Compared with two months ago, the only change was the Greens slipping two points, one each picked up by Labour and Te Pāti Māori (TPM). But with 2024 already the Greens’ annus horribilis, Chlöe Swarbrick can be pleased her party remains on 11% and the combined left on 46%.
None of the governing coalition partners lost or gained at all. Importantly, Christopher Luxon’s preferred Prime Minister rating was up to a reasonably respectable 28%. A government sitting on a combined 51% during what’s likely to be the second recession since its election – and before either tax or interest-rate cuts had kicked in – is quite remarkable.
Crucially, the poll numbers are strong enough for National to hold power even if one of its coalition partners were to slip below 5%, although not if one went rogue. But neither seems likely.
Luxon and National lacking much of a programme is allowing Act and NZ First to feel they are making meaningful gains on their own priorities, with the exception of Act’s poorly conceived Treaty Principles Bill.
Across all six parties, the biggest risk from the poll is it breeding further complacency.
For National, complacency concerns policy. It would see National deciding it had already done enough to secure re-election, with the public having got the message the previous regime is to blame for everything including the weather and the median voter still not knowing the difference between a deficit and a telephone number.
As National’s most cynical strategists have said all along – mercifully ones not let near government itself – the reversion to the economic mean in 2025-26 will deliver everything necessary for a second term.
Based on the Key Government’s playbook, best then to batten down the hatches as soon as possible and avoid unsettling anyone. After three terms, the post-2030 crises would be Labour’s problem.
For Act and NZ First, complacency is always less likely. When it arises, it sees them forget how hard it is for small parties to stay above 5% in government and start to neglect their core supporters.
Neither yet shows any signs of that, although Act’s expensive new Ministry for Regulation had better deliver some marketable gains before election year.
Labour is the party at greatest risk of complacency.
Winning one point from the Greens to get back to 30% is hardly worth celebrating, yet some strategists claim there is something “psychologically” meaningful about a poll rating starting with a three or more.
In reality, even National’s 38% in 2023 was fairly poor and no major party can form a government with just 30% support.
For Labour, that would require the Greens and TPM to have combined support of nearly 20%, the fear of which National – even under Luxon – could easily use to collapse Labour’s vote during a campaign.
Yet the prospects of Labour improving under Chris Hipkins are negligible. After he brutally moved Labour to the centre as Prime Minister and vetoed Grant Robertson and David Parker’s proposed wealth tax before the election, voters on Labour’s left will never forgive him.
Voters on his right won’t return home from National to Labour given his personal roles as Minister of Education and Minister for the Covid-19 response under Jacinda Ardern. They associate him with falling standards in schools, the polytechnic mega-merger disaster, memories of the long 2021 lockdown and the misery of Kiwis abroad being denied entry to their own country even to give birth.
Like Ardern and Robertson, it is best for Labour that Hipkins recognises sooner rather than later that his journey now lies outside Parliament.
The same applies to Labour’s No 3, Megan Woods. As Minister of Housing from June 2019, she presided over the worst house-price inflation in New Zealand’s history and the final failure of Kiwibuild.
Worse, as we enter the worst electricity crisis this century, voters will remember Woods was Minister of Energy and Resources for Labour’s full six years. If the lights go off, she’ll get the blame.
Yet, remove Hipkins and Woods, and Labour can be made to look quite fresh and new, and is not without some talent and appeal among its senior MPs. They know they ought to get on with it.
Kieran McAnulty is the leader-in-waiting, with a communications style very different from Ardern, Hipkins or Luxon. Had he been in charge of Three Waters under the last Government all along, it would not have gone off the rails, with him able to communicate – too late as it turned out – that it was about pipes not appointment committees.
McAnulty undoubtedly presents better as a genuine Kiwi bloke than the more effete Luxon.
Barbara Edmonds, the new finance spokesperson, is a fiscal conservative in the best traditions of Sir Michael Cullen, and is impressing in the business and finance communities, as well as the party. She has greater technical knowledge of accounting, finance and economics than Nicola Willis or almost anyone else in Parliament.
Carmel Sepuloni, the current deputy, was a top ministerial performer, keeping the welfare system out of the headlines and not associating herself with the previous Government’s worst failures. Were she willing to stay in the job, the West Aucklander would be a perfect deputy for the provincial McAnulty.
Love him or hate him, Willie Jackson has earned his place on the Labour front bench and is capable of moving on from his typecast role as an advocate for Māori alone to something broader.
Ginny Andersen has surprised in presenting as tougher on crime than her Labour predecessors and held her own against National’s popular Police Minister, Mark Mitchell.
Manurewa’s Arena Williams, Epsom’s Camilla Belich, Nelson’s Rachel Boyack, Palmerston North’s Tangi Utikere, Christchurch’s Duncan Webb, Rangitata’s Jo Luxton and Dunedin’s Rachel Brooking and Ingrid Leary all look ministerial and are not associated with the excesses of the Ardern era.
Damien O’Connor could easily do another term as trade and agriculture minister, and David Parker is the indispensable policy-reform expert to ensure a McAnulty Government left a greater social-democratic legacy than the failed Ardern-Hipkins outfit.
Others with more to offer include Peeni Henare, Deborah Russell and Ayesha Verrall.
We may be getting ahead of ourselves, but this lot at least looks like a plausible alternative to both Luxon and Ardern.
Had Labour lost a point to 28% rather than gained one to 30%, the coup would be under way.
But the tiny shift in the other direction means they’ve all decided to wait, complacently, for another two months to see what happens next.
