alone. National probably has further to fall from its current 32% average, but TPM’s triumph on Saturday and NZ First’s bold new policy at its weekend conference make them doubtful targets.
It’s a big ask for Hipkins to get that extra 5% entirely from National, especially with National talking about TPM whenever it can.
Polling analysis suggests that, since the election, Hipkins has so far won back around 180,000 voters who picked Sir Bill English in 2017, Dame Jacinda Ardern in 2020 and Luxon in 2023. But those are the easier ones. He now needs around another 140,000 such voters to return to Labour.
Labour strategists say they’re well aware of how toxic public impressions of TPM can be. Takuta Ferris’ recent outbursts have made Labour even more cautious about allowing any impression relations are warming.
Labour and the Greens must win about 5% more from TPM, National and NZ First for Hipkins to start talking credibly about governing with the Greens alone
Even Hipkins, who initially refused to say it was racist for Ferris to attack “Indians, Asians, Blacks and Pākehā” for campaigning for Labour and Henare, now says the TPM MP is “getting well into that territory”.
But while he says it would be “very, very difficult” for Labour to work with TPM, he still qualifies himself by saying that’s only if Ferris’ comments reflect TPM’s public position.
“If, on the other hand,” he says, “they embrace a more inclusive approach that says that the role of government is to govern for all New Zealanders, then we may well be able to find a lot more common ground.”
That’s so charitable to TPM, that Hipkins can only be naive or playing for time. And while he continues to insist Labour will fight “vigorously” for all seven Māori electorates, the 140,000 further National voters he must win back should be sceptical Labour can win any of them.
Labour strategists say their relationship with the Greens has warmed considerably over the past year, and that the Greens are also becoming frustrated with TPM and creating more distance between them and the more radical party.
But such whisperings are one thing. In reality, if Hipkins wants to reach out to the 140,000 National voters he needs, both he and Green co-leaders Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick will have to become much more forthright in ruling out working with TPM in Government.
A step along that path is the Greens saying publicly they may target a Māori seat next year, to add a fourth electorate to their current tally of Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai. Labour and the Greens’ positions on TPM would be taken more seriously if they agreed not to stand against one another in the seven Māori seats but instead endorse the other’s candidates.
Hipkins might be wary of that tying Labour too closely to the Greens, but better that than TPM.
Of course, none of this precludes a Labour-Green Government from relying on any TPM MPs that are still elected. In that case, centrist voters would just have to hope Hipkins proves a more skilful negotiator than Luxon in making clear to both the Greens and TPM that, ultimately, they have nowhere to go but to support Labour, and that they will not be leading his Government’s agenda.
To be fair to Hipkins, it’s difficult to believe it could be possible for anyone to do worse on that score than Luxon did with Act and NZ First in 2023. But Hipkins needs to prove it.
