Matthew Hooton: Polls tell happier story for Labour

OPINION:

March quarter results are in. After all the drama since mid-January, the red team is up just 1.75 points and blue down 2.10.

But it makes all the difference. Before Christmas, National and Act were on track to form a Government with a seat to spare. One way of looking at the March quarter is that Jacinda Ardern’s resignation and Chris Hipkins’ elevation have served only to get Te Pāti Māori (TPM) the balance of power.

Labour worries and National hopes that TPM president John Tamihere may want to launch Winston Peters-style talks with both main parties, but it’s more difficult than ever to imagine Act being prepared to support a National-TPM Government, even if TPM co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi were prepared to deal with Christopher Luxon.

Today’s TPM supporting a National-Act Government is out of the question.

The upshot is that Labour’s leadership change and policy bonfires have worked, at least to the extent of putting a Labour-Green-TPM coalition ahead by the slenderest of margins.

A re-elected Prime Minister Hipkins would find governing a little more comfortable if TPM created an overhang by winning four or more of the Māori seats. He knows that abandoning the co-governance elements of Three Waters wouldn’t just see to that, but also help Labour pick up a crucial handful of extra votes from National.

Despite a small net gain this quarter, the two major parties are on track to secure the lowest vote share since 2002.

In the elections since, their combined support has averaged 75 per cent. Current polls have them at just 69 per cent.

That combined National-Labour or “purple” vote is a lead indicator of voter frustration at the status quo. Unlike 2002, 2011, 2014 and 2020, the current purple vote is low not because one or the other has collapsed, but because both are performing below their historic averages.

In either a Hipkins- or Luxon-led Government, the Prime Minister’s own party would have just three-quarters of the seats required for a parliamentary majority. That’s happened in 1996 and 2017, but both times NZ First was involved, with Peters known for bellicosity in opposition but docility in government, until he can’t stand it any longer.

In the meantime, though, he happily sold National’s economic programme for Jim Bolger, Helen Clark’s foreign policy for Labour, and “this” for Ardern.

This time, Act or the Greens and TPM would not just have numbers in Parliament and around the Cabinet table, but are parties with genuine policy programmes, interested in radical change. The closest to this before was when the Alliance used its strength in the first Clark Government to force through Jim Anderton’s Kiwibank and — against even stronger Labour opposition — Laila Harré's paid parental leave scheme.

TPM has talked of finding innovative ways of allowing a government to remain in office without having to actively support it.

The Cabinet Manual requires the Governor-General to appoint someone as prime minister if their party, with its allies, “appears able to command the confidence of the House of Representatives (expressed through public statements)”. But the Cabinet Manual doesn’t require a majority. That means TPM could announce it would abstain on confidence votes and allow whichever of the red or blue blocs had the most MPs to govern.

It would be an elegant solution, except that right now it would put National and Act in government. However innovative the paperwork, TPM can’t escape that such decisions make the difference.

A re-elected Hipkins could easily put co-governance back on the table and blame TPM, which would be enough of a policy win for TPM to maintain its support base.

With only three MPs, it would then make sense for it to focus mainly on giving a voice to a more radical agenda than Labour or even the Greens.

The bigger question is how Act or the Greens could use their power to finally deliver to their supporters. Both parties have rightly had enough of a quarter-century of being expected to passively support mostly inactive National or Labour Governments on the grounds that the other side would be worse.

Nevertheless, that argument has successfully held them in check all these years because their voters agree with it, and because it’s been assumed that bringing the house down and causing new elections over a policy dispute would have fatal polling effects.

Yet ultimately, it’s only that possibility that gives Act or the Greens any power at all. To stop being doormats, they need to find ways to make National and Labour believe that threat is real, including by showing that the option could be put without it collapsing their support.

One concept is for Act and the Greens to clearly set out the policies that would have to be part of a Luxon or Hipkins Government to secure and maintain their support. Even more important, they would need to publicly communicate and achieve recognised buy-in from their members, donors and supporters for the steps they would take should National or Labour not agree — up to and including changing sides or forcing new elections.

Previously, Peters in particular has spoken of having bottom lines. Neither of the two main parties much believe him anymore and he usually portrays his demands as aggressive.

Act and the Greens would have to do it differently, positioning their stances as co-operative and transparent to the bigger parties, and to voters in general.

Of course, if the policy measures are sufficiently impressive to their supporters, they will also be terrifying to the median voter.

But when the scare campaigns start by Labour against Act and National against the Greens, better the smaller parties have genuinely informed voters and limited what is on their agenda than allowing Labour and National strategists just to make it up. Transparency is everyone’s friend.

National needs a good second quarter to at least get back to where they were at the end of 2022. It will be difficult and National does not need any more candidates to be discovered having compared same-sex relationships to incest and polygamy.

Moreover, its opponent has the set piece of May’s Budget, and nobody has a better record than Grant Robertson, as a staffer for Clark, at pulling popular programmes out of the hat at Budget time. He now has the opportunity to do the same as Minister of Finance. This week’s better-than-expected government books to the end of February give him a little more room to be imaginative. But don’t expect any cash to flow until after the election. After yesterday’s surprise from the Reserve Bank, he dare not risk further interest rate rises in May, July or August – and least of all October.

- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.