Labour's Chris Hipkins and National's Christopher Luxon. The campaigning has been in full swing for a long time already, writes Mike Munro. Photo / NZME
Labour's Chris Hipkins and National's Christopher Luxon. The campaigning has been in full swing for a long time already, writes Mike Munro. Photo / NZME
Opinion by Mike Munro
OPINION
And so the countdown begins.
The major parties will this weekend string up their banners, inflate their branded balloons and set out the merch stalls as they stage rah-rah rallies to officially kick off their 2023 election campaigns.
In this era of the so-called permanent campaign, itmight seem curious that they bother with the idea of a campaign “launch” so close to when voting places open, which this year is October 2.
If the election season feels like it started a long time ago, well, it did.
That’s because campaign strategists know you can’t fatten a pig on market day. It’s what parties do over the entire three-year term that is important – identifying voters’ most pressing issues, proposing and testing policies that respond to those concerns, then crafting key messages to promote them.
The upshot is that for the past year or so, pretty much every speech, announcement, response, media engagement or visit will have been treated as an opportunity to parrot themes and messages.
As the American political guru Dick Morris observed, every day has become election day for the modern politician.
But of course, the weekend launch events in Auckland – Labour on Saturday and National on Sunday – have a broader purpose.
They’re about putting on an upbeat show to enthuse and energise the party faithful, showcase the leaders and their teams, announce a policy or two, and hopefully attract a lot of media attention. Positive pictures on the evening news bulletins are what matters.
The launches are set pieces signalling that the real hostilities have begun. The meticulous election plans the parties have drawn up are about to move to their final, critical phase.
After the weekend the leaders, with media entourages in tow, will begin to trail around the cities and regions, pressing the flesh, greeting placard-waving supporters and offering regular soundbites, all to a backdrop of focus group-tested campaign slogans.
And they’re slogans that in this election year struggle for originality.
The trouble is, virtually every variation of wording around concepts like change, hope, aspiration, unity and the future have been previously used on party billboards, if not here then overseas. In Labour’s case, its 2023 slogan has been pinched from Canada.
“In it for you” was used in Canada’s 2019 federal election by the centre-left New Democratic Party (NDP). So Labour will be hoping the NDP’s experience isn’t a harbinger of things to come here: the number of seats held by the NDP fell from 39 to 24, its worst result since 2004.
National’s “Get NZ back on track” and New Zealand First’s “Take our country back” feel uncomfortably close to the “We want our country back” rallying cry of the Brexit referendum’s Leave campaigners, who promised Britons a golden post-Brexit future, a state of affairs that clearly hasn’t materialised.
If the election season feels like it started a long time ago, well, it did. Photo / Mark Mitchell
But for campaign bosses, choosing a pithy and novel slogan is far from a top priority.
What matters to them is control and discipline. Candidates are expected to stay on-message, to never embarrass the leader and not to make themselves a media target.
For the media, the parties’ iron-fist discipline and determination to carefully stage-manage everything they do can become frustrating, so they revel in any mis-steps.
Cast your mind back to the last election. Judith Collins was always struggling to stay in the race against Jacinda Ardern in 2020, and as Collins’ plight worsened, her days went from bad to worse.
National’s then-Maungakiekie MP Denise Lee was mortified to learn that Collins had promised to set up a review of Auckland Council. Lee, who was local government spokesperson at the time, fired off a furious email to colleagues. In quick time it was leaked to the media.
It wasn’t a major story, but in the white heat of an election campaign, it always takes on a greater significance, especially if the leadership is having to explain itself.
Around the same time, Collins attracted derision for allowing the media cameras into a church as she prayed, and there was also the ill-fated Ponsonby Rd walkabout, for which National had positioned party supporters at regular points along the street to greet her.
So obvious was the orchestration that the media soon cottoned on, and again Collins found herself back-pedalling and explaining.
Elections, for the most part, have become risk-averse exercises, with every day being carefully scripted. Sometimes itineraries are not issued to media until late in the piece. So it’s understandable that they scowl and look for opportunities to wrong-foot the politicians.
A favourite is the gotcha question – for instance, what’s the current unemployment rate, what’s the price of a loaf of white bread? The questioner, of course, knows the answer, so it’s about them demonstrating superiority over the politician.
Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt famously dealt with a gotcha question during the Australian 2022 federal election by replying, “Google it, mate”.
Then there are the ambushes, where someone from a rival party, or perhaps just a malcontent wanting to be a disruptor, interrupts a campaign event. It is the major party leaders who are routinely targeted.
