Partly that’s because Winston Peters is wilier than Seymour, with an exquisite sense of timing.
It’s also because his more realist foreign policy is what many in National have wanted since Labour’s anti-nuclear silliness infected their own party in the late 1980s.
Yet it’s early days. Eventually, NZ First must win back voters it has lost to Act over race relations.
It may also face the delicate matter of its first leadership transition since Peters founded it more than 30 years ago.
National and Labour are accomplished at leadership changes yet are still usually tested when they happen.
For NZ First, even a well-managed transition carries existential risk.
Labour takes further heart from the Coalition mimicking the Ardern-Hipkins Government with announcements of announcements, scrapping existing policy and moaning about the status quo without identifying alternatives and appointing working groups instead.
Like the Goff-Shearer-Cunliffe-Little-Ardern debacle before it, the National opposition’s lack of any serious policy work or even ideological reflection left it with no real idea of what it wanted to do in office. Christopher Luxon tries his best to paper-over the paucity of material but lacks Jacinda Ardern’s knack for making nonsense sound meaningful.
More substantively, his Government has been astonishingly slow to get going, despite its unfulfilled promise to work through summer. Its mini-Budget contained no substantive decisions. Its Budget Policy Statement, usually ready before Christmas, is not yet agreed and won’t appear until March 27.
The Budget itself isn’t until May 30. In the meantime, Nicola Willis’ proposed cuts to the Wellington bureaucracy entirely lack ambition, although her speech yesterday in Hamilton suggests she may be set to lift her game.
Sadly, though, Luxon’s promises to cut taxes and get back to surplus while spending more on health, education, law and order and defence are mathematically irreconcilable, especially now the economy is in worse shape and will be smaller over the next three years than expected.
Neither the Three Waters nor resource management questions will be resolved this year, and probably not even next.
Such dillydallying means Luxon won’t benefit from any microeconomic reforms producing economic gains before the next election.
The change voters thought they were buying back in October risks being undelivered.
Still, Luxon and his coalition partners can rely on Labour’s intellectual laziness and sense of entitlement giving them a second term.
Once upon a time, Labour Governments were change-agents. Whether Savage and Fraser’s welfare state, Nash’s austerity, Kirk’s superannuation fund or Lange’s free-market economic reforms, Labour transformed. National Governments then managed whatever the Labour regime before them had put in place.
To some extent, the Bolger Government broke the mould in its first term but the truly important disrupters to the old routine were Helen Clark and especially Ardern who decided to adopt the old National Party approach of just trying to cling to office for the hell of it, not much bothering with exercising power.
Voters certainly wanted a pause after the drama of the Lange and early Bolger years but have now been voting for knowledge waves, step changes, “this” and getting back on track for nearly two decades, without politicians delivering.
Both National and Labour are now mere empty vessels for the personal ambitions and brands of whoever gets control of them.
That’s not so bad for National since it was established mainly for the noble cause of combatting communism and socialism, and usually claims to represent the whole nation.
It’s a bigger problem for Labour since, as the name suggests and its traditional supporters expect, it’s supposed to be about redistributing at least some power and wealth, from capital to labour and from the ruling establishment to ordinary people.
Even Lange and his great reforming troika of Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and David Caygill were motivated by those goals.
Yet not since Clark put unions back into employment law, mandated employers must bargain with them in good faith, introduced the 39 per cent top tax rate on incomes above $60,000 a year (about $110,000 in today’s money) and launched Working for Families has Labour done much more than emote in the direction of what a centre-left party in a mixed economy is meant to be about.
During Hipkins’ policy bonfire, anything redistributive was incinerated, while he kept the bizarre $30 billion light-rail monument to the Grey Lynn liberal establishment, even though everyone knew it would never happen.
Imagine what the quarter billion dollars knowingly wasted on light-rail consultants could have done for, say, reading recovery and early literacy support in decile 1 primary schools in South Auckland? Or partly funding tax cuts targeted at minimum-wage workers?
Worse, but publicly unbeknown at the time, one-time leadership rivals Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Revenue Minister David Parker had joined forces to design a wealth-tax and low-income tax-cut combo that would have been at least modestly redistributive and perhaps – had it been announced early enough – an election winner.
Yet, in the best traditions of Ardern’s aversion to meaningful change, Hipkins canned it, ironically while attending a Nato summit in Lithuania as part of Ardern and his foreign-policy tilt back to Canberra, Washington, London and Brussels.
Labour will never win back the working-class and middle-income voters who switched to National in 2023 until it offers more change than Ardern and Hipkins were comfortable with. If there is to be a do-nothing Government, former Labour voters may as well stick with National, which is historically so good at it, but isn’t seen to pander to the woke, Wellington, pounamu- and David Jones-wearing, yet mainly Pākehā elites.
In the twilight of their careers, Robertson and Parker are leading a battle for Labour’s redistributive soul. Of the party’s most influential remaining MPs, they can rely on support from leadership candidate Kieran McAnulty, deputy-leadership candidate Barbara Edmonds, most of the 2023 intake and those who survived from 2020, Christchurch Central’s Duncan Webb and Te Atatū's Phil Twyford.
Former Alliance Party activists Megan Woods and Willie Jackson, both loyal to Hipkins’ disastrous captain’s call during the campaign, are aboard.
Hipkins and Sepuloni will soon need to get on board too or get out of the way.
Matthew Hooton has more than 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the mayor of Auckland.
